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The next shot in the advertising/blocking war. AdNauseam is a FireFox plug-in, currently in beta, that works in conjunction with AdBlock and clicks ads while it blocks them.
The project was "initiated" by Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University.
As online advertising is becoming more automatic, universal and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating all ad-clicks universally and blindly on behalf of the target audience. Working in coordination with Ad Block Plus, AdNauseam quietly clicks every blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases. As the data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user profiling, targeting and surveillance becomes futile.
They also state "AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas".
Will this help things with online advertising, or make them worse, assuming that's possible?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Gravis on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:30AM
Adblock works fine and does not disrupt the advertising networks by skewing their analytics of people who legitimately click adds because they have seen a product or service they want to know more about.
Just because we dont like adds doesn't give us the right to disrupt other peoples business.
1) it's "ads" with one d.
2) we have as much right to skew their analytics as they have to show us ads. if they offered a simple way to opt-out of their networks like encasing all their garbage in an tag that is easily ignored, then i would agree with you. however, they have made no attempt to simplify blocking their ads and are costing me processing power->electricity->money to ignore them.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @04:18AM
To elaborate on (2), they don't have the right to collect accurate statistics on us. If they did have such a right, it would be useful to assign each person online a national ID number and require us to be logged in as our true identities at all times. We have the right to lie about our identities, a point of pride in American history: how many of the Founding Fathers published pseudonymous political treatises as "Cato" or "Publius" or "Caesar" or "Brutus?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 28 2014, @02:43PM
Dude, shut up! You'll give them ideas!
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday October 29 2014, @05:41PM
If they did have such a right, it would be useful to assign each person online a national ID number and require us to be logged in as our true identities at all times
What the hell kind of of false-dichotomy/strawman/slippery-slope-fallacy is this?
Please tell me you're trolling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:37AM
Of course, many sites already do this, on purpose. That is, many sites 'fake-click' their own ads in order to raise their ad revenue. The ad hosters know this and they accommodate it. You think they don't know when one person clicks all the ads on a page? Or when one IP clicks on 10x more ads than a 'normal' person? You think they believe those clicks?
It's your computer. You've got the right to make it do just about anything you want. Don't want ads? don't load them. Want to hold a little ad-protest? go ahead and gang-click all the ads. Hell, write a script to crawl the web, loading every ad from every page. Or just continually load random URLs from doubleclick and adsense. But don't pretend it's anything other than petty whining. As a form of civil disobedience or protest, it doesn't even rise to the level of mailing empty "Business Reply" cards.