The rise of adblockers was all the rage last month. Advertisers (and governments?) have long been abusing the various tracking mechanisms available on our browsers and our smartphones to monitor the things we search for, the articles we sympathise with, the people we connect with, the stuff we buy, the places we visit, our physical activities, our medical history, our photos, and everything else that we end up surfacing on a device with an Internet connection.

All this information (and more) is monitored to "enrich" our experiences online. For everything I care about (articles and books to read, music, movies and TV series, restaurants, travel destinations), I have my own tools and algorithms set up for discovering new things to do or add to my collection. And I'm one of the many (and fast growing) adblockers. So, I don't really care about what sites monitor my activities and how they use them (I'm still convinced that my government will ensure it isn't used to cause me any harm, discomfort maybe, but not harm). But apparently a lot of people do.

The ones that seem to care a lot about privacy online, seem to be heading to the darknet.

Darknet is just like the Internet, only you can't access it in traditional ways. You can only access it through specific software and configurations (some of you may have already used Tor for connecting anonymously). Facebook now has a darknet site for those concerned about their privacy.

You can use Tor to access the regular Internet as well, anonymously.

There is certainly the allure of the darknet. No ads, no tracking, secure anonymous payment systems (using Bitcoin). Is this the answer to our privacy concerns? Is darknet going mainstream?

Seems plausible.