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Comment by mqzaidi | Hacker News Reader

I have always wanted to make an extension which would use a random cookie (from any of the users) instead of just blocking ads. This would totally mess up their targeting and reports. It would not help the ad industry at all.

Given that I have spent years working in the ad industry and writing ad servers, this is somewhat ironic.

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A similarly anti ad-business idea: an extension that randomly clicks ads in a background.

That's already been implemented. With the shift to CPC, there are people who write that kind of software and sell to sleazy publishers. On the other side, ad servers have a fraud detection module that looks for those random clicks.

Sure, but those systems aren't going to flip out when each user clicks one or two ads, because that is what the normal data looks like.

You would get the publisher black-listed by e.g. google. This would target the wrong people.

Random cookies probably wouldn't suffice. Evercookie[1] uses thirteen different storage mechanisms, making it almost impossible to delete.

[1] - https://github.com/samyk/evercookie

This is illegal and not in use by legitimate ad companies. They've learned their lessons [1]

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/ad-network-at-center-of-third-...

You assume that everybody stores the visitor data in the cookie. Nowadays only the visitor ids are stored there, identification is made also by all the info you and your browser provides and the rest of the data which actually contains the user's interests and visited sites is in distributed NoSQL/SQL replicated databases.

I work in the ad industry, specifically real time bidding and I am thinking it would be kind of pointless.

While browser/device fingerprinting has made great strides, if this was really pointless, you wouldn't see so much of hue and cry over some mozillas decisions to block third party cookies. (http://www.iab.net/mozilla).

Flashcookie and localstorage based techniques are hardly legal. Store user profiles server side, but you will still be fooled by a different visitor id in the cookie (and fingerprint for that matter), won't you?

Yup. So many work arounds. Simply the IP+UA alone contains enough entropy to uniquely detect the majority of users already, you don't need to store anything at all.

ETag cookies work quite well too and don't require any additional software or "hacking"-esque approaches.

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