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Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

dhowe.github.io

251–253 of 253 posts

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#251
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really can't tell the difference between a real person who decides to click one ad per page view and a script that does the same thing. Whatever criteria you use to differentiate between fake and real can be reverse engineered and fed back into the robot to look more human. Never mind about cyborgs, or script-enhanced humans, which are what users of this add-on will become. You can't even tell if a script was lau…

You seem to fundamentally not understand how ad networks work.

Do you know the difference between in-band and out-of-band signaling?

The ad networks are using an automated Turing Test based on statistical models to differentiate between "real" and "fake" requests. Until someone commits real dollars to make a purchase, there is no out-of-band verification of the requester's humanness. When you click the ad, your tamper-proof mouse does not take a tiny blood sample to verify that you are a real person, and communicate that via magical ansible to the ad network servers. Until the check clears on a purchase, the only data the ad networks have come through the HTTP requests, as in-band signals.

In-band signals can always be faked. Ask anyone who has ever blown a modified whistle from a cereal box into a phone handset, or modified a Radio Shack tone-dialer to produce the old payphones' "quarter inserted" tone.

So any script writer that either knows or can guess at the algorithms used to automatically sort "fake" from "real" can produce automated behavior that fools the automated sorter. What's more, those models are brittle. If the real behaviors of real humans change, such as by ad-blocking or running other response-modifying scripts, the models become decreasingly accurate classifiers.

A script that blindly clicks all blocked ads on a page is the tip of the iceberg. You can substitute the "click everything" strategy for a "click like a woman pregnant for the first time" strategy, or a "click like a male gamer, aged 17-25" strategy.

If web traffic ever has a significant number of browsers impersonating the browsing behaviors of other types of people with the help of scripts, ad networks can't trust any of their traffic to know "real" from "fake". That is an intractable problem for them.

You have to be able to verify a statistically significant portion of traffic as real humans before your models will work. And that is what Nielsen does with its consumer tracker devices.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#252
post #134

this is absolutely moronic and childish if you don't want to see ads, use adblock and be done with it. why do you now have to be a child and "one-up" the ad agencies by sending fake clicks to the them? you do know that legitimate businesses and people advertise on these networks and the only thing you're going to be doing is draining their accounts. if you _think_ you're hurting the ad networks themselves by use this…

>i'm sure the ad networks are laughing their way to the bank with an extension like this.

Definitely not. If this were to catch on, the whole ad ecosystem would feel the impact. Ad networks have advertiser relationships to look after. If the numbers looks fishy, they are held to answer by clients and usually instructed to stop running ads on sites where the suspicious activity originated.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#253
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I glady pay for Internet access, cable TV, the cinema, magazines, other content I view. The problem I have is with tracking. Ads should never do anything save show an ad. There should be no attempt to learn about me or track me or sell my data. Magazines I buy don't track me. I ignore ads in the cinema by whiling away that time on my mobile, I FF thru DVRd programs at home. I've paid already. I'm not viewing your dre…

So you don't mind ads as long as they are completely random ads that you may not care about. But if they try to get some info about you to show ads that you might actually be interested in, then you are pissed? What!? What do you think they are doing with this information? All they are doing is catering ads to your preferences.

But my preference is _really_ to see no ads.

What you cite as "my preference" is really "what the advertising backend has deduced I'm most likely to buy" - that's certainly better for the advertising company, very likely better for whoever's receiving revenue from showing the ads (averaged over all users because yes, targeted ads do work better), but it's not actually _better_ for me. From my point of view as someone who didn't actually want to spend any money, it's worse, because I'm now more likely to spend the money.

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