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Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

Being realistic, of course they'd block it. Why would they allow an extension that costs them money by faking ad clicks (edit: harms their business model by making advertisers mad that they're getting fake ad clicks)? I'm happy simply blocking ads; I don't want to directly cost anyone money that way. Whatever you think about ads, isn't automated random faking of ad clicks arguably fraud?

Being optimistic, the conflict of interest over ad clicks may not be the only reason for this decision. Blindly and randomly following ad links seems like it would assist exploitation of browser vulnerabilities.

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I don't think this is fraud.

Either there is no law on the Internet - It seems be the reality of Internet being global and hardly enforceable - and in this case you do whatever you want and advertisers do whatever they want.

Or there is laws on the Internet, and advertisers are not respecting them. Privacy, damaging your devices via malware, not separation of contents vs. ads, EU laws being very protective, illegal targeting, etc. So, defending yourself against this is not fraud.

I'm not going to downvote you. But it's in no way shape or form fraud.

It's just like sending back business reply mail if you're not interested in the product. It's not fraud.

I can see a case for it being a bit like a DDOS attack. But I can't see a case for it being fraud.

I'm not so sure.

1. The authors of the extension clearly intend to harm the ad industry. There's no expectation that anyone will look at any one fake ad click and say, "oh, that person's sick of ads... maybe we should change our strategy." There's no business-side interaction with fake clicks like there is with empty returned prepaid envelopes. The only impact anyone intends or expects from this extension is financial. The intent is to get advertisers to pay more for fewer sales.

2. This is automated, and by distributing an extension, automated on a (potentially) mass scale.

I hate ads and I'm the kind of person who would use that extension if I weren't already happy with ublock origin, regardless of whether it might be considered fraud. However, I think there's at least a passable argument that it could be. If the main reason for this removal is that Google views the extension as fraud, then banning the extension from the Chrome web store is fairly decent of Google compared to suing the developers.

> The only impact anyone intends or expects from this extension is financial.

Financial disruption is the tool used by most forms of direct action[1]. The power imbalance between large businesses and the people affected by those businesses usually leads to problems being ignored for the sake of profit. When money is the metric that influences decisions, the only way to effect change is to disrupt the source of revenue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_action

> The authors of the extension clearly intend to harm the ad industry

Not at all, it is just trying to prevent tracking and profiling by obfuscating genuine clicks with noise. It is explicitly a reaction to ad firms ignoring do-not-track.

But it's in no way shape or form fraud.

If I "accidentally" visit my own website while I have this extension active it'll cause any adverts to be clicked and I'll earn money from them. Unless the plugin has a way to block the action on adverts that the browser user receives money from it's indistinguishable from deliberate click fraud - all Google knows is that the browser used a programmatic event instead of a user initiated click.

To that end I can see why Google might want to disabled it. I hope they'll also reach out to the developers to come up with a workable solution rather than just blocking it permanently though. Google have an opportunity to show they do actually care about privacy on the web here.

Just don’t have ads on your website. Easy as pie.

So, in some cases, you're advocating just closing up shop?

If your website costs so much that you need income to support it and provides so little value that people are unwilling to pay for those costs, then, yes, you should probably shut it down.

You do realize that both YouTube and Google make their money entirely off of ads, right? If you had your way, we wouldn't have the largest search engine on the internet nor any of their spawned products.

> It's just like sending back business reply mail if you're not interested in the product.

Without going into fraud-or-not, this is the opposite of how it works. It responds to every single business "I'm interested in all your products". This potentially generates some costs for the business which sees a new interest on latest products and makes misguided related investments.

> It responds to every single business "I'm interested in all your products".

This is unwarranted wishful thinking. Clicking an ad doesn't necessarily imply interest.

> generates some costs

Yes. Hitting businesses in their profits is one of the only communication methods some businesses listen to.

> Clicking an ad doesn't necessarily imply interest.

I believe this is actually the only thing that a real honest click on the ad indicates. What else would it do?

> Hitting businesses in their profits

It's also illegal in other ways. Racketeering idea would potentially apply here - you're making the company pay to get rid of problem (meaningless clicks) which wouldn't exist if you didn't run the extension.

>I believe this is actually the only thing that a real honest click on the ad indicates. What else would it do? Most of my clicks on ads are mistakes. Ads that finish rendering after I've started reading the page, causing the window to jump around, resulting in a misplaced click. Or ads that have such a tiny "Close" button that it's impossible to click on a phone. Those are all honest, non fraudulent clicks that do not indicate interest on my part. I don't feel bad at all if this gives the advertiser the wrong idea.

> you're making the company pay to get rid of problem (meaningless clicks) which wouldn't exist if you didn't run the extension.

The company that chose to display ads in the first place? Who is the root cause of the problem here, exactly?

>Racketeering idea would potentially apply here - you're making the company pay to get rid of problem (meaningless clicks) which wouldn't exist if you didn't run the extension.

As I understand it, racketeering requires that a company is offering a (paid) solution to a problem they are responsible for - so it'd be racketeering if the makers of the extension sold a product to detect and filter out the fake clicks, for example.

yeah, and I'm allowed to do it. It's not against the law to be an asshole.

I'm even doing it on the phone, for the companies that keep calling me despite me telling them not to: I make them lose as much time and money as I can, by scheduling fake appointment with their salespeople

In some cases it is against the law. Spam only wastes our time and tiny fraction of money - it's literally just companies being assholes. And it's been declared illegal. Same for phone spam.

Why would they allow an extension

Is Chrome the user's agent, or is it Google's agent.

How is it fraud? I never wanted the ads. How is it any different than me manually clicking the ads myself because I don't like ad networks and want to see them lose revenue?

Serving me malware laden ads that ransom my PC, now that's criminal.

> I never wanted the ads. How is it any different than me manually clicking the ads myself because I don't like ad networks and want to see them lose revenue?

Scale and rapidity is the difference, in dollar terms, robo-clicking will cost them at least an order of magnitude more. I also don't think advertisers mind that you clicked on their ad in anger - as long as you saw it and it registered.

i to think its going to far. as somebody that had to block aws range because there is i assume fake clicks as a service, this is not great, but i think it could be product of a anti anti block that many are implementing now.

Presumably in the short run it makes Google money - a great deal of those blocked ads are AdSense ads and Google gets cash for every click.

Though that obviously isn't sustainable when advertisers realise what's going on.

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