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Spon Unlock invalidates the AdBlock blocker on Spiegel Online. Whilst we recognize the legitimate wish of the publishers to finance their service through adverts, the site goes too far and asks the user to compromise his privacy.

Spon is the common abbreviation for Spiegel Online, the online presence of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, found under the URL https://www.spiegel.de/.

Spiegel Online operates an aggressive strategy to prevent users from using ad blockers. If ads are blocked, the user is nagged by a full-screen popup every other second. Now, one could argue that it is fair enough for an ad-funded news service to push ads to the user. However, in this case the site is not satisfied with a simple ad blocker exception but requires the user to configure the browser in an insecure way. This is not acceptable.

Spon Unlock comes to the rescue. This Firefox add-on disables the anti ad blocker mechanism.

We can expect a cat and mouse game, of Spon changing the anti ad blocker mechanism and Spon Unlock reacting to it.

Additional sites may be added to Spon Unlock as time goes by.