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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?
I am all for poisoning that well. For those of us who use adblock it won't affect what we see and will cost the advertisers money as they will have to pay the site we visited for those clicks. So really no down side from my perspective.
Time to offend someone
It could be considered click fraud if you used it against your own website that you have advertising on.
But I do agree, if I was an advertiser, and this caught on, they could see a potential spike in clicks, and therefore a big jump in advertisement expenditures.
That might lead to drastically reduced payments per click for websites, or maybe the end of pay-per-click, or who knows what else?
I already paid to get on the internet. Comcast gets sixty bucks a month. In addition, I pay to host my own websites out of my own pocket. You aren't entitled to a revenue stream from your website. If the only way you can make money on the web is by pushing malware (which is what all third-party ads are) then you don't belong on the web and should GTFO.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Adblock by default has the "acceptable ads" feature which is pretty much that. I personally uncheck this box on every customer because they allow Flash ads if they aren't annoying and with flash ads the #1 source of malware it is simply irresponsible to allow them but if you care to support advertisers (which I don't***) then this combined with AB should fulfill that goal.
*** Advertisers, you stupid greedy pieces of shit, you brought this on yourself and deserve your slow death as does anybody on the net who bases their business model around you. For nearly a decade the thought never even occurred to us to block ads because they were just text or JPG hyperlinks or if you really wanted to be fancy a small looping GIF. They were so small and unobtrusive they had a negligible effect on even the shittiest dialup and since they were first party they were actually relevant, a D&D site may have a link to buy miniatures, a site for musicians footpedals and strings. Everyone got along and things ran smoothly.
But then you stupid fucks listened to the MBAs, Master of Being Assholes, who said "Fuck this being nice man, we'll pop up and under, we'll bury the content, we'll slap screaming flash vids on every page so the stupid peasants will give us money just to STFU!". It was YOU that created the pop up/under/over, it was YOU that demanded Adobe turn what was a simple video player into a code running malware delivery system so you could make "punch the clown and win an iPod" style bullshit, it was YOU that added MBs worth of bullshit to every single page, it was YOU that caused pages that should have been one to become seven, it was YOU that made simple cookies into tracking dogs, it was YOU that made pages slow to a crawl as unsecured ads from a half a dozen sites became the norm, it was YOU that made ads the #1 attack vector by not giving a shit about anything but your bottom line, it was YOU that took a business model that worked for a decade and burnt it to the fucking ground with your feces flinging short term outlook, you worthless douchebags!
So as we, the Internet users, do everything in our power to slowly but surely starve you out and make your business model a thing of the past just remember, it didn't have to be this way, it was YOU that shit on everybody and because of this we won't shed a tear, not a single fuck will be given, as you cry and whine about how poor you're becoming. You brought this on yourself, you deserve what you get, you worthless greedy fucktards!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If you put stuff on an URL, and then you make the URL public (and put it on search engines), you are agreeing with the http protocol. The contract is:
"At this URL you can find public and freely available data".
That's the way http works. There is no click through contract to get to an URL and the standard is made so data can be processed easily (there are content, presentation and behaviour separated parts, and each part is designed so it is easy to extract only a subset of it). So, again, clearly the intent of the http protocol design is: "At this URL you can find public and freely available data in a format easy to process so you can use any subset of the data any way you want".
Seen in this way, an advertiser has agreed with the http "contract" by publishing the data. It should be illegal than an advertisher tries to subvert the nature of the http protocol and force you to consume content in a way that further's his interests.
This is similar to what is happening with net neutrality. People trying to subvert the design to convert a protocol into something it is not so to achieve control in the ways the protocol is used, removing control from the actual users of the protocol. They should call it something different, like "filtered internet".
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Agreed.
The basic idea here is that the http protocol doesn't mandate what to do with the information stored on a given URL. That is left to the user to decide.
The thing about this point is that advertisers seem not to have understood this basic concept yet. I have no idea of the quality of the browser extension I linked to in TFA. However the idea that an extension could be used to automate the deliberate poisoning of advertisers collected user data seems to be a powerful one. In my view this is a logical next step in the user vs advertiser arms race.
Ianal, but even the definition they put in their FAQ states that intent to harm the advertiser is click fraud. The do not track purpose seems like a thin veil over causing massive amounts of false clicks that harm their advertising revenue. We should certainly be able to block what gets served to our computers, but this add-on definitely crosses the line.
Ianal, but even the definition they put in their FAQ states that intent to harm the advertiser is click fraud. The do not track purpose seems like a thin veil over causing massive amounts of false clicks that harm their advertising revenue. We should certainly be able to block what gets served to our computers, but this add-on definitely crosses the line.
That would make it civil disobedience and protest then. 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, which AdNauseum doesn't do. It'll be interesting to see how this gets treated by the press who have a vested interest in online advertising.
Ads weren't the problem for me. But here are the problems