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Comment by archerx | Hacker News Reader

This whole cookie banner situation is a disaster. Companies know that you will not accept their cookies and have decided to use the "legitimate interest" loop hole. So if you select reject all cookie, the legitimate interest ones are not rejected unless you go an uncheck them manually.

https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1cn306c/...

Here is an example of what I am talking about, I think some companies are catching on and hiding it better but those soulless marketers will find anyway to track you.

What can you do about it? Poison their data.

https://adnauseam.io/

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This is not a loop hole. Claiming that something is legitimate interest while it isn't is just good old breaking the law.

Just because computer is able to do something, doesn't make it legal.

Also: just because me or a lawyer says it's legal or illegal, doesn't automatically make it. This sort of thing needs to go to court.

I regret to inform you that solutions like Ad Naseum are snake oil.

Bot-clicks and LLM networks are already pretty pervasive clickers of ads. Most ad networks already have ways of filtering out noisy clicks. And anyone dumping real money into ads will be smart enough to tie their ROI to conversion events, not clicks.

Well the specific profile that they build on me will be a mess. I don’t see many ads and when I receive one it is not very targeted at all as if they don’t know what I actually like and what my real interests are…

Perhaps, but bot clicks and LLM networks are not domestic users with off-the-shelf browsers doing other legitimate activities in a website.

Also: the ad networks don't care about your ROI, they'll still charge if they don't catch the fraud.

Ad networks can't charge you if you stop buying ads because you're not getting a good ROI.

Yeah everyone who isn’t purposefully burning money has people whose sole job is just to spend less money on stuff that doesn’t work and more money on stuff that does. Pretty much every platform (DSP) has some fancy deep learning that bids up or down based on the quality of the individual bid (taking into account the user, host, banner size, likeliehood of fraud, etch

> https://adnauseam.io/

I'm not sure this is a good thing. Wouldn't this make advertisers think their ads are doing better than they are? Which would then encourage them to advertise even more?

No, it will ad noise to their data and make their profile of me a mess and very inaccurate. If they make models from this data it will be fundamentally flawed (Garbage in = Garbage out)

As the other poster told you, they filter it out.

It’s still gonna cost them that click, if every site I go to will cost advertisers money I’m good.

Also if it doesn’t work why did Google go out of their way to make it hard to install? If it was truly harmless to advertisers Google would not have done anything.

Ads are doing worse, not better. The purpose of an ad isn't to be clicked but to increase revenue. In the end of the year data will show clicks have gone up but other more important metrics haven't.

Who is guilty for tracking users? The site relying an income from ads with user-tracking, or the company buying the ads based on tracking instead of some less invasive method of distribution?

The "definitely not heavily lobbied" loophole that lets EU claim good press for most of the law while leaving the backdoor wide open

It's not a loophole. Strict necessity is well defined, and per the opinion quoted in the fine article:

> While [cookie-based analytics] are often considered as a ‘strictly necessary’ tool for website operators, they are not strictly necessary to provide a functionality explicitly requested by the user […]. As a consequence, these cookies do not fall under the [exemption].

Companies can still do it illegally of course, and many do, but there is no law that can stop people from doing illegal things.

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