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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

I am coming to the conclusion that the only way to beat the system is to not play in the system. Or play as little as possible. I no longer go on FB, Instagram or Amazon. I do my best to just be anonymous. I don't "need" to hang out on social media. I lived quite happily before these services even existed, and will continue without them. We have control. We can resist their shiny toys. If we are waiting for THEM (or politicians) to fix these problems, we will die of old age waiting. It's antithetical to their business and self-interests. The only way to make them less powerful is to not give them your data. That is the source of their power. Information.

  Greetings Professor Falken

  Hello

  A strange game.
  The only winning move
  is not to play.
  (1983 - Wargames)

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This would be a solution if the problem was social media. The problem here is the intrusiveness of advertisement. Personally targeted advertisement exists on the non-social web, on the phone, in your mailbox, at your door. Group-targeted[#] and still intrusive advertisement exists in the public transports, on the radio, in newspapers, in the streets, on most "things" in your house (as branding), on your clothes. I think by now it's clear that we cannot realistically avoid substantial amounts of ads by simply changing our personal behavior. Just like for ecology, it is a common mistake to depoliticize the problem by advocating only individual actions. Defending oneself against ads has to be done in whatever community you are part of using the available power levers (that were put there exactly for that purpose). This can be the state level but also as a union, in a neighborhood. Advertisement should to be (more) socially controlled and regulated.

Advertisement is inherently intrusive, it's goal is to make you listen to some message you didn't ask for. It is strictly one-way communication and as such it's deeply authoritarian: tptb have the right to talk, you are coerced to listen (it goes against fair access to public speech, which goes against the ability to exercise your power on society as a citizen). It is based on ethically questionable methods: psychological manipulation and information gathering; to provide some hindsight, when performed by an individual and not a corporation, we call this behavior harassment or psychological abuse. Yeah sure, you might be stalked by a nice guy with whom you could be friend just like you might see an ad on an interesting product, but no, stalking is oppressive even if done by a nice guy and harassment is a tiny fraction of the possibilities you have to communicate. You want to get a new fridge? Ads will not help you while an independent comparison or buyers guide will. You cycle a lot and would like to keep up-to-date with related products? Subscribe to the newsletter of some cycling community. We don't need ads for anything, they only solve some problems as byproducts and we can always solve them more efficiently and less intrusively.

F ALL ADS

note: i didn't properly define "ads" here but broadening from pure "commercials" we could have mostly the same arguments against all sorts of "public relations" like corporate communication or modern vote-based politics.

[#] there is no such thing as "non-targeted advertisement"

In that case the solution would seem to be more trivial: block the ads. Ad blocking tools are readily available.

About the only issue you may run into still is shopping sites, where they may offer "related" products. Amazon is brutal with this in particular.

The entire modern economy seems to exist for, because of, and due to ads.

I think you're taking Joshua's quote out of context: The WOPR learns about futility in game theory, not anonymity through exclusion.

I think OP is just reapplying it to another context where it works equally as well.

I'd say the only not loosing move is not to play.

Misconstruing the original context is how we got into this fake news problem in the first place.

What "fake news problem?" And who is "we" here?

It's from a movie.

While I don't engage much on social media, I've found it better to randomly click an ad. I'm ruining their profile one click at a time.

The ads I see across platforms and websites are so hilariously dumb and irrelevant now. You are going to be tracked, might as well ruin the analytics.

That might be a fun thing to do. Make google and the others pay out the nose by actually clicking as many ads as you can instead of avoiding them. Just have everybody be their own click farm. We could have an international "click to support business day" (hah) where for 24 hours everybody around the globe just clicks ads. That's what they want us to do, isn't it? Maybe we should give it to them.

If you like screwing with advertisers, I recommend the browser extension AdNauseam

https://adnauseam.io/

Basically, it hides and silently clicks on every ad in the background. It even has an archive where it shows you the ads it has hidden and clicked, so you can check in to see what advertisers think you are interested in, and it tries to eyeball the cost of those clicks to advertisers. Lots of fun to load the worst ad-ridden offenders' websites and get a smug sense of satisfaction that you wasted advertisers' money

You probably aren't. That's highly suspicious behavior that isn't hard for the ad networks like Google to detect and they'll just refund any costs as fraudulent activity.

Yeah, I wondered why it wouldn't just choose a random number of currently-visible ads to click, including 0, at random times? Clicking all ads all the time would definitely be conspicuous.

Then I found this on their FAQ (https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#what-is-the-clic...):

> What is the "click-probability" setting? This setting lets you control the likelihood that each discovered Ad will actually be clicked by AdNauseam. 'Always' means that every Ad discovered will be clicked, while 'Rarely' means that very few ads will be clicked(10%).

I wasn't meaning to use a plugin, or necessarily specifically target Google. Everybody manually click on ALL ads they see on ALL platforms. Make it so "the ad and tracking system" model just doesn't work and becomes to expensive for them to justify. They claim all of this capturing our data is to "provide better, more relevant, personalized targeted ads." They charge companies for those ads. We can basically make them ineffective by overwhelming them. All of them. I see nothing wrong, legally or morally, with everybody clicking on all of the links that they are putting before us. That's what they are there for, so let's utilize them en masse. If everybody did that on ALL platforms, what would happen? Where would they go? They would quit spending as much on these platforms, which is basically the entire revenue model of the platforms. The platforms would be forced to shift their behavior once it becomes literally ineffective for them to do business the way they have been and profits start to shrink, wouldn't they?

Another thing we can do: when you do a search, perform another search for the opposite. Or perform 2 irrelevant, random searches on things you literally don't care about or have nothing to do with your life. If we give them more crap than actual data, their algorithms would probably become ineffective.

Maybe not really click on all the ads though. Some of them can be shady as hell, or they open a new site with even more ads, and you'll never be done! Clicking on ads opened by other ads, I find that the "deeper" you, the worse it gets. By which I mean my personal feeling of: How likely whatever's being offered is a scam, but also how they are messing with my browser, pop-unders and other weird behaviour.

And most of the time I have uBlock enabled. I'm not entirely sure if messing with the tracking system actually weighs up against having to browse without uBlock.

Anecdote: I've hopped on a pot committed, 5+ device, aggressivly tuned AdNauseum bandwagon several times now, about one to two month spans spread over the past several years. I usually forget/ignore the increased background traffic for a short time then realize during a moment of inconvienient network congestion and flip back to ad-block, pie-hole, Blockada for mobile vpn etc... I have repeatedly observed a very steep increase in spam phone calls for myself (I take great effort to minimize the footprint of my personal emails across random db's) and email/social media spam for both other household members and office collegues, starting shortly after these heavy AdNauseum binges begin. Lot's of uncommon or specialized, high margin, high intent customer markets and service spam floods in. Never understood why they can stay so persistant. They often seem completely unfased, as if Google's prompt and voluntary fraud detection, disclosure and refund issuance can go entirely unnoticed. /s

It gets you banned rather quickly as a bot from most ad networks. Win-win.

But I suppose getting banned doesn't mean they stop serving you ads, right? It's more like a shadow-ban in that sense. There's still a win in that they'll have to invalidate a whole trail of tracking data about you.

Doesn't clicking on ads reward google, instead of punishing them?

The budget from advertisers is already credited to Google - if such tactic becomes popular, advertisers would get lower returns (bounces would be way higher than now), and move their budgets elsewhere, harming Google's business.

Here in the real world where that’s not gonna happen, they do benefit though. Adblockers getting popular makes sense, but some sort of ‘screw with google’ plugin (which already exists) is too niche.

> move their budgets elsewhere

This assumes Google isn't effectively a monopoly. Is that assumption valid?

Google doesn't bill the campaign upfront. It bills every time a threshold is crossed - for example, whenever you spend $500.

This is fascinating. It seems like it would be pretty easy to write a chrome app that runs a window in the background that interacts with every. single. advertisement.

Unfortunately the people to pay the toll would be the businesses running CPC campaigns, not google.

You'd have to run it at such massive scale that google wouldn't be able to collect because advertisers could show that something was wrong with google's model.

Um. Google would make money if you did that. At least short term. I guess if enough people joined in then advertisers would move to FB and google would lose money.

I don't care, I ruined their analytics and more importantly my online profile. The cross platform tracking exists, I'm going to fuck it over regarding my identity. Plus at an incredibly small scale I make it less valuable for advertisers.

Or when you're in a hurry, just click the least relevant ones.

I'm sure that by now the ad networks must have figured out that I compulsively lie to them and take that into consideration. Youtube just can't believe that I've mysteriously never heard of a single product they ask about in their surveys... "Wow, this guy has never heard of Starbucks either?!"

Lying to CAPTCHA is getting tougher these days - it takes me a few minutes now before they let me through even though I've identified a plain piece of road as a sign. It's a pain to sit through until they let me go, but I'M NOT YOUR FREE TRAINING DATA!

That is part of why I switched away from Google & containerized Youtube in Firefox, its really easy to end up in CAPTCHA hell it seems. Qwant and DuckDuckGo are sufficient, and actually better when searching specific item names or part #, its pretty impressive how shit Google's results have become as of late for this use case IMO.

The only reason nowadays to use Google search is verbatim error messages for exotic software products.

There it still seems to outsmart DuckDuckGo. Else than that I haver zero reason to look back. As a matter of fact. That little box, containing basics for questions like "shell date operations" is usually sufficient and if not you have a link to (usually) stackoverflow. I really like the concept.

On a side note why does Google offer a captcha service to the public, then for their services use an incredibly shitty one. It takes me 4-5 tries to decrypt the random squiggles on their sites. I don't mind decoding a bit of text or an address, but lately even their public captcha has gone rapidly down hill.

I was recently thinking, I'm not entirely sure if they would still use those photo-CAPTCHA's for ML training data any more. The classification "puzzle" that is offered seems like something deep learning is already capable of today? It seems like such "toy data", considering the images and the task given.

I could be completely wrong though. Is there anyone up to date on modern ML capabilities to comment on whether this data is useful and what for? I used to think it made sense, especially with ReCAPTCHA (digitizing books) but it just doesn't seem that valuable any more?

Getting captcha correct on google is actually difficult. For some reason they use a different one than they provide for third parties.

As for survey/reviews I routinely one star apps that nag me to leave a review. Some apps have two options "review now" or "remind me later" . Those apps get reviewed, "app is great, but won't stop fucking asking me for a review even though I already have."

I’ve been doing the same thing. Originally blindly, now I can actually see my ad interests buried in the settings under account data and all the way at the bottom of the list... but it’s there. And oh how it’s funny to see what changes the list. What’s terrifying though, is the things on the list that I have not engaged in online that only could have been added as result of verbal conversations with people who have not set up even a modicum of privacy on their devices. Specifically flag words I use in conversations for just such a purpose. As a result, I’m collecting evidence for a massive privacy lawsuit that undoubtly will occur sometime in the future which I’m eager to take part and assist in.

That aside and in the interim, a small thing we can all do if you’re concerned about privacy is to inform people when discussing such matters where to go on their devices to learn about what is known about them.

No other conversation has scared indivuals I’ve met more than showing them their ad interests.

Also don't feed the machine. (Or just with the basics)

I just post irrelevant stuff to social media. Keep likes under control. Ad-block/tracking blocker and I'm wary of what I search in search boxes (Google or others. Sometimes DDG doesn't give a good answer so I go back to Google).

Do you use your smartphone? Or dumbphone? Do you use credit cards (including debit cards and every other way of electronic payments)? Do you use browser? Even loaded with anti-spying plugins?

If any of the answers is yes then you are being watched and profiled. And of course those companies you actively avoid would simply buy raw data or "analytics" from the companies you still use.

There is a big difference in letting these companies control your mental well being, as in the letter, and letting them know intimate details about you. The first is well within your control:. don't use Facebook/Instagram/etc., then their algorithms will not affect your mood, because you won't interact with them at all.

Of course I know that it isn't monetized and I _believe_ it isn't tracked, but you do know that HN is a form of social media, right?

My point being that it's harder to escape than it looks.

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