I’d like to allow websites to show all the ads they want. If a website is borderline unusable because of ads then it’s probably not worth my attention anyway and I’m going to avoid it, and for good websites I don’t want to reduce their income.
On the other hand, tracking should be off limits no matter what, so I’d like to still block Google/Meta etc. from tracking me on every website.
Can I achieve that in Brave? It seems that “block trackers and ads” is a single setting, I’m not sure why. Is it that the two can’t be separated?
Correct. For the most part, ads and trackers go hand in hand. The ad systems used by most websites, like Google AdSense, are built to do more than just show you a banner. They also fingerprint your device, record which sites you visit, and use that information to tailor ads across the web.
That is why Brave and most adblockers tend to group “ads and trackers” under one setting. If you block trackers, you also end up blocking the majority of ads, because they rely on the same tracking infrastructure. There are some exceptions, like static or “contextual” ads that don’t track you, but those are far less common today.
So while in theory you could allow ads but block trackers, in practice most modern web ads cannot be separated from tracking.