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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."
Won't this just make Google more money?
It's not like the advertisers can go somewhere else. If you want search ads, there's only one place to go.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Actually, I think I already have Google ads blocked...
Will false-positives hurt them more than just adblocking them?
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I think the better approach is to give Google the finger and start using other tools.
Isn't adblock enough? I hate advertising, but as long as I can opt out it's OK with me.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If I was an AdWords user, I would pull all of my bids now and let other advertisers exhausted theirs first.
Then a "word" will be easier and cheaper to get.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
We're talking about tagging cookies to a browser, keeping data browser-end, and having the browser send data back to the server for statistics when ads are served.
Instead, we could skip the cookies. Keep the data on the server, in a database, tied to your IP address and other information collected about you (OS, browser, time of day, etc) and do much more extensive research.
When you clear your cookies, you're removed from Google's "Database" ... YOU are requesting THEM to send you ads based on information YOU are tracking using THEIR program. THEY are not tracking everything you do, because damn, it'd be hard to uniquely identify you when your cookies expire and drop your UUID stored in a cookie and they wind up with 40 database entries for your ONE browser because you clear cookies every session.
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smells like a lawsuit coming soon....
Don't know how google are expected to continue providing free search, maps, mail and all, if they can't get revenue from somewhere else. Ads work for tv and radio, and apparently for web, too.
We have all seen the "make $10,000 a day using adsense" - won't this only increase the ad revenue for these potential scams and in turn have more of these scam ads proliferating the net?
Stay tuned for new sig...
i think this is stupid, but it's just my $0.02...
Sorry, that bid is not high enough for any ad placement.
I you want to learn a lot about civil disobedience, web search "civil disobedience carl cohen howard zinn" - and I note that for once I didn't say to google it.
I studied under Carl Cohen - and highly recommend reading everything by him and Zinn if you want clear thinking on this topic.
The act of overloading Google with this plan is something that I personally find quite laudable - but it is not civil disobedience. As an ancient hippie, I don't mind saying that this act is simply called, Sticking It To The Man . I'm saddened that today's Man-Stickers are so inundated with political correctness that they can't call an action for what it is.
As Carl might have said - they emasculate their argument by so doing.
FWIW, it's not the summary - the stupidity of calling it civil disobedience comes right from TFA.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
The smart thing for Google to do would be to completely ignore the program, and let advertisers use their usual click-fraud dispute resolution mechanism. By fighting the program, Google would only be giving the program legitimacy. Without the "I'm being oppressed" notoriety, the program will pick up very few users and the total effect on the market will be small.
I'm not against advertising. I'm against fraudulent, manipulative, and obstructive advertising. Google AdWords typically score relatively low on all three counts, so they're fine with me.
A better bit would be a Firefox plugin (you can't do greasemonkey, it needs to be lower down) that just strips all references to google adwords, analytics, and doubleclick and replaces them with noops.
Now google can't track you and you don't see the adds.
While the "clickfraud" solution sounds cute, those are easy easy to detect and Google will just ignore those clicks.
Test your net with Netalyzr
As noted in the second comment in the posted article, Adbusters is using Google Analytics for user tracking. It doesn't seem like Adbusters is really concerned about this issue whatsoever if they allow Google to violate their own users' privacy, all while encouraging click fraud. What is Adbusters thinking?
This makes my brain hurt, teh implications, teh possibilities legal and otherwise...
i think i have to defer comment and opinion until some experts wander in (are we allowed to do that here? Will my account be locked? ,-) ).
What does strike me is Protest 2.0.
SysAlert: new protest available. Download? [Y/N] > y
........... done.
Run protest? [Y/N] > y
Protest running.
Of course, i'm gonna complain that no one can be arsed to actually do anything any more, aren't i? And i advocate automation and interfacing with other systems - literally, figuratively, politically, socially, mechanically - whenever possible. So is this looking-askance at Protest.sh a little Luddite slipping in in my old age? Or will it just encourage MORE laziness - oh, if i don't have a button to press, i can't be arsed so prepackage my activism please.
Brain hurts again :P
That which does not kill us makes us... st
I don't understand this "protest." Google, apparently the target of the protest, gets increased ad revenues, whereas small businesses like mine that use Adsense get... Thousands of dollars in additional advertising costs that are designed to generate no revenue...?
I admit it -- my small jewelry store (beadstore.com) is not a particularly sophisticated Google customer. I think in 2007, we spent maybe $10,000 over the course of a year advertising on Google. (Since then, we've scaled back considerably -- even though it increased business, cash flow concerns made it impossible to continue.)
After we started, I handed off control of the budget to someone who didn't quite understand the limits system properly (they're beaders, after all, not techies). She racked up almost a thousand dollars in costs in a single week. Eek! A potentially devestating mistake, since $1,000 in unexpected expenses is a huge amount for a little company like ours. (We learned our lesson and made sure everyone understood the system pronto.)
Fortunately -- and I'm sure not coincidently -- that week was also one of our biggest grossing weeks ever (though it probably didn't cover the additional advertising costs, at least over the short run). I don't know what we would have done had those costs been driven by non-customers clicking through in some misguided attempt to hurt Google. I'm not looking for sympathy for people who screw up, or suggesting that all Google advertisers are like us, but please remember that a single click can still cost a dollar or more, so a few fraudulent clicks really hurts. Not only does it inflate your advertising costs, but it also denies us of legitimate potential customers (since the system is designed to remove the ads once your target budget is reached). And I suspect we would never know for sure whether we just had a really low click-to-purchase ratio for a given week, or whether we were the victims of an organized fraud (in the non-legal sense, anyway).
Lastly, Google claims that multiple clicks from the same IP address are filtered out -- of course, I have no idea if their system would prevent what these people are suggesting.
Adbusters is certainly a brand, and they SELL stuff. Mostly they're a bunch of self-satisfied, self-indulgent, marxist/green graphic designers selling dorm-room revolution against The Man. Unoriginal politics, but hip design. Pass the organic fair-trade soy latte...
I don't need no GreaseMonkey script - I already click on all the ads visible :)
Instead of launching a DOS attack on google(that might just make google more money) over the TOS, why not use Microsoft or Yahoo search until they fix it? It's not like Google is the only search provider in the world.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
I'm a cautious supporter of Adbusters, but I actually took google's ads out of my hosts file's filter list.
My reasoning is that I believe, after years of studying media and communications, that advertising can only be ethical if it resembles the directory that you find in a phone book, accompanied by an honest, vetted description. Otherwise, it is rhetorically manipulative and preys on the uninformed.
Now, while google's ads aren't perfect, they hew closer to this ideal than most other forms of advertising. The lack of emotionally manipulative visual imagery helps (I make a living messing with such imagery, BTW).
I don't trust Google, the company. I am opposed to their excessive privacy abuse. However, I balance that against their general model, and find the competition worse.
I won't support adbusters in this campaign, but I don't oppose it either.
Damn those pesky terrorists
as i am reading the comments, trying to think up something snarky...this pops into the old inbox:
Hi, We're writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site's privacy policies. You'll also see some new options on your Account Settings page. Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast"). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310. As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language. For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html. We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement. Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account. Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043
FEAR THE GOOGLE!
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
Much as I like Adbusters, this is a headache.
Right now, Google ad URLs are relatively straightforward to recognize and decode. If Google sees this as a real threat, they may start obfuscating them and using elaborate gimmickry with Javascript, like the stuff one sees in hostile web pages. Then they'll be much tougher to deal with. The easy approaches to ad blocking will stop working.
We recognize Google ad URLs in AdRater, which is a Firefox plug-in, and we put a translucent rating icon atop each ad. Google ad links are currently rather straightforward to decode, so we don't have to follow them, just examine them. For some of Google's competitors, you can't tell where the ad link is going without clicking on it. We've considered a plug-in which follows encoded ad links in the browser, but it would look like click fraud, even though it has a legitimate purpose. So far, we've refrained from doing that. If Google tries obfuscating their ad URLs, we'll have to actually traverse them to find the advertiser site for rating purposes. That increases everyone's overhead.
So block the clicks coming from the ~2% of users who use Tor. Since Tor usage and cluefulness tend to go hand-in-hand, you'd only be dropping .002% of clicks anyway.
$ make available
Didn't see this posted earlier but here's the link for opting-out of the DoubleClick DART tracking: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/plugin/
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
Why does it always seem universally agreed upon that advertising is lame? It's one of the top ways I find out about products I enjoy.
Adbusters is a truly pathological publication. You buy a copy for $8.99 at a bookstore and get two extremely terse paragraphs on the October Revolution and interviews with well-coiffed third-stream intellectuals. This isn't to say there isn't a payoff: also included are 6 pages of pretty pictures to accompany the article, many of which have nothing to do with the October revolution, but manage to go a long way toward proving Adbusters supports revolution. And you will too, once you buy the magazine, buy the plastic-bottle shoes, and buy into the illusion that Adbusters actually cares. Insurrection this, insurrection that. If, on the off-chance, that insurrection is on the scale they image, a new October 1917 like their publication so cavalierly glosses, Adbusters would likely be one of the first called into question as counterrevolutionary due to their self-conscious posturing and content that is little more than sanctimonious drivel.
NOW - if Adbusters really cared about government surveillance, they probably should have kept their pens silent and not hopped on the persecution of this boogeyman of the month. For let us not forget the amount of insane surveillance goes into producing an issue of Adbusters. The mag's writers, for purposes of research and science, habitually sneak into parties (usually it's parties, but if you're lucky it's a cultural event of some kind), unannounced, sensing the "mental environment," and writing drivel about it a magazine whose title and content could be summed "How to be cool for the next two months until the next issue comes out."
I doubt there are many out there who aren't very passionate about keeping personal information private, but Adbusters is really calling the kettle black on this one. Wrong forum.
I've heard many people claim a "moral wrong" in blocking ads. How they get to this, I really don't know.....
Advertising, unless you explicitly ask for it, is unwanted. Advertisers are solicitors: They are asking for money in return for a service or product. Charities, although not offering a product or service, are still asking for money and are also solicitors.
Consider this: You are sitting on a park bench reading SlashDot. Later, someone else comes over and sits next to you, and starts talking to you. You aren't interested in any products or services he's offering, and ask him to stop. He refuses. You again ask him to stop. He continues to refuse. You put on a pair of earplugs, the kind they use at shooting ranges, to block out the drivel you don't want to listen to. Is this wrong? Absolutely not. It may be a public place, but ignoring the stranger is legal, while harassing someone for a sale or panhandling, is not. However, one nations' laws cannot be enforced in another nation.
AdBlocking is the Internet equivalent of earplugs. It is also the equivalent of saying "Leave me alone! I don't want to listen to you and I'm not going to buy anything from you!". You you shouldn't have to listen to an ENDLESS FLOOD of sales pitches, product offers, "Special 1-Day Deals", porn ads, and "You are the 1 Millionth Visitor!" that you don't want to.
I have heard a seemingly endless number of arguments that claim AdBlocking is stealing. Stealing? Not at all. Stealing is when you take something from someone else and keep it as your own. By AdBlocking, you aren't taking anything from the site operator and keeping for yourself. You may be costing them clickstream revenue, but your are not stealing since you aren't getting anything in from it.
Someone should cook up a script that sends the site operator a message that says "I don't want your stinking ads!" whenever it detects, and blocks, ads.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
But really the whole mission statement of Adbusters is stupid. Removing all ads from the internet will destroy pretty much every service on the internet. Think youtube would be profitable without ads? How about any site you visit with alot of images. Bandwidth isn't free so sites make money from either ads, donations or memberships. Most sites with memberships remove the ads for you so this goal is STUPID. Just use Adblock if you hate them so much
"We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century. To this end, Adbusters Media Foundation publishes Adbusters magazine, operates this website and offers its creative services through PowerShift, our advocacy advertising agency."
- http://www.adbusters.org/about/adbusters
I personally am still weighing the pros and cons of the clickfraud approach, but the comment that your post is FUD is spot-on.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
What strikes me is what is obviously missing in Adbuster's paper. They say Google is bad, but don't even mention the possibility to switch to another search engine. There is none, no list could be provided.
They must not hate Google in the end.
OK, the impact of n Adbusters users leaving Google may be harder to track than staying and clicking everywhere. Yes. For those who 1) use Firefox + 2) have broadband access + 3) install the extension. /. users will do this. And, 0.003% of the rest of the world.
I'd say, 50% of
My advice: use Clusty. The only one that sometimes indeed is more efficient, thanks to clustering.
http://clusty.com/
Herve S.
Check out the HTML source for the adbusters link. Oops! Google tracking bug!