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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

Or we could all just start googling and searching for things that are completely irrelevant to us. This would fuck up the advertising models and marketers would be forced to change their practices.

So I say to you all: go and google some random shit and do some deep dives into it. Be predictably unpredictable.

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Because I don't have better things to do than playing whack-a-mole with some stupid advertisement algorithm.

I have simpler option: don't use social media, use DDG, uBlock and pay for products you use.

In theory, I don't mind advertising or machine learning based recommendations that is a nice mix of "here's more of the same" and "hey, how about this from left field". I think Spotify for instance has a good mix of this. My biggest issue, aside for privacy concerns, is the efficacy of these systems. If I could get some nice gift ideas before purchase that would be great -- if these systems could realize that I made this purchase as a gift and don't want it added to the model they have on me that would be great, these systems just really seem hit or miss right now.

That’s a system that’s impossible to build. You’re describing something that can perfectly predict human behavior. If we built a system like this, it would not be used to sell me Tide Pods.

Of course it would be used to sell you Tide Pods. It would sell you cars, too. It would also be used to make you anxious and fearful, but not so depressed that you kill yourself. It would be used to make you vote for certain people, buy particular clothes, and encourage you to maximize your lifetime consumption.

Maybe this is close to your idea: https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

Yes, but I think that this is too shallow. You have to do deep dives (as if you were actually interested in the product/service) for it to really work. Like the OP said, you have to go to review sites, watch youtube videos, etc.

Google really hates this. They've got some heavy anti-spidering watchers going on to prevent this. There was a Github project that was designed to randomize the search queries under your account. I'm not sure if that got shut down by google, or what happened. Suffice to say, not so good things happened.

There are people working around the clock to determine this information, and there's no indication that they couldn't just peg you as "open-minded" and start selling products associated with that.

Right! But I will not click on those ads because I am not part of that demographic. The whole point of doing this is to shift you to a demographic where the ads become irrelevant and you aren't tempted to click them.

The fact that you aren't clicking the ads is powerful evidence in itself, much stronger evidence than what you Google.

I run a comment reply bot on my reddit account on saturday afternoons/nights when I'm out. It just posts some highly-voted comment from a CSV. My reddit history makes no freaking sense.

https://adnauseam.io

Here you go!

Google actually banned this from the Chrome store so it must be hurting them.

For good reason: It's a fraudulent click.

A what? Fraudulent click? Lol. There’s no such thing.

Where's the fraud?

I'm not making money off of it, nor does anyone I know or have a business relationship with stand to benefit from it.

I'm merely authorizing an application to use my local system to access unsolicited hyperlinks provided to me by a third party while viewing another party's Web site.

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