It is built on top of unlock origin and will silently click on the ads in the background to mess with your digital footprint while costing advertisers money who use pay per click.
How does AdNauseam “click Ads”?
AdNauseam ‘clicks’ Ads by issuing an HTTP request to the URL to which they lead. In current versions the is done via an XMLHttpRequest (or AJAX request) issued in a background process. This lightweight request signals a ‘click’ on the server responsible for the Ad, but does so without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. Further it allows AdNauseam to safely receive and discard the resulting response data, rather than executing it in the browser, thus preventing a range of potential security problems (ransomware, rogue Javascript or Flash code, XSS-attacks, etc.) caused by malfunctioning or malicious Ads. Although it is completely safe, AdNauseam’s clicking behaviour can be de-activated in the settings panel.
That feature it uses to silently click ads increased the RAM usage of my browser by a lot on two separate systems (my android phone, and my PC) and since I really do not give an extra fuck about clicking ads in the background (Google still makes millions, and the plugin dev is also using the clicks to make money via affiliate) and I only care about blocking them, I went back to uBlock Origin.
and the plugin dev is also using the clicks to make money via affiliate
That’s actually kinda brilliant and I’m jealous. I might actually install it just to reward his intelligence. I can’t blame him for doing it, I’d do it too if I was in his shoes; I wish I’d thought of it first.
Basically tells advertisers and trackers that you click on every single ad (a common metric used to gauge interest), so it’s harder for them to tell what you’re interested in and build a profile of you
Worse actually, since we usually visit a subset of the web, and by “fake clicking” all the ads of all the websites we visit, we actually give google a pretty good profile of the websites we visit, and that’s bad. Fake clicking is not as private as people think it is.
It still only clicks ads of the webpages you visit, which again is a pretty good tracking pattern. I prefer to be tracked as “blocks all of them” than “clicks all the ads of these webpages, which are about XYZ, so they must have interests in XZY, which is actually true since I did visit those websites”.
Adnausem
It is built on top of unlock origin and will silently click on the ads in the background to mess with your digital footprint while costing advertisers money who use pay per click.
Google:
Google might not care, but if enough people install it, their advertisers sure will.
That sounds neat, but it means those ads are at least partially loaded on the background, which is also bad
only the URL is loaded.
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-does-adnauseam-click-ads
That feature it uses to silently click ads increased the RAM usage of my browser by a lot on two separate systems (my android phone, and my PC) and since I really do not give an extra fuck about clicking ads in the background (Google still makes millions, and the plugin dev is also using the clicks to make money via affiliate) and I only care about blocking them, I went back to uBlock Origin.
That’s actually kinda brilliant and I’m jealous. I might actually install it just to reward his intelligence. I can’t blame him for doing it, I’d do it too if I was in his shoes; I wish I’d thought of it first.
The developers are three wealthy tech-bros, not one guy struggling.
what do you mean by ‘mess with digital footprint’
Basically tells advertisers and trackers that you click on every single ad (a common metric used to gauge interest), so it’s harder for them to tell what you’re interested in and build a profile of you
Seems like not clicking on any ads should have the same outcome…
I don’t see ads, so who knows what is in my profile.
Worse actually, since we usually visit a subset of the web, and by “fake clicking” all the ads of all the websites we visit, we actually give google a pretty good profile of the websites we visit, and that’s bad. Fake clicking is not as private as people think it is.
You get tracked based on how you interact. This obfuscates that beyond just “I block all of them”.
It still only clicks ads of the webpages you visit, which again is a pretty good tracking pattern. I prefer to be tracked as “blocks all of them” than “clicks all the ads of these webpages, which are about XYZ, so they must have interests in XZY, which is actually true since I did visit those websites”.