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AdNauseam Browser Extension Quietly Clicks On Blocked Ads
New submitter stephenpeters writes The AdNauseam browser extension claims to click on each ad you have blocked with AdBlock in an attempt to obfuscate your browsing data. Officially launched mid November at the Digital Labour conference in New York, the authors hope this extension will register with advertisers as a protest against their pervasive monitoring of users online activities.
It will be interesting to see how automated ad click browser extensions will affect the online ad arms race. Especially as French publishers are currently planning to sue Eyeo GmbH, the publishers of Adblock. This might obfuscate the meaning of the clicks, but what if it just encourages the ad sellers to claim even higher click-through rates as a selling point?
True, advertising does serve a useful purpose. The problem is with the people who think it's a good idea to make their ad just a little bit louder, brighter or bouncier than the rest, so it gets noticed more. And then of course the rest of the advertisers, even the well-meaning ones, are forced to make their ads a little louder still. Yes, even the "regular" advertisers do this: television ads have been normalized in terms of dBs and often in compression as well. But those same exact same ads do not behave so well on unregulated channels, such as broadcasters' websites showing repeats of their shows with ads in between. Some of those ads fairly blast out your eardrums, and that's not just laziness on the webmaster's part for failing to adjust the volumes properly; those ads also have extreme compression (for higher perceived loudness) that is absent from the televised versions.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It would only be criminal fraud if the intention was for a competitor to gain an advantage, to demand payments for it to stop, or to extract more money from advertising agencies' clients ...
It might be illegal for merely trying to interfere with business between others (website and advertiser). Tortious interference.