Marco Arment, announcing Peace on his weblog:

As you can see in Peace’s privacy policy, we not only don’t collect any user data, but we can’t collect anything of much use — iOS content blockers aren’t privy to any of the user’s browsing activity. All we can do is provide a list of conditions to block. That’s it.

With Ghostery’s database, Peace is ridiculously good. This isn’t a time for me to be modest — just go try it and you’ll see for yourself.

Peace is a great application that I didn’t hesitate to purchase. It’s too soon to tell if it will become my go-to ad blocker for iOS, but I’m liking it so far. I just wish that it and every other content blocker would whitelist ads from the good guys by default.

I only want an ad blocker forthe sites that have dozens of tracking scripts and piles of obtrusive ads. But I don’t want to punish sites like Daring Fireball, Pixel Envy, Six Colors, and others like them. They display respectful ads and deserve to generate revenue from my pageviews.

I could add entries to Peace’s (or another content blocker’s) whitelist that would allow Safari to display ads from those sites, but there’s no way most users are going to be that diligent. And that’s setting aside the fact that if I come across a site that displays respectful ads I’m not even going to know that they’re there — the content blocker makes them invisible by default.

I know that the battle’s already won, but I wish it was commonplace for The Deck and Carbon Ads to be whitelisted out of the box. And I wouldn’t mind being able to set a maximum threshold for the number of ads I deem acceptable per webpage. This would limit the amount of revenue generated by the sites which cover their pages in banner ads while still allowing the publishers who respect their readers to make money from web advertising. But unfortunately, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak.