What do you think of AdNauseam and their 'poisoning-the-well' approach?
What do you think of AdNauseam and their 'poisoning-the-well' approach?
Inspired by the discussion in 'they already have your data' I was reminded that AdNauseam exists. I rarely see it mentioned in privacy circles but the idea seems attractive to me, I've used it before and since it's based on uBlock Origin it was just as effective in adblocking and the "poisoning" itself unobtrusive. How do you guys feel about it? Are there reasons it should be avoided?
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Lol. There is no poisoning. They want to see where you are on the Internet. You’re just helping the ad companies get a better profile so they can sell you at a higher price. Not to mention they’re not idiots and can just exclude all the 20 clicks that happen in the first second of viewing a page, and look at the one click that happens after hanging out on a website for a while.
If you want to poison their database, then actually use vpn/mullvad/tor, and give fake data on forms.
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I'm a big fan, especially because it not only makes my "profile" much harder to identify, it also costs the advertisers more. Anything that harms advertising is a good thing IMO.
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I think its a waste of time as they still get your data. They have algorithms designed to identify false positives in their click through rates and they have access to info from databrokers and things like facebook. Once they correlate that they know who the person is and the ip addresses and fingerprints of the hardware.
Instead I would recommend tails or use a combination of blockers and default with JavaScript and cookies disabled , only allowing on trusted sites.
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Do you know if there are any writeups on this identification of falsw positives?
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Not off hand but here is a product tailored to advertisers that claims to be able to do it https://www.anura.io/product
It stands to reason that this company must be successful in doing it if they are able to stay in business. That means ad companies are paying for it so they see value in it. So they are successful in eliminating or reducing their false positives.
This was a quick search as I'm on mobile and in a meeting at the minute but you can be sure the big guys have in house teams for this eg Google, Meta etc
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Considering there are services that remove false positives like that from your tracking data, I think it’s probably not worth using AdNauseam. Just use regular uBO and don’t connect to the ad servers in the first place.
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I am happy with it, I run it on all compatible devices. In the ad vault it says how much money was wasted on ads to you, but I do not believe that amount shown.
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I'm not sure to what extent this works better than not clicking on anything at all:
Given that there's already a quantity of data about me on the internet from before my "privacy adoption", the brokers already have an idea about me. If i stopped clicking on ads, that idea would remain frozen in time with my preferences from that time.
If I started clicling on everything to poison that profile, couldn't the brokers just filter the period when i started clickning everything? In that case, their profile of me would again remain the same they had when I stopped clicking at all, am I right on this?
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, couldn't the brokers just filter the period when i started clickning everything?
They don't care about the quality of an individual profile, it's the quality of the aggregate data that's important to them. If anything, your profile might be identified as an outlier compared to the average and simply discarded. They're not going to look any further than that and try and "rescue" your data, they've got a million other profiles to sell to advertisers.
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What happens if one of the ads is a malicious link?
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Nothing. Because it discards any data returned from the click.
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-does-adnauseam-click-ads
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Sensible. Thanks.
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From the FAQ: AdNauseam simulates clicks on Ads by issuing an AJAX request to the adserver in a background process. This request is made without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. The text-only request is safely discarded by AdNauseam before it has a chance to execute in the browser (no DOM is constructed and no code is ever allowed to run). Further, all cookies from AdNauseam's visits are automatically blocked before they reach the browser's local storage.
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it just wastes my system's resource for no gain. imo it's sufficient to have a proper adblock + js/cookie/xhr whitelist + container tabs.
if you're really paranoid you can rotate ip address or something similar,,
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I do it myself by using belivable fake personal data where i can.