Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

emma wrote

It's a proof-of-concept in disrupting the advertising industry that serves no practical purpose, and is by design going to be taxing on your CPU, network, and battery. I wouldn't install it.

7

nulloperation wrote (edited )

When you see talks by Helen Nissenbaum, in the Q&A people are less concerned whether AdNauseum works but whether it's ethical.

At 46:55, audience member: "It seems to me that there's this implicit bargain that we have: that Google gives us lots of cool free stuff, like Search and Gmail, and in exchange we give them an ability to have a revenue stream. And so, if we're not willing to keep our side of the bargain, why do we get the free stuff?"

Helen: "I don't remember making a bargain."

It was also banned by Pale Moon for this reason:

Because this extension causes direct and indirect economic damage to website owners, it is classified as malware, and as such blocked.

I think it's awesome.

4

Zerush wrote

I think that the problem are not the ads, but it's a problem with personalized ads by user surveillance. That is selling your privacy, only to see specific ads which Google think that it's interesting for you (and selling this data to others to make more money) This is the violation of basic user rights and should not be a means of making money from a company. There are many other options to earn money online than trafficking in private data and even putting its security at risk.

3

nulloperation wrote

I think that the problem are not the ads, but it's a problem with personalized ads by user surveillance.

Adnauseum has settings for that:

  • Don't hide non-tracking Ads in the Hide ads section
  • Don't click non-tracking Ads in the Click ads section
4

Zerush wrote

Tech review comment

Adnauseam is not a privacy addon. Connecting to advertising/tracking domains doesn't "hurt" them, obfuscation does not work. It gives them information on you regardless of the content. Giving these domains your ip/browser fingerprint is the opposite of privacy.

Adnauseam is at best an attempt at online activism, but it in no way protects your privacy. Blocking these domains is the only method that can ensure your privacy.

In my opinion the app is snake oil, plain and simple. They keep trying to push their shitty apps on privacy subs through native advertising and i'm sure some people fall for it.

I use uBlock Origin and Trace, which is the best option

There are also other, which is ery good, but it's proprietary soft: CyDec, capable to obfuscate all your data, using random values. But I think Trace do enough in this aspect.

https://www.cydecsecurity.com

3

nulloperation wrote

Adnauseam is at best an attempt at online activism, but it in no way protects your privacy.

That is false:

And just like other adblockers, AdNauseam does block malware and non-visual trackers.

It gives you µBO-level protection out-of-the-box, where fake click functionality is then added on top. You can access the entire µBO menu from AdNauseum too.

µBO is pretty much the best and fastest adblocker out there, so I think it was a sound choice by AdNauseum authors to base their add-on on that so that it doesn't conflict with it (in contrast to, say, Privacy Badger). According to µBO dev:

Seriously: Do NOT use similar-purposed blocker(s) along with uBlock Origin: this will cripple uBO's ability to defuse anti-blocker mechanisms and its ability to minimize likelihood of site breakage. ("similar-purposed" = any other blocker making use of EasyList).

3

Zerush wrote

I use uBO filter lists among others in the inbuild ad/trackerblocker of the browser and Trace I use also Site Bleacher, which remove all the data from websites you visit, except from whitelisted, cookies, local storages, IndexedDBs, service workers, cache storages, filesystems and webSQLs All these are complementary, no redundances there.

3

nulloperation wrote

I like it.

also kinda concerned that maybe it could waste singificantly more CPU than a traditional adblocker

According to their FAQ / benchmarks, that is not the case: "AdNauseam is significantly faster (and safer) than using either of the two most popular blockers, Adblock or Adblock Plus, and nearly twice as fast as using no blocker at all." That also reflects my own experience running AdNauseum on low-end hardware. It's slighter higher in resource use (network, CPU) than µBO, of course, because it's built on top of µBO.

they could probably fairly easily sift through it just by storing the data for just general tracking (shopping history, watch history, fingerprinting) separately to advertisements and just not looking at the data for ads if you click them all.

Perhaps, however the advertisement data is valuable on its own to ad companies. It is my understanding that AdNauseum is specifically for monkey-wrenching ad-click measurements, and it's at least good enough at that for Google to ban the add-on. I'm also not 100% sure that this add-on only targets the ad companies themselves: As I understand it, advertisers pay for clicks, and therefore fake clicks could mean advertisers wasting their money.

If you want to pollute your search / browsing history too, try TrackMeNot by same authors. However, where GUI of AdNauseum is 4/5 (with their dazzling advertisement collages), the TrackMeNot GUI is perhaps 2/5. Someone should improve on that interface, because the concept is great. I made a similar add-on once and put it on addons.mozilla.org and police came and raided my house for it.

I think it's first-class anti-capitalist disinformation warfare, but I see other raddlers are a bit less enthusiastic. I think people misunderstand AdNauseum because they look mainly at your individual tracking, but that's not what it is. It's basically just µBO with added functionality for pissing out realistic phony ad click data. It's more offensive than defensive, for sure.

3

[deleted] wrote

3

nulloperation wrote

Yea. Still trying to get my old laptop back. Good being reminded of why full disk encryption is a good idea.

3

southpark wrote

Advertising networks have ways to detect unnatural clicks, I am not that sure Adnauseam can get through it, and I rather block adverts, I think it is unnecessary to click on them

3