I used this for a while. It generates a gallery of all the ads that you “click” on which is quite entertaining. It’s interesting to see what ads come up based on what it clicks.
> I used this for a while.
Why did you stop using it?
AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users
71–80 of 163 posts
Re: AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
People also commit terrorist acts and justify it as "ideological".
I think using the cultural stigma of a "terrorist act" to make an analogy like that isn't very productive. It's as effective as saying "People also do bad things for ideological reasons", simply stating as fact that violating copyright is bad ignoring any of the nuance that was provided.
Violating copyright doesn't actively harm the copyright holder. Clicking on ads consumes actual real world resources of the ad network (which is passed on to the advertiser). This is basically stochastic terrorisim on a small scale.
Re: AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
People do this more for ideaology reason. For some people (not me) ads are inherently bad, so it's okay to abuse advertiser. Just like for some people, copyright are inherently bad, so piracy is not just a way to save several bucks, but a moral duty.
People also commit terrorist acts and justify it as "ideological".
A lot of nefarious, brutal and unethical behaviour that is completely normalised in today's world will be considered terrorist or otherwise in the future. It is still ideological no matter how horrible we think it is.
Re: AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users
#74It 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…
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -H. L. Mencken
Re: AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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.
It's all fun and games until Google gets upset and locks you out of your gmail.
That would be funny since the only thing I use my gmail account for is YouTubeTV. I guess forcing them to save me $72 a month is an option I had not considered.
Re: AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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.
How "far fetched" this is from click fraud is the central argument, and I can easily see a range of arguments from both sides. 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…
This tool doesn't in any way meet the legal definition of fraud. Any if everyone working on online advertising loses their paychecks then that is an acceptable outcome.
Re: AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
It gives them money in the short term but it costs their clients money and makes the service overall less valuable. If everyone installed this it would basically wreck the online ads industry overnight.
Marketing departments don't care. Attribution is already a joke, click fraud is the cost of doing business. Folks think most marketing departments are these sophisticated analytics driven masterminds, when it's really number go up == throw more money at it.
In my experience, marketing does track the cost of user acquisition through ads, and of different ad platforms vs each other.
Re: AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users
#78As 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…
I like this reasoning. Either we voluntarily stop behaving in a way that advertisers don’t like or we will be forced to stop behaving in ways that advertisers don’t like. The only likely or rational future is that we all stop acting in ways advertisers don’t like, one way or another. We may be best served by proactively rethinking all of our computing habits to make sure they more closely align with AdSense’s goals f…
I’ve seen an incomplete proposal from an adtech CEO that suggests we have a global user ID that we set somewhere, somehow (the tech details aren’t worked out, but the data would be stored centrally in some ad watchdog type org, something like the PCI-DSS Council), and publishers could offer varying levels of access to their site for varying levels of access to your data for advertisements. The user would be able to remove access to the data from any publisher at any time, delete all their data at any time, and they’d be able to centrally manage their data for all sites.
His argument for began with essentially what you said, this is going to happen whether we like it or not, so let’s get ahead of it and create a system that leaves the power in the end-user’s hands.
That’s not going to happen in the current structure where Google basically owns advertising because of Chrome’s market share. Google will control things.
Re: AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users
#79It 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…
> But if you're already blocking the ads, then the tracking shouldn't work anyway.
But doesn't that fail if the blocking is anything short of perfect?
Re: AdNauseam: uBlock Origin fork silently clicking ads on behalf of users
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Someone who installs this extension doesn't in my mind qualify to be defrauding anyone. 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 inst…
Stop being vague. Which specific law do you think that might violate. Provide a citation.