AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

If anything prosecutors should start with the rampant fraud being committed by companies in the online advertising space before they even think about looking at consumers.

FTR: I don't use AdNauseam because I'd prefer to nuke trackers and ads alltogether, but I'm supportive of the project.

Where in the spirit of the law is the ability to surveil consumers reading choices in order to influence their spending enshrined? It just emerged when people realized that the information was valuable.

There were similar projects involving sharing customer loyalty card numbers for grocery stores, and I never saw the argument that sharing your card number with others was fraud.

I think you are seeing that if consumers protect themselves against this type of surveillance then the lazy (and cheap to measure) metric of clicks becomes a less effective metric for measuring advertising placement value. It exposes the fact that those measuring this were barely providing value to advertisers and publishers in the first place. That doesn't make it fraud, that just inconveniences a large industry that pays a lot of bills. Those are very different things, both ethically and legally.

As to 3, this has clear objectives, they are apparently just much farther reaching than you are comfortable with or agree with. I get it, I worked in the online advertising ad network business for many years, however I never fooled myself that this business was anything other than an unethical anti-consumer endeavour. That's why I don't do it anymore.

The goal highly specific. It is to make Internet advertising artificially expensive, and it is to make harvested data about users inaccurate.

There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but they also shouldn't advertise at me, ever.

Human attention is extremely valuable, by far the most expensive commodity on the planet. If advertising companies want my attention so damn bad, they can pay me ~$65000 a year for it, same as my employer does. Otherwise, they can piss off.

  > 3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.

Legally, you might get Tortious Interference pass the laugh test, but who is interfering? The author (if they're cautious) isn't running it, so you're likely looking at RIAA-style fishing for IP addresses for random people who installed the plugin and contributed a tiny amount, and we've seen that show already[1].

2) It could. Things have hard-to-predict effects. I see no reason why I should weight small startups as more important than the set of everyone disgusted by the invasion of every metaphorical orifice with surveillance tentacles.

3) Good on ya.

I don't know if I'm going to run this plugin or not. But this is exactly the sort of thing needed to level the playing field between the commercial surveillance shops (Facebook, Google, the other ad shops, on down the spectrum to phishers and other outright criminals) and actual humans.

We know that any form of legal or illegal online surveillance that has a chance of being commercially self-sustaining will be at least trialed. This has been demonstrated repeatedly. Legally, this is difficult to address sensibly because of the mismatch between the legal system speed and the tech-landscape speed (not to mention the inevitable unintended-consequence shakeouts, and the slowness of general wisdom in times of change). And that's even if assuming the Powers that Be want to address them, which is unlikely in the U.S. while a con-artist setting the agenda.

So that leaves making as much of the surveillance business model untenable as possible. I don't know what the right approach is, but it will likely be one that involves feeding the watchers lies.

I really don't like pissing on other people's work. But if that work is dedicated to things that make my life worse, I retain a right to, among other things, lie to their creation out of self-defense. It is that simple.

Random, related aside: I'm unlikely to have time to make this happen, but one thing I've thought would be fun is to see about how tricky it would be to repurpose some test equipment to be, say, a whole herd of Bluetooth phones[2] taking a walk by those iBeacons. Being more subtle would likely be a lot more fun, depending on the target, and would serve as a useful reminder of what 'unlicensed spectrum' means.

[1] Spoiler, here's the ending: https://popehat.com/2016/12/16/the-prenda-saga-goes-criminal...

[2] What's the collective noun for phones?

Internet advertisers are almost 100% reprehensible and fully deserving of what happens to them. They've spent years pissing in the pool, there is zero reason they shouldn't be force-fed the results.

The key moral argument in play in this entire matter is: "fuck these people and fuck everything about them." I owe advertisers nothing. They are loathsome abominations and have turned the Internet into surveillance capitalism malware soup. Causing them pain is pretty much an ethical obligation.

(BTW, I was surprised and pleased AdNauseam didn't act against Project Wonderful, the closest I've seen to a non-reprehensible advertising network and one I unblocked specifically in uBO. But the rest can frankly go and get fucked.)

There is absolutely no criminal or civil statute nor legal principle in any American or European jurisdiction that binds users to respond to advertising in an accurate or forthright way.

To have such a law on the books would be utterly ridiculous: how could you ever prove in court that I did or didn't properly reflect my forthright intentions when I clicked on a "one weird trick" advertisement? And under what possible principle could I have implicitly contracted to give you an honest assessment of my interest in your advertisement?

Your proposition is perhaps one of the most insane ones I've ever heard argued about advertising, because it claims that you not only have a contractual right to knowledge of my consumerist tendencies, but -- amazingly -- that you believe that contract is with society writ large (i.e. where breach is a criminal fraud) rather than with you (i.e. civil breach) as a service provider.

I'm all for helping fellow startuppers, but no part of me feels that startups that buy ads are an endangered species worth nurturing. The whole ad model leaves the world worse off, and it sucks that startups are left with no option but to participate in it.

There isn't a god-given right to make money via your chosen business model. Ads are a sleazy way to make money, and if you choose that, you should pay the consequences. Appealing to "people we know" as if that makes their behavior better? Ugh.

> 3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.

I can't speak to the goals of everyone who is anti-advertising, but my goals here are:

1. Users should be customers, not products, so that companies act in the interest of users, not in the interest of other companies.

2. Users' attention should be respected, only giving users content they ask for.

3. Companies should create products users value enough to pay for, and compete on quality, rather than competing on how many users they can shove idealized presentations of their product (often outright lies) in front of.

Keep a list of identified writers/writer 'styles' that are penned by fraudsters. Like easy-list is for ads.

That'd be the only way to clean up to the net. For a while at least.

Odds are that this addon doesn't actually trick the major advertisers whatsoever.

1. Any user/session that is seen clicking many ads across many different domains will quickly have their entire history ignored. You can bet that if your browser is seen clicking 1,000 ads across 10 domains in one day, that your assault will be completely ignored and have exactly zero effect against the network or its advertisers.

2. If the addon manually triggers click events on hidden elements, then the ad network likely has javascript detecting these clicks as invalid and ignoring those impressions. a) Any element that is not visible on screen has events ignored - it will check for display:none, visibility:hidden, as well as common off-viewport positioning, transparency tricks, etc. b) When you manually trigger a browser event on an element, no event object is passed to the event handler, meaning those events are easy to detect and dismiss.

Networks aren't guaranteed to implement #2, and any implementation may not be very sophisticated, but I'd bet a good penny that there is at least a basic client-side line of defense. If you manage to outsmart the client-side implementation, you're still very unlikely to outsmart the server-side analytics, where people who live and breathe this industry have spent over a decade writing software to analyze every ad click, specifically to not be fooled by such a naive attempt to hurt their business.

The hope is that publishers will understand why they're getting hit by the collateral of the fake-click barrage and move out of the blast range by changing their ads into unobtrusive ones, or even moving away from ads entirely into models like:

- treating your webpage as an investment

- sponsorship / patronage

- subscriptions

- paywalls

Additional hope is that the whole ad industry finally implodes.

Even in the long term? If plugins like this are super effective, then the value of tracking becomes less than the cost of doing it. Eventually, advertising might revert to a less intrusive model like billboards or magazine ads.

I posted it to my Facebook earlier. So far the response has been unbridled glee. I think you're tremendously underestimating the sheer joy people have at being handed a method of striking back at the people making their lives a misery, and need to recalibrate your model of how people will react to this.

http://12bytes.org/articles/tech/firefoxgecko-configuration-...

Yes, this makes my fingerprint highly unique, no good way around that yet, but I use multiple instance of Firefox for different purposes as mitigation

It's certainly plausible. All pre-internet advertising avoided tracking of individuals. There exist even now advertising agencies that cannot possibly serve up malware to their customers. Arguably Google achieved its great success by being a less-abusive advertising platform in its day.

> destroying the community we live in.

... thinking in terms of violence.

(edit: if it works. someone else has written that these fake clicks simply get filtered)

It does actually let through ads uBO doesn't (though it embeds uBO and uses the same filter lists), but nothing I can't live with. Doing my bit to make Internet advertisers' lives that little bit more miserable is pretty much an ethical obligation at this stage.

The FAQ does say only to run it if you know what you're doing. But I think anyone who reads HN will have no problems whatsoever in running this extension. If they do, the code's right there.

And at least in its current implementation, I would guess most 3rd party click validators already filter it out.

(disclaimer: ad-supported news sites pay my bills)

https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/blob/master/src/js/adn/co...

I would say that for once, the law is actually catching up with Internet activity that would clearly be illegal if done on a physical paper.

If you try to finance your site using tracking ads, or if you advertise through networks that use invasive tracking ads, or you are a network that distribute such ads - then I have no problem helping taking you out of business.

I believe that's the point of it.

Someone will get infected with malware by using the shady ad-network with a higher revenue, so what's the difference?