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 better signals, like actual searches, apps used, websites visited, articles being read, or data freely provided by the user himself, like age, sex or location.
Clicks on ads are misleading because the ads themselves are misleading. It's not a good signal unless it leads to a conversion and a click is just part of the funnel and not a conversion. In fact the only really useful signal is that the user clicks on ads, in general, or in other words you're inviting publishers to serve you more ads.
Also this "fighting back" attitude is not very constructive. If you hate the direction of this industry, consider paying for shit that you consume, instead of pushing for extensions that will inevitably get banned (due to this being essentially fraud) and that are pushing more and more publishers towards native apps and towards DRM, because the open web is a risky platform due to these extensions.
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For protecting my privacy, besides Firefox's built-in trackers blocking and uBlock Origin, I also use and recommend Privacy Badger ... this is a neat extension that automatically learns about trackers that follow you around the web; it can brake some websites, but it's the best at bypassing protections against ad/tracker blocking.
> Also this "fighting back" attitude is not very constructive. If you hate the direction of this industry, consider paying for shit that you consume, instead of pushing for extensions that will inevitably get banned (due to this being essentially fraud) and that are pushing more and more publishers towards native apps and towards DRM, because the open web is a risky platform due to these extensions.
Fighting back is very constructive. It's a market signal. People aren't only restricted to express their dissatisfaction through buying elsewhere (people on the producing side would love everyone to believe that, though). Complaining loudly, accurately portraying adtech as the scoundrels they are publicly, to discourage others from using such products, are also valid market signals. And so is AdNauseam.
AdNauseam is definitely not fraud. Clicking on random ads with no intention of buying is something I, as a user, can do. I've signed no contract with advertisers saying otherwise, and the tech is deployed in such a way that I get to view and click (or not view / not click) how I please. AdNauseam just automates my preference for clicking on random ads while not looking at them. My preference to express that the whole industry is bullshit and should simply die in a fire. It's perfectly legal, perfectly by the rules of the Web and the HTTP protocol, and runs entirely on the User-Agent side of Browser/Server border.
Remember, Google didn't ban AdNauseam because it's wrong. They banned it, because it went against their commercial interest, and being a private platform they could just ban it without asking anyone.
> 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, we share/leak our customers' (anonymized and bracketed) income.
This is now done through first-party tracking, so you won't see it if you look in the network tab in DevTools.
Why do we do this? Because it helps us target our marketing to an individual's demographics. Yes we make money through other ways, but this helps us make even more money. That's how businesses operate, and I don't think that companies like mine are uncommon.
Thinking that paying for shit will let you avoid tracking is like thinking that paying for cable TV will let you avoid ads. Companies will do whatever they can to make an extra buck on top of the money they're already taking from you.
Ad/tracker blockers are useless. Short of creating legislation to stop it, the only way to stop this tracking is to fuck with the data enough that it's no longer worth mining.
If you don't need the money, if it's just an extra buck, then it's easier to put pressure, as you know it wont kill them. Like most people would be scared of the collateral damage from pushing too hard against ads if newspapers, that are pretty important for society, would take too big of a hit.
- 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 Origin to deny 14 requests; I don't currently have a subscription but I imagine those assets are still loaded even if I'm signed in (with much clearer markers towards my identity!)
- Fighting back is a fine way to effect change. It's clearly working or Google wouldn't be banning this extension from their store or limiting their API.
I'm very comfortable with this so it's interesting to speak with someone who isn't. If adblocking is on the rise, I wonder what the next step will be towards monetizing content? Micropayments didn't take off (perhaps unsurprisingly) and subscription models seem to not have the return that people had hoped. There's huge amounts of money on the table but a lot of very smart people don't seem to have hit upon anything yet!
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.
OK, if you don't pay then money has to be found somewhere for the web to still work[1] which advertising seems to be the only source of. Payment provides that cash thus squelching the need for ads.
If they don't advertise then they don't need to track AFAICS.
If they do start advertising as well as accepting payments for non-advertising, they are going to get spanked by users withdrawing payments, and installing ad-blockers.
I'd prefer to pay, anonymously, but as people clearly won't cos they want free stuff at any cost, advertising will persist. It's a social problem not a technical one.
Anyway, I block all 3rd party ads, which is 99% of them and 100% of the bad crap, and block all JS, with a VM for the rare cases I need it on. Not totally safe but pretty close without actually unplugging.
People complain about ads presumably because they see them, but they are so damn easy to block why don't they? I just don't get the perennial complaints. Just do it, find a minimum 10X speedup... but no, it doesn't seem to happen, and they keep discovering that Free Stuff Costs.
All the stuff you wrote about people paying, or wanting free stuff, is patently false. It was proven false by Cable TV. The promise there, when it was introduced, was that by paying a subscription for your TV, you wouldn't have any ads. So people bought into it, and pretty soon, they just added the ads back in, so now they were making money both from advertisers and the viewers at the same time. And this didn't cause them to be "spanked by users" by them canceling their cable TV subscriptions. It's been decades now, and cable TV is still here, and only now is it waning, but only because of online services like Netflix, not because people were fed up with ads.
> I'd prefer to pay, anonymously, but as people clearly won't cos they want free stuff at any cost, advertising will persist. It's a social problem not a technical one.
It's more of a content quality issue. There are examples where large numbers of people will pay for quality content (example [1]). Large swathes of 'content' is junk (clickbait, listicles, submarine articles, actual fake news, etc) and few will pay for that.
> extensions that will inevitably get banned (due to this being essentially fraud)
AdNauseam has been up on Firefox Add-ons for a while and it is not banned and I don't believe it will get banned. Explain why you think differently please.
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.
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 better signals, like actual searches, apps used, websites visited, articles being read, or data freely provided by the user himself, like age, sex or location.
Clicks on ads are misleading because the ads themselves are misleading. It's not a good signal unless it leads to a conversion and a click is just part of the funnel and not a conversion. In fact the only really useful signal is that the user clicks on ads, in general, or in other words you're inviting publishers to serve you more ads.
Also this "fighting back" attitude is not very constructive. If you hate the direction of this industry, consider paying for shit that you consume, instead of pushing for extensions that will inevitably get banned (due to this being essentially fraud) and that are pushing more and more publishers towards native apps and towards DRM, because the open web is a risky platform due to these extensions.
---
For protecting my privacy, besides Firefox's built-in trackers blocking and uBlock Origin, I also use and recommend Privacy Badger ... this is a neat extension that automatically learns about trackers that follow you around the web; it can brake some websites, but it's the best at bypassing protections against ad/tracker blocking.