Adbusters Suggests Click Fraud As Protest

An anonymous reader writes "In response to Google's recently announced plans to expand the tracking of users, the international anti-advertising magazine Adbusters proposes that we collectively embark on a civil disobedience campaign of intentional, automated 'click fraud' in order to undermine Google's advertising program in order to force Google to adopt a pro-privacy corporate policy. They have released a GreaseMonkey script that automatically clicks on all AdSense ads."

Comments

Re:Why not just block their ads?

[rake74]

Semantics. I was responding to geekoid:

how can you fraudulently click something?

It's an asshat thing to do. How about just plain ol boycotting? And if you have to, boycott those who work with them. It's how things work in a civil society.

Re:"Protest"?

[nametaken]

Yeah, because Google's anti-scam heuristics is so good that I won't end up paying for any of this. I can't wait to have my entire ad budget spent on shithead /.'rs with the greasemonkey script running... fighting the MAN!

Hey, at least keeping our business running is nice and easy in this fantastic economy. Why WOULDN'T they choose NOW to run some fucked-up "civil disobedience campaign" that messes with small businesses.

Thanks Adbusters, you worthless fucks.

Re:Protest is one approach, but...

[BitZtream]

First off, you're an idiot if you think Yahoo doesn't do the same shit.

Second off, the reason the stuff under the more tab on Google specific is because what you wanted was already on the main search page.

I just searched for bioshock on google. It has reviews, patches, cheats and walkthroughs on the first page of search results. Not sure what your problem is, perhaps you got stuck off on one of googles servers with a bad index. It happens sometimes.

For me, searching on Yahoo and Google returns almost the exact same result set, just a slightly different order. I think you fail at the web.

Re:Adbusters don't suggest switching from google..

[BitZtream]

I'd say less than 50 people from slashdot will do this. Which is effectively lower than your number for the rest of the world.

The whole premise behind it is retarded:

Google is bad, they track me using information I (or your browser) send to them, thats an invasion of privacy even though I'm (again, your web browser) telling them about it!

We're going to show them! Install this Firefox extension so that google can see you're clicking on every link in the pages! The best way to keep things private is to send more information to the ones who are tracking you!

And its Google, so we know they have no experience thwarting people who try to cheat their ranking systems. I mean lets face it PageRank is totally broken and always returns results for the domain squatters!!!

And because we're so super smart, and Google is so dumb, they'll have no chance against us because no one has ever tried this simple method click fraud on the Google AdSense network in the past!

So what have we learned?
1) People still don't get that its not private when you tell someone else about it on the Internet.
2) Adbusters is a joke and is so arrogant they think they have come up with a way to skew Googles traffic enough to make a difference, even though far more advanced methods have been used to attempt to game Google for years and have been almost useless.
3) The 3 people that do go along with Adbusters (not counting the 7 internal people they have, their 'staff' if you could call it that) aren't going to make enough of a dent in anyones logs for anyone to notice.
4) Before you come up with some retarded way to 'stick it to the man', take a look at your unintended side effects and hopefully realize before you do it that you are doing nothing more than hurting the services you enjoy, not the person you disagree with. Good thing here is that since we're only talking about 10 or 20 people that will actually make the effort to do this, that you won't be hurting those sites that use AdSense much (like good ol' slashdot).

Dear Adbusters,
Please get a clue. They have cluepons on the Internet if you need a discounted rate.