Docs›Privacy and security

Blocking ads and trackers

What Luma blocks from the first page you open, where its filter lists come from, and what to do when a site breaks.

Luma blocks trackers, intrusive ads and third-party cookies, and hides cookie banners, on every site. There is nothing to install and nothing to turn on: it works from the first page you open.

What is blocked#

You find these switches in Settings › Privacy & security. A change applies right away.

Some blocked ad scripts are answered with a harmless empty stand-in instead of an error, so pages that check whether their ads loaded keep working.

So that signing in keeps working, a few sign-in and anti-bot services keep their cookies inside other sites: Google, Apple, Microsoft, GitHub, Facebook, Okta, Auth0, Cloudflare, hCaptcha and reCAPTCHA. When a site opens a sign-in pop-up for another site, those two sites can also share cookies until you quit Luma.

The filter lists#

Blocking runs on Ghostery’s open-source engine, with the lists uBlock Origin uses by default:

• Trackers: EasyPrivacy and uBlock Origin’s privacy list.
• Ads: EasyList, EasyList Italy, Peter Lowe’s ad server list and uBlock Origin’s filters (with its badware, quick fixes and resource abuse lists).
• Cookie banners: EasyList Cookie and uBlock Origin’s cookie annoyances list.
• uBlock Origin’s unbreak list, which fixes sites the other lists would break, goes with both trackers and ads.

A copy of every list comes with Luma, so blocking works from the first launch, even offline. A minute after Luma starts, and then every six hours, it checks whether its lists are more than four days old. If they are, it downloads fresh copies over HTTPS from their publishers: easylist.to, easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org, and Ghostery’s copy of the uBlock Origin lists on GitHub. The new lists replace the old ones only once every file has arrived, so a list is never half updated.

When a site doesn’t work#

Now and then blocking breaks part of a site: a video that won’t start, a button that does nothing, a sign-in that loops. You can turn blocking off for that one site.

1. Click the shield at the start of the address bar. In the dock layout, click the shield at the start of the dock instead.
2. Click Is this site not working?. Protections turn off for this site and the page reloads.

For that site, this turns off ad, tracker and cookie-banner blocking, third-party cookie blocking, the reduced fingerprinting headers, the upgrade to HTTPS and your own filters. The warning for dangerous sites and Global Privacy Control stay on.

With protections off, the panel shows Report this site. It copies a short report (the site, your version of Luma and which protections are on) and opens Luma’s Discord: paste it there and add what goes wrong. Nothing is sent by itself. Reports help fix the lists for everyone.

To turn protections back on, open the panel and switch on Protections for this site, or turn the site back on under Protections turned off in the privacy dashboard. The command palette (Ctrl+K) also has Turn protections on/off for this site.

Block an element yourself#

If something on a page still bothers you, such as a newsletter box or a sticky video, you can hide it.

1. Right-click the page and choose Block element…, or press Ctrl+Alt+B.
2. Click the element to hide. Use Area to take in a larger part of the page, and choose Only this or Similar elements. Luma shows how many matches it finds on the page.
3. Click Block to hide it on this site from now on. Remove for now takes it off the page you’re looking at without keeping a rule. Esc cancels.

My filters#

The elements you block end up in Settings › My filters, where you can edit or remove them. You can also add your own rules there, one per line, in the Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin syntax:

Luma tells you which lines it couldn’t add and why. Procedural filters and scriptlets (+js(…)) aren’t supported in your own rules. Turning off protections for a site turns your filters off there too. Your filters can travel to your other computers with Sync.