AdNauseam is a uBlock fork that goes further: it actively attacks marketers by auto-clicking every ad before blocking
AdNauseam is a uBlock fork that goes further: it actively attacks marketers by auto-clicking every ad before blocking
A browser extension that clicks on every blocked ad to fight advertising surveillance.
It garbles advertisers' data as a result, but you must disable uBlock Origin to run it; they can't work simultaneously. I recently moved to it and, so far, am never looking back!
Good start. Now make a version that clicks each ad a random number of times from randomly generated IP addresses.
Ad Networks use browser fingerprinting to detect duplicate clicks, which is tied to your hardware, system locale, installed fonts etc.
Sounds like a solvable problem
That's not how IP addresses work.
Nothing is random
In bot cases like this you would have a proxy list that it “randomly” picks from
This would still make a connection to the ad servers that can then track me though.
I guess with a hardened browser and a VPN it would be alright.
You know this is the good shit because when it first came out a few years back google was running a huge disinformation campaign against it. You'd search for "adnauseum" in google and the first result would be an article from some weird advertising company calling is "insecure" and "malware" without any actual argumentation behind those claims, while no other search engine returned that article (I lost the screenshots, so yall are just gonna have to take my word for it). They also delisted it from the chrome store for not discernible reason. They were afraid.
But nowadays I'm willing to bet that they figured out how to detect adnauseum's fake clicks and filtering it out. Stuff like that needs a talented development team to keep it up to date.
Has the same limitations as uBlock Origin with Manifest v3 and won't work in Chrome.
I always liked using this on the premise of privacy-through-obfuscation. If the powers that be must get information from me, then i'd prefer to give them garbage information.
And lots of it.
Google has put a lot of effort into detecting and blocking stuff like this. They call it "click fraud", if you want to look it up.
It'll just mean they start ignoring clicks from you.
That, I guess, it’s the whole point. Stopping being tracked 🙂
This feels like reverse psychology on a little kid.
"That's it, I'm not tracking you anymore! >:("
"Oooh nooo, what have I done! Oh how much I would wish to be tracked :("
"No, you won't convince me to change my mind >:("
"Oh well, guess I'll have to live without being tracked, what a shame that is."
if enough people start doing it might be effective
Not sure how true it was, but there was a YouTuber claiming that their videos were getting entirely demonetized because too many of their viewers had Ad blockers enabled. So even though 75% of people were seeing ads on the video, Google was keeping that ad revenue, withholding it all from the creator because 25% weren't getting ads. The claim the youtuber made is that this will probably predominantly impact creators with a more tech savvy / privacy aware audience, resulting in less of that niche content.
Anyway, this is anecdotal, but I wouldn't put it past Google to pass the issue to the creators for the actions of their consumers, even though it's not their fault.
Throw in a dash of track-me-not (https://www.trackmenot.io/) and maybe they'll start ignoring your search queries too! Worst case my actual searches are so buried in the bs deciding what to market would be easier from my screen-name.
Some ads have used browser exploits to infect visitors in the past. So this is a very, very bad idea, if it actually is implemented in a way that is hard to filter for ad networks.
So the way I understand this to work, it's 100% safe from the type of attack you're describing.
You are clicking the link (asking the advertiser for the data) but then never actually fetching it.
So you can never get the malicious payload to be infected.
Im too scared to trust it works out fine in the end to use it, been raised on the idea that interacting with an ad in any way other than task managering the pop up is dangerous. Wheres the part of the code that makes it safe and a write up of how it functions, otherwise im fine just blocking ads with regular ublock.
Interesting, was wondering about this. This would also "help" the websites with more ad income right?
if thats true, brb setting up a website and a bot farm
Careful: that then enters the world of ad fraud, which randos like us doing the clicking isn't considered as.
Haha I imagine they need at least unique ip addresses to count. Now I wonder if for clicks to count you need to properly click through and load the target website with the same "browser fingerprint".
Potentially.
This would just give money to the advertisers.
Why can't uBlock Origin and this thing work at the same time?
because it's a modified uBlock Origin, so it's like running two ad blocking plugins at once, which isn't recommended. and if uBO blocks an ad first, AdNauseam won't be able to detect it and click on it.
anyway, I remember reading a long time ago how that approach isn't going to harm ad companies anyway, because [technical reasons that I don't remember at all].
I use it because otherwise I'd use ublock anyways. So it either does it thing and if not, it's the same result as ublock.
It's a bit redundant to run both at the same time, considering they both practically do the same thing and one is built off of the other.