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Comment by WORMS_EAT_WORMS | Hacker News Reader

Trying to block this is a losing battle. The whole privacy-first angle is so disingenuous, too.

Is there a way we can just obfuscate / ruin our data with them?

Like a tool or browser extension I can run that clicks / visits a bunch of random links and totally trashes which "cohort" Google thinks I belong in.

I'd pay for this more than paying to opt-out. Then serve me all the ads you want.

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It speaks volumes that Google allows many ad blocking extensions in Chrome Web Store, but blocked an extension that was doing exactly that:

https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html

Does that actually work? It seems like clicking on every ad would be easy to filter out.

Probably, but it would "trash which "cohort" Google thinks I belong in"; there's really no reason to fool Google into putting you into a specific cohort as opposed to just a random/"broken" one; either way, your true cohort is obscured.

Unless you were studying the impact of ads you receive based on cohort, like https://their.tube.

More likely FLoC will place you in a cohort also full of other AdNauseam users.

I remember reading about it on here a while ago and some Googler said that it was easily identified as automated clicking on their end, they have pretty sophisticated antifraud systems.

Just don’t use chrome ? Or if you really like chrome Use a chromium browser that won’t implement cohorts , why bother feeding it disingenuous data instead of just not feeding it anything ?

Stop using Chrome.

https://adnauseam.io/

I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet.

Also there's an issue that bots are detected easily.

That's because Chrome banned it.

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