Best part is it tells you how much ad spend you have caused. It’s crazy how quickly the number reaches 4 figures.
It’s a nice additional data point to identify and track the users running it, though.
2. How would you filter out AdNauseam ad clicks with genuine ad clicks?
AdNauseam clicks occur far more often than normal ad clicks, aren’t associated with other ad load events, timing is all similar, ads are clicked regardless of predicted relevancy. There’s dozens of obvious, and hundreds of non obvious, ways to detect if a particular user is a bot or not. Literally legions is PhDs study this attack vector and work at Google and Facebook.
This extension just isn’t effective, and any time working in the ad industry makes that overwhelmingly obvious.
Adnausium can just connect us through an anonymizing server so that we can sell our well chosen (by them) clicks to those organized crime and sophisticated actors. Heck, those bad guys would probably be willing to pay me or Adnausium a fractional CPM for the service.
You can easily adjust the click rate in AdNauseam's settings (assuming I only click 1 out of 50 ads then it will be completely random if Google's ads are clicked once per 1 or 1000 ad loads because they don't know how many ads were loaded by other providers inbetween), click timing is affected by so many load factors that I'd think it isn't even necessary to sleep a random period before clicking. Other techniques, such as "ad traps" are easily countered by IP changes/Cookie AutoDelete extension.
Does this extension change your IP?
How bad at their job do you think these data scientists are, to make companies like Facebook and Google such great money printing machines?
This extension doesn't change my IP nor does it auto clear cookies, but are we not allowed to combine multiple tools? I use VPNs (both my own and from work), I often change location (home, office, hotels, cafes, etc.), have several phones/laptops that use different operating systems/browsers. At the office everybody use the same computer model, are you going to blacklist 50+ peoples potential ad clicks from that IP because I use AdNauseam?
I don't think the data scientists at Facebook/Google/others are bad at their job because of their likely inability to invalidate all AdNauseam clicks, nor do I think the addon, with its current userbase, has the slightest impact on their money printing machine.
Your browser leaks a lot more information than just cookies and IP.... canvas fingerprinting for example is particularly pernicious. Check this [1] for a demo of the known leaks (there are probably more that aren't in this project yet)
In any case then I still think the goal should be to recommend AdNauseam to as many people as possible, because it does work against most ad networks, especially when it's accompanied by extensions such as Privacy Badger that will block a lot of tracking domains.
Even the most sceptic users (with regard to AdNauseam's ability to hurt user tracking ad networks) will still benefit from using AdNauseam as an alternative to uBlock Origin, because uBlock Origin is still running under-the-hood. There's nothing to lose and a lot to gain, especially when we in the future figure out how to defeat canvas fingerprinting without disabling JavaScript.
You know a society is in decline when their smartest and best-educated members dedicate all their efforts to advertising crap to people to buy, instead of something more constructive like medical technology, space exploration, etc.
I've used it for over a year (also on $XXXX estimated cost figures on 3 different devices) with several thousands of ads clicked. My ad vault contains everything from porn, electronics, job boards, ads in languages I do not understand, gambling, gaming, and all sorts of crap I have zero interest in. I pretty much never see ads while surfing the net, and when I do then it's the ads that would also slip through uBlock Origin and other ad blocking extensions.
That was the best thing about some of the addons to the old adblock plus addon - you could keep your own list, and the average user was entirely unaware of the extent that they were doing so.