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Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

dhowe.github.io

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Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#241

Post by spain »

justinpaulson wrote: post #170
spain wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is it really a privacy issue to track what ads you click and use that information to target advertisements to you later? I found it hard to reply to this and I think its because you framed the question in a strange way. Targeted advertisement is not only based on what ads you click, but also the sites you visit and the stuff you view on them. If targeted advertising only worked based on what you'd click I wouldn't h…

So what? If they are using that information to cater ads to you, what is the problem? What are they using this information for other than targeting ads?

It doesn't matter, it's a breach of my privacy regardless of what they use it for.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#242

Post by GhotiFish »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #21
androidb wrote: post #8

Bad idea, ads are also a way to support the site/service you are using. Automatic ad clicks can get that site banned (i.e. Adsense will surely do that) so that's a sure way to kill the site. Google for instance wouldn't have existed without ads. Lots of people on HN saved millennia with help from Stackoverflow (ad supported) and so on. I'm now "ad-aware" so I know how to differentiate content from ads, but I will cli…

I often wonder what the internet would be like without ads. First of all, you're right that it would totally kill sites. Let's say it happens. What's next? I would be ecstatic if sites like BuzzFeed and Gawker died. That'd be great[1]. But it also kills good sites like Stackoverflow. That sucks. Right now people don't have to pay for content. Almost everything is ad based. Because of this people almost never pay for…

In your hypothetical world, I would expect some technologies would rise where people contributed drive space and bandwidth to endeavours they care about, and distribute workload. Like a distributed stack overflow.

Like a bittorrent for websites. This needs to exist for wikipedia.

Frankly, if that existed, we would be so much better off, and them immediately after that got implemented, ISP's would go on a rampage with bandwidth clampdowns.

Anyway, I'm not even remotely afraid of the world you posit.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#243

Post by adjwilli »

zmmmmm wrote: post #191
cbr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"this user clicks on absolutely everything we put in front of them" seems really easy to filter out...

It would almost certainly be filtered out as an outlier in any sensible algorithm. With all the bots that routinely scan web pages for all kinds of reasons I am sure that filtering out the "clicked on every ad" behavior is probably particularly well handled at this point.

Yeah, you're probably right. AdNauseam would do better to click on only a percent randomly.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#244

Post by mitchty »

einrealist wrote: post #86
forca wrote: post #19

I realize this won't be popular, but I really have no feelings for ad networks. - They allow shoddy security on their servers - They track users against their will - Info on me is sold w/o my knowledge or consent - Ads are a poor business model since they can be blocked - There is no moral imperative for me to view ads since I've paid to access the Interwebs I block all ads, tracking cookies, beacons, all of it... I…

I guess, they feel pretty secure, because there are many devices with no or limited ad-block capabilities like phones and tablets. (Or are there addons for my ios Safari that work without jailbracking the device?)

My solution is to vpn into home, and have a bunch of firewall rules setup to prevent any ad network traffic getting past the firewall.

Outside of the extra battery life hit, its extremely effective.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#245

Post by Alupis »

logfromblammo wrote: post #239
Alupis wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An ad network cannot tell the difference between a real click and a fake click based on the HTTP request itself. No they can't, however they can tell what is a real user and what is not. Real users don't click every single ad presented to them on every single page. Real users don't click ads as soon as a page loads. Real users don't click on all ads at the same or near-the-same time. (If this worked, without gettin…

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.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#246

Post by justinpaulson »

spain wrote: post #241
justinpaulson wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? If they are using that information to cater ads to you, what is the problem? What are they using this information for other than targeting ads?

It doesn't matter, it's a breach of my privacy regardless of what they use it for.

Well I think giving out information to a company over the internet isn't really privacy. They aren't collecting any information that you aren't freely giving up. So I think the debate is really skewing what the term "privacy" means. No one is breaking into your computer and finding out what is in your private files, they are just collecting data you are openly giving out. Your public record.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#247

Post by Nursie »

justinpaulson wrote: post #246
spain wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter, it's a breach of my privacy regardless of what they use it for.

Well I think giving out information to a company over the internet isn't really privacy. They aren't collecting any information that you aren't freely giving up. So I think the debate is really skewing what the term "privacy" means. No one is breaking into your computer and finding out what is in your private files, they are just collecting data you are openly giving out. Your public record.

>>They aren't collecting any information that you aren't freely giving up

They don't present a choice. Most non-tech people don't have a clue they're being recorded. Especially not that they're being recorded in great detail across multiple sites so that advertisers and marketers (many of whom have exceedingly questionable ethics anyway) can target them better.

It may be semi-public, but its also done secretively and without permission. If someone followed you out of your house and took a note of every shop window you looked at, every book you picked up, everything you did, would you be happy?

There is some expectation of privacy even in public spaces. The balance has not yet been struck properly with the net yet. For now the technology is just making it easier to violate.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#248

Post by wpietri »

dserodio wrote: post #232
wpietri wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the point you're replying to is ridiculous, but I still think there's no moral imperative. An equivalent moral case is broadcast TV ads. You aren't obligated to stay in the room and pay attention; going to the kitchen, using Tivo, and flipping channels are all morally ok. Part of the reason that subscriptions and micropayments haven't caught on is that people put up with ads. If ads stop working as a bus…

OTOH, the alternative to ad-supported content is paying directly for the content you want to read, which is even worse from a privacy POV because publishers will know exactly who you are instead of only knowing which "demographic" you belong to.

Every neighborhood store I shop in knows who I am, and that's fine. Ditto every single online store. The problem with publishers knowing who I am is only problematic if they are also selling me out to advertisers. The easy fix for this is for them not to take advertising. Places like Consumer Reports and Cooks Illustrated do just fine that way.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#249

Post by coniptor »

tombrossman wrote: post #215
forca wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites love to view user history. It helps them build up a profile to sell to marketers. You want to deny sites access to this info if you can, In FF, you can do this by toggling to "false" layout.css.visited_links_enabled under about:config

I would prefer not to as I find this useful. What I'm really trying to determine is whether this setting alone is responsible for leaking history metadata. I'm using Firefox with NoScript and I have Firefox set to clear everything except saved passwords when I close it (which I do frequently). I'm hopeful that is good enough because it looks like JavaScript is needed for the leak to occur, right?

The site has been down for years but you can find it on The Internet Archive. wtikay.com whattheinternetknowsaboutyou.com

There are some other sites that use the same or slightly different tactics to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. They read your history right out or your cache using timing or logic to know if you've already visited the sites in question they want to query for. They also read the color values of the links to know if you've visited that link before. This was a known issue that someone brought up 10+ years, no 15+ years ago before we had Firefox and they were working on the not production ready Gecko codebase and still just trying to pass early CSS acid tests. Gecko builds early on had this issue and it was raised and to this day no one has fixed it.

No, I'm not a coder/developer as yet and it is over my head and I don't have the time to research it to devise a solution and send a patch upstream. If I could I have serious doubts it would be mainlined. I have the impression that many in the mozilla organization are for improving security and privacy but that some of them are MORE than happy to sacrifice our privacy for money or simply don't take things as seriously as others.

I found a bug report in bugzilla using google that I can no longer turn up regarding silent basic authentication for tracking: http://user:trackingcookieaspassword@example.com/possiblymor... This is proven and observable at http://ip-check.info. In this bug report someone I believe who works with them submitted a test xpi authtest.xpi to negate/nullify/disable this exploit between sites and only allow it on the same visited domain.

The bug report can no longer be found and all current versions of firefox are still susceptible.

Re: Ad blocker that clicks on the ads

#250

Post by coniptor »

tombrossman wrote: post #217
correcthorse wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a similar option for the referrer? And while I'm at it, is there a way to prevent a website from rewriting a url when I click on it? sites like Google and DuckDuckGo show the actual url in the href, but when you click it (or right click and copy it) it becomes something like http://example.com/something?url=encoded_real_url and I detest that.

Blocking the referrer in Firefox is easy, just go to about:config and search for the string 'network.http.sendRefererHeader' then modify it from the default 2 to a 0 (zero). For the search links, I use this Add-on and it works perfectly: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...

This breaks some sites. None I use. I've read it is a problem for last.fm users because of some social chat thing they use I forget the name of. Anyway. I do this too, kind of. I use either refcontrol or smart referrer. I let sites have referrer on their domain but no 3rd parties by default and can add an exception if I want. You can test this at http://ip-check.info regardless if you're using Tor or not.

I haven't found the time to do it my self yet but will if someone doesn't beat me to porting Window Name Eraser to firefox from chrome. window.name is great for the site your visiting to use on their site. They have absolutely no business using it crossdomain, period. Not even if they own the other domain. There are legitimate ways to do that but they are too lazy, dumb, or opposed to using encryption.

I will allow a fucking cookie if I want to login or allow them to store or gather anything! No supercookies, no flash cookies, no evercookies. I use cookie monster, cookie culler, cookie self-destruct, and Cookie Controller that applies my regular cookie rules/disposition to DOM storage cookies as well.

Browsers, all of them, should behave and act the way they do after I make them go all green on ip-check.info.

In addition to that they have no fucking business knowing what the monitor resolution is. They ONLY need the canvas/inner window of the browser to render their damn site right. I will pull down videos and watch them offline without flash phoning home or to anyone else to give them anything to fingerprint my devices with.

They aren't entitled to this information and I'm against them having it. If I were like Carrie or the Twilight Zone kid who sends people into the Corn field and does other "fun" stuff they would have very good reason to be worried. >=/

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