51–60 of 69 posts
Apart from actual malware, this is the only browser extension I know of to have been blacklisted by Google. If you want to use it in Chrome you have to jump through hoops. For the record, I approve of AdNauseam. I have every right to browse the internet how I choose. My computer, my control. I am firmly against the corporization of the internet.
This extension apparently simulates clicks on blocked ads. I'm not comfortable doing that. First of all I don't see the point. I don't click on ads, so there is no profile that advertisers can extract from that. Having an extension that simulates clicks would only link to my supposed profile shit that I don't want, plus in my experience from when I worked in the ads industry, the user profile often gets compiled from…
> If you hate the direction of this industry, consider paying for shit that you consume I work at a very large bank. We make money by through account fees and interest charges, but we still do all the sleazy tracking and analytics that you would expect from a company with a you-are-the-product business model. We work closely with ad networks so that we can get demographic data about who our users are. And in return,…
> I worked in adtech a few years ago, and AdNauseam-style click fraud is a relatively trivial to detect and ignore. It does nothing, and adtech companies don't care about your hate of online advertising the least because that's what brings in the cash.
Then other user clarified [1]:
> The most usual technique is to setup click baits/traps, once you click on a trap link you (= IP or UID via cookie) are added to an ignore list, where all your actions are not invoiced to advertisers. Simple and works,
With all that in mind I came up with an idea at a time [2]:
> What would happen if there would be a popular extension that would share UID cookies between all its users?
Now, the question is: is it worthwhile to do something like this?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19279384
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Multiple and fully isolated user profiles - hugely important for the work I do. I know Firefox has containers, but they're not really feature complete compared to Chrome's, and the UI experience leaves a lot to be desired, there's just to many friction points. edit: forgot to also mention, I'm also aware FF has profiles as well (about:profiles) but the implementation has too many speedbumps. As I mentioned in another…
You can also start firefox with a -p flag to get a profile selector on startup.
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A couple of quick points: - Your ad profile will be built based on pages you visit as you indeed note, not just things that you click. Any noise you can introduce surely has to be a win for obfuscation? Would be interested in your thoughts here because you have more experience than I do! - I'm not certain that paying for content makes any difference from a data mining perspective. Loading a NYT article causes uBlock…
Also I upvoted you - I'm not sure why you're being downvoted without explanation since you've axiomatically added an interesting viewpoint to the discussion.
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They're a pain to use though since you need to pass that on the command line.
Right click on the icon, select properties and add the flag in the target.
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Also I upvoted you - I'm not sure why you're being downvoted without explanation since you've axiomatically added an interesting viewpoint to the discussion.
What exactly does it clarify to modify "add" with the adverb "axiomatically"?
In previous discussion about AdNauseam one user familiar with the ad industry said [0]: > I worked in adtech a few years ago, and AdNauseam-style click fraud is a relatively trivial to detect and ignore. It does nothing, and adtech companies don't care about your hate of online advertising the least because that's what brings in the cash. Then other user clarified [1]: > The most usual technique is to setup click bai…
The click baits/traps would, in terms of cookies, be countered by the Cookie AutoDelete extension and whenever you browsed in private mode. As for blacklisting IPs, that seems very risky since an IP is often shared among many users (and it's always a risk people use same device, e.g. a MacBook), and it would continue to result in an increasing amount of legitimate users being wrongfully blacklisted as the extension's user base grew. Moreover, assuming these techniques are actually used, then it's safe to assume that at least a few ads would be clicked before they detected they were malicious clicks. And this would be the case whenever a user used a new IP with no cookie present. I'm definitely not convinced it's something ad networks can reasonably detect, especially considering it's important that the ads are served as fast as possible.
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Not OP, but Google can enforce whatever policies they like in their own marketplace. Considering their main business is selling ads and click fraud is against their TOS, I'm not surprised they'd ban this extension. Personally I think that if people hate ads so much they should just block them (I do). This attitude of "sticking it to the man" by "screwing with their data" seems petty and potentially counterproductive.
How is it counterproductive? Any concrete scenario?