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Comment by phreack | Hacker News Reader

The article talks about AdNauseam, an extension that autoclicks every ad it finds to try and poison the data well, and that the creators found out that Google would accept most of those clicks and charge advertisers / pay out websites for them.

What worries me is that running something like feels close to what would piss off Google the most, and be one of those things that suddenly and without explanation or recourse makes them kick you (and anyone associated with you) out of everything Google, like Gmail, YouTube, Drive, etc.

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Firefox now by default opens Facebook and Instagram in separate walled "container" tabs. Perhaps you could do the same thing with Google services? Would they be able to track by IP/user agent fingerprinting though?

IP, user agent, window size, available fonts, and a million other things that can't be escaped.

It's us versus the self-proclaimed "smartest people in the room."

because Google's stuff is so integrated into so many sites for many people - from analytics (which you have no choice of) to "Sign in with Google" (which you do), embedded Youtube videos, Gmail, Calendar, all the hosted libraries (jquery being the most popular), i just don't see a "google tab" are workable.

I've tried making my own. The problem is even though I use ProtonMail, and Etesync (calendar) and tresorit (storage) and signal (messaging) and Duckduckgo and stay on Firefox unless i have no choice, is that i still end up with lots of stuff running in the same tab that is "non-google" simply b/c everything utilizes and embeds so many google services.

There is a Firefox addon called 'Google container' on AMO.

Perhaps it could click a random one (plus or minus one) at lower time intervals? That would be much harder to detect and filter out. I mean: it's not such a big deal to filter out quick strings of ad clicks.

Ah, I see that's an option already. Interesting.

Yes. Same here. Google's gotten some bad press lately for banning people without stating a reason-- yes, there's legal rationale for not giving a reason. But, I'd suggest it's also likely that nobody at Google actually knows the reason. There's not some single common and obvious thread in the bannings (aka customer "segmentation"). Speculating, it's really just your risk/segmentation score from algorithm X is vector Y. And, I'd imagine AdNauseam increases your score in the bad direction.

I've been running ad nauseum for years and have never had a problem with Google.

I do get some funny ad suggestions though.

Since I just deleted my Google account, I'd be more than happy to risk a ban.

I do feel like Google would absolutely permaban you for doing something to deliberately sabotage their profit model.

It is more likely for the owner of the website to be banned for "false clicks" because it is against AdSense ToS

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