Noiszy: A browser plugin that creates meaningless web data – digital “noise.”
noiszy.com
noiszy.com
Then we might just be able to send a message to advertisers and those "data anal-lysts"
Question is: Will I be held liable for randomly clicking on things? What if I use a bot instead? (Maybe that's why the author eventually abandoned this project)
Liable? For what? You're literally doing nothing damaging or illegal.
Also advertisers hate fake clicks on ads (they call it ad fraud) but they will blame the site owner so that's not really a problem.
The question was if it's illegal, not if it drives advertisers mad. The whole point is to drive them mad. :)
If you count this, some sites might think you're a bot or otherwise hint that they don't want to serve you. I've had Google make me solve captchas occasionally because I was using Ad Nauseam.
Plugins like this are a very bad idea.
1) Increase revenue for the advertising companies you don't like
2) Cost advertisers a lot of money (some of who are probably companies you like)
3) Increases revenue for publishers with a ton of ads on their page
It's not obvious to me how contributing to click fraud benefits you as the user. If anything, it benefits the ad companies by driving more revenue to them.
Just my best recollection.