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Earlier quoted context omitted.
s/fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users/fork defending users by silently clicking ads I came here with the revised title assuming malicious intent from the fork. I now know thats not how it works. So my title rename is just a suggestion to further clarify the intent. hth
I don't understand all this fork talk
As someone who's been interested in tracker defeating since that became a thing around 25 years ago, I'm just a little concerned that something like this AdNauseum -- if ever adopted significantly -- could invite blowback that also hits more conventional tracker blocking, or other current liberties. Not making certain HTTP requests seems to be protected right now. However, click fraud, with which this might be confla…
“click fraud”? That is very very far fetched. I’m just following links your website serves me. If you don’t like it you don’t have to serve your ads to me.
On one hand, distributing and marketing a tool that is explicitly designed to harm trackers can be seen- ie lobbied- as fraud.
On the other, this isn't a targeted campaign of misclicking, this is essentially random noise on a user by user basis.
At scale though, this fucks with a whole lotta peoples paychecks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the purpose to cause ad networks to lower fee payments due to rampant click fraud and thus to destroy the business model?
I think one should be careful using the term "click fraud" in this context. Someone who installs this extension doesn't in my mind qualify to be defrauding anyone. There is no contract in place, it isn't against the law to express interest in a product, and there's no technical controls being breached illegally as the browser is just sending a request to a server.
Bluntly, it doesn't matter what you or I think -- what matters is what politicians, police, prosecutors and judges think.
I don't see anything on the main github page that says the extension is intended to cause harm to the advertisers or the website, but IME governments have often not cared.
And when 1M people in a country install the extension, are they acting independently or as a group? One person protesting may be legal, 1M organizing may not be protected.
Cutting out 200+ objects, some with significant overhead, on a lower powered device or low bandwidth or long ping time like overseas can completely change a browsing experience from intolerable to completely acceptable.
Clicking ads would defeat the whole point and require all resources to be loaded.
However some day if politicians take enough money from the powers that be and make laws requiring all ads to load, this would be a good alternative to have. (However then they'd ban automated clicking)
As someone who's been interested in tracker defeating since that became a thing around 25 years ago, I'm just a little concerned that something like this AdNauseum -- if ever adopted significantly -- could invite blowback that also hits more conventional tracker blocking, or other current liberties. Not making certain HTTP requests seems to be protected right now. However, click fraud, with which this might be confla…
As someone who's been interested in tracker defeating since that became a thing around 25 years ago, I'm just a little concerned that something like this AdNauseum -- if ever adopted significantly -- could invite blowback that also hits more conventional tracker blocking, or other current liberties. Not making certain HTTP requests seems to be protected right now. However, click fraud, with which this might be confla…
“click fraud”? That is very very far fetched. I’m just following links your website serves me. If you don’t like it you don’t have to serve your ads to me.
This may not be the best title, it's the desired function of the add-on to generate noise and making tracking and targeting less useful. There is nothing hidden about what it is doing for the user.
I did a slight edit now, hope that makes it more clear.
Fight against ads by giving the ad networks money and further incentivizing captcha and other tech to stop bots.
Which will lower bids for ads.
But it would be easy for Google, FB, etc to filter out this traffic.
Which I guess is the goal of the plugin.
It took me a long time to come around to using ad blockers. For a long time, my feeling was, "if you don't like ads don't use the web. You owe it to those websites to look at their ads". But then the ads just go so resource intense that I came around and finally installed an ad blocker. This however still feels one step too far. The ad blocker protects me from the resource utilization of ads. But if you're already bl…
It took me a long time to come around to using ad blockers. For a long time, my feeling was, "if you don't like ads don't use the web. You owe it to those websites to look at their ads". But then the ads just go so resource intense that I came around and finally installed an ad blocker. This however still feels one step too far. The ad blocker protects me from the resource utilization of ads. But if you're already bl…