I don’t like this. While I strongly oppose tracking and have a variety of privacy extensions installed on my browser, clicking on ads is simply wrong. Someone will have to pay for those clicks. Not to mention that if something like this gets wide adoption then it will make click fraud detection even harder. A bunch of browser sessions randomly clicking on ads will have no difference from a bot doing the same thing.
AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
31–40 of 282 posts
Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
#32I'm out on this. 1. They say it's legally not click fraud. To me it sounds like regular fraud: "deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right". I'm not concerned with breaking the law I just don't want to act in the spirit of it. 2. This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget. They say the market will adjust, but until it does small startups take…
Regarding #3, I'm personally 100% against any online advertising in any form. So this punishes those who support it. Ditto for #2. As for #1, I'm not gaining anything, and no one is being deprived for their rights. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make there? If anything prosecutors should start with the rampant fraud being committed by companies in the online advertising space before they even think about lo…
Micropayments have never worked well on the internet, not for technical problems, but likely more that the market isn't really there. I know I just want free stuff and I'm not going to pay to read a news article or blog post no matter how well written or researched.
So at the end of the day there is still no viable alternative to advertising supported content. Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it, because many of the content producers and curators won't waste their time for no return.
I don't like ads, but I like my free content, and ads are an acceptable way of financing it.
Edit: I get that some of you really don't like ads, but the quality of comments here is abysmal. You guys are living in some kind of dreamland if you think you can just kill of advertising and not lose something in the trade off (PS imagine a world with no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) I honestly expect more intelligent commentary from HN, consider both sides of your argument.
Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
#33I'm out on this. 1. They say it's legally not click fraud. To me it sounds like regular fraud: "deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right". I'm not concerned with breaking the law I just don't want to act in the spirit of it. 2. This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget. They say the market will adjust, but until it does small startups take…
I don't understand #1, it's obviously not click fraud but how is it regular fraud? They want to track my clicks in order to gather profiling information about my personality in order to better influence/manipulate me. So now I use some technology to help me fuzz this information, I could do the same by clicking myself and browsing websites I dislike myself. Which would be boring and time consuming, hence the automation.
Where in the spirit of the law is the ability to surveil consumers reading choices in order to influence their spending enshrined? It just emerged when people realized that the information was valuable.
There were similar projects involving sharing customer loyalty card numbers for grocery stores, and I never saw the argument that sharing your card number with others was fraud.
I think you are seeing that if consumers protect themselves against this type of surveillance then the lazy (and cheap to measure) metric of clicks becomes a less effective metric for measuring advertising placement value. It exposes the fact that those measuring this were barely providing value to advertisers and publishers in the first place. That doesn't make it fraud, that just inconveniences a large industry that pays a lot of bills. Those are very different things, both ethically and legally.
As to 3, this has clear objectives, they are apparently just much farther reaching than you are comfortable with or agree with. I get it, I worked in the online advertising ad network business for many years, however I never fooled myself that this business was anything other than an unethical anti-consumer endeavour. That's why I don't do it anymore.
Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
#34I'm not sure the folks who created this understand how ad tracking works. Clicks are such a small part of the equation that this is laughable.
Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
#35I'm out on this. 1. They say it's legally not click fraud. To me it sounds like regular fraud: "deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right". I'm not concerned with breaking the law I just don't want to act in the spirit of it. 2. This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget. They say the market will adjust, but until it does small startups take…
>3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.
The goal highly specific. It is to make Internet advertising artificially expensive, and it is to make harvested data about users inaccurate.
There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but they also shouldn't advertise at me, ever.
Human attention is extremely valuable, by far the most expensive commodity on the planet. If advertising companies want my attention so damn bad, they can pay me ~$65000 a year for it, same as my employer does. Otherwise, they can piss off.
Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think #3 is the key thing here.. Is this really activism or just vandalism?
If your cause is to decrease advertising on the web, and these actions diminish its effectiveness and potentially lead to decreased advertising in search of a better revenue stream, well that sounds like effective activism to me.
That doesn't mean it's not vandalism, too. The fact that no property is actually destroyed does mean that, but I think there is a qualitative difference between blocking ads and attempting to swamp ad-pricing signals with injected noise.
Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
#37I'm out on this. 1. They say it's legally not click fraud. To me it sounds like regular fraud: "deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right". I'm not concerned with breaking the law I just don't want to act in the spirit of it. 2. This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget. They say the market will adjust, but until it does small startups take…
>3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys. The goal highly specific. It is to make Internet advertising artificially expensive, and it is to make harvested data about users inaccurate. There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but t…
It's not like the ads just appear while you're sitting around doing nothing. You see the ads when you are receiving something with them. The ad companies are paying for your attention with the content you consume.
Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding #3, I'm personally 100% against any online advertising in any form. So this punishes those who support it. Ditto for #2. As for #1, I'm not gaining anything, and no one is being deprived for their rights. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make there? If anything prosecutors should start with the rampant fraud being committed by companies in the online advertising space before they even think about lo…
Micropayments have never worked well on the internet, not for technical problems, but likely more that the market isn't really there. I know I just want free stuff and I'm not going to pay to read a news article or blog post no matter how well written or researched. So at the end of the day there is still no viable alternative to advertising supported content. Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it, bec…
I disagree. If you can't fund your content without ads then you have a bad business model. We should kill ads and any content that dies in the collateral is an acceptable loss.
Micropayments also don't work because no one has done it well, not because it's inherently not going to work.
Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding #3, I'm personally 100% against any online advertising in any form. So this punishes those who support it. Ditto for #2. As for #1, I'm not gaining anything, and no one is being deprived for their rights. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make there? If anything prosecutors should start with the rampant fraud being committed by companies in the online advertising space before they even think about lo…
Micropayments have never worked well on the internet, not for technical problems, but likely more that the market isn't really there. I know I just want free stuff and I'm not going to pay to read a news article or blog post no matter how well written or researched. So at the end of the day there is still no viable alternative to advertising supported content. Kill advertising and you'll take the content with it, bec…
>So at the end of the day there is still no viable alternative to advertising supported content.
Yes there is. Many creators successfully support themselves entirely based on Patreon.
Re: AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse
#40I'm out on this. 1. They say it's legally not click fraud. To me it sounds like regular fraud: "deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right". I'm not concerned with breaking the law I just don't want to act in the spirit of it. 2. This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget. They say the market will adjust, but until it does small startups take…
There is nothing fraudulent about this. Clickable ads are put there to be clicked on. It's like inverse spam. Spam email is a nuisance because it's cheap to send to many. Well now it's cheap to click on many ads.