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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Not hard; impossible. They gather data from non online services, app malware, logged out browsers, etc, etc. How do I opt those things out?

I’ve long thought we need a way to run sybil attacks against trackers, with the goal that all the numbers and statistics these things produce would be off by at least an order of magnitude (in both directions, at random).

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Run Ad Nauseum instead of plain uBlock Origin. The websites get clicks on their ads, you still don't see any ads, and you poison your ad profile. Everybody wins.

Except you since that does not fix privacy concerns. And the website since the value per click/view gets lowered. And you again since the ad-companies will try to develop methods to discern what is a real click vs what is not and that makes privacy worse. And the advertiser since they won't know what ads are effective. And the ad-companies since they now need to spend time/money on fake clicks.

Oh wait, seems like nobody wins?

Google banned the extension since apparently they couldn't figure out a good way to discern what is a real click or not. Seems to be more effective than you would think.

If the value of a click goes to zero then does it make sense to show ads?

I never said it's easy for them to do it, I said "ad-companies will try to develop methods to discern what is a real click vs what is not and that makes privacy worse".

I'd much rather make the people who do not want ads block them entirely than creating artificial garbage clicks, especially since those still send data to the major data-collectors.

I think all of the wins in your scenario are short-term only.

What is the end game in your passive movement? You just die before it gets to that point?

There is no end game where they don't implement every feature you're worried about unless it's not profitable before they go out of business.

At one point I made a simple extension that maliciously edited Google and Adobe Analytics tracking requests, alongside setting the DNT header. Junk data (especially page names slightly off, etc) is infuriating for analytics users. If enough people had a “respect my DNT header or deal with it” extension I think DNT would have succeeded.

Working at the time in the web analytics field I never released it.

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