<story><title>AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse</title><url>https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WhitneyLand</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m out on this.&lt;p&gt;1. They say it&amp;#x27;s legally not click fraud. To me it sounds like regular fraud: &amp;quot;deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right&amp;quot;.  I&amp;#x27;m not concerned with breaking the law I just don&amp;#x27;t want to act in the spirit of it.&lt;p&gt;2. This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget.  They say the market will adjust, but until it does small startups take a hit.  People we know.&lt;p&gt;3. I dislike activism without clear objectives.  I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_m7bj</author><text>&amp;gt;3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.&lt;p&gt;The goal highly specific. It is to make Internet advertising artificially expensive, and it is to make harvested data about users inaccurate.&lt;p&gt;There are no &amp;quot;good guys&amp;quot; on the other side. People shouldn&amp;#x27;t track me, that one&amp;#x27;s obvious, but they also shouldn&amp;#x27;t advertise at me, ever.&lt;p&gt;Human attention is extremely valuable, by far the most expensive commodity on the planet. If advertising companies want my attention so damn bad, they can pay me ~$65000 a year for it, same as my employer does. Otherwise, they can piss off.</text></comment>
<story><title>AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse</title><url>https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WhitneyLand</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m out on this.&lt;p&gt;1. They say it&amp;#x27;s legally not click fraud. To me it sounds like regular fraud: &amp;quot;deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right&amp;quot;.  I&amp;#x27;m not concerned with breaking the law I just don&amp;#x27;t want to act in the spirit of it.&lt;p&gt;2. This could hurt small startups that are very carefully managing an ad budget.  They say the market will adjust, but until it does small startups take a hit.  People we know.&lt;p&gt;3. I dislike activism without clear objectives.  I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>freshhawk</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t understand #1, it&amp;#x27;s obviously not click fraud but how is it regular fraud? They want to track my clicks in order to gather profiling information about my personality in order to better influence&amp;#x2F;manipulate me. So now I use some technology to help me fuzz this information, I could do the same by clicking myself and browsing websites I dislike myself. Which would be boring and time consuming, hence the automation.&lt;p&gt;Where in the spirit of the law is the ability to surveil consumers reading choices in order to influence their spending enshrined? It just emerged when people realized that the information was valuable.&lt;p&gt;There were similar projects involving sharing customer loyalty card numbers for grocery stores, and I never saw the argument that sharing your card number with others was fraud.&lt;p&gt;I think you are seeing that if consumers protect themselves against this type of surveillance then the lazy (and cheap to measure) metric of clicks becomes a less effective metric for measuring advertising placement value. It exposes the fact that those measuring this were barely providing value to advertisers and publishers in the first place. That doesn&amp;#x27;t make it fraud, that just inconveniences a large industry that pays a lot of bills. Those are very different things, both ethically and legally.&lt;p&gt;As to 3, this has clear objectives, they are apparently just much farther reaching than you are comfortable with or agree with. I get it, I worked in the online advertising ad network business for many years, however I never fooled myself that this business was anything other than an unethical anti-consumer endeavour. That&amp;#x27;s why I don&amp;#x27;t do it anymore.</text></comment>