It garbles advertisers’ data as a result, but you must disable uBlock Origin to run it; they can’t work simultaneously. I recently moved to it and, so far, am never looking back!
Couple of issues I’m wondering about…
First, wouldn’t clicking on everything just make you easier to track?
Second, how much bandwidth would all this use?
- not in this way
- not enough to matter
the way it works is sending an HTTP request that registers as a “click” to the advertiser (thus costing them money), but then doesn’t actually let the browser download any content and fetch the webpage, basically pi-holes the destination site and any attached tracking cookies. Combined with the fact that it does this to every ad, it would basically poison any click tracking.
edit: pedants
and before I get any more of you, this is just what I remember reading about adnauseam, do not take it as gospel, go look at AdNauseam’s FAQ.
none
Ah great
it works [by] sending an HTTP request that registers as a “click” to the advertiser
Uh, wait a minute. 🤔
Sending a request also uses bandwidth, you know.
A basic GET request, even with a long querystring, will be negligible even on a 1998 dial-up connection.
Right, but thousands of them, possibly every day? Could perhaps affect your data consumption on your phone e.g. 🤷♂️
Edit: I got it guys, thanks.
You aren’t terribly familiar with how much traffic we generate nowadays… are you? If we were still on 2G and isdn / dsl sure. You’d likely see a slight latency jump. On anything from this last decade+ ? Not a chance.
I’m not, am I. I hadn’t done any calculations regarding this. It was strictly hypothetical, as you can probably tell from the question mark and 🤷♂️. 👍
I’ll be honest - you weren’t really presenting your case in that way. Understand my confusion: you seemed pretty adamant about your concern with no backing data on it. Most people pick their hills with something to back them.
I don’t know of any data plan that limits on the upload. Caps are usually on the download side, and TFA says it does not download the server response.
Okay, fine, not enough to matter. Are you satisfied with that?
Jesus, you got defensive quick and hard. Sorry I rustled you.
https://lemmy.world/comment/16187642
🤷♂️
furthermore: lmao.
you’ve got to try a lot harder to “rustle” me, but I like your moxie for thinking you did, sport
doing the math, even the cheapest phone plans that don’t explicitly exclude data, nowadays include at least 1GB of data for free. Usually more. Almost any reachable amount of outbound requests to click on ads would barely put a dent in your data allowance.
Now the name calling. Cool, dude.
I’ll concede the data plan dent thing; I hadn’t done any math regarding that. Thanks for clarifying that to me and everyone else!
But you did say “none” so I just pointed out the fact that it’s not none. It’s some. I wasn’t wrong to point that out. No matter how much of a stickler you find me for that.
But that’s no reason to post images implicitly depicting me to be some kind of fat nerd.
You’re a rude person. Autistic or not.
I’ll concede the data plan dent thing; I hadn’t done any math regarding that. Thanks for clarifying that to me and everyone else!
I accept your concession, better luck next time.
But you did say “none” so I just pointed out the fact that it’s not none. It’s some. I wasn’t wrong to point that out. No matter how much of a stickler you find me for that.
pedantry is pedantry, if you interject with “well ACKSHUALLY” over literally a couple kilobytes of data in this, the Year Of Our Lord 2025 where common storage device sizes are in the multiple terabyte range, and 100mbps down/10 up is exceedingly common, expect to be called one. It is functionally none, because it is not 1993.
Autistic or not.
can’t even come up with your own insult for me, just gonna steal that sad attempt at bait from the other guy? how… underwhelming, must do better. 🤡
You definitely seem rustled.
“I have drawn YOU as the soyjack and ME as the chad, therefore you lose the argument”
Are you autistic?
Yeah.
Is that a fucking problem?
It is when you’re being rude for no reason.
Using autistic as a derogatory slur is rude for no reason.
what a rude thing to say, especially considering I wasn’t talking to you.
I’m gonna keep it that way, best of luck baiting someone else champ.
I mean, that image is pretty rude, too.
That HTTP request would also show up in the advertisers web logs with your origin IP address.
so use a VPN? if you’re the sort of user using AdNauseam, and is concerned about tracking, you’re probably also the sort of user who already uses a VPN.
I think we’re far past caring about a website logging an IP address.
I’m past caring about giving my IP to a website that I want to use, but what this is doing is handing out your information to every single advertiser that is published on any page you visit. In some cases this plugin would match the definition of “leaking personal data”.
You do you though. I won’t stop you.
Most people dont have static IPs. All the ads would see is web requests from random residential ips from a certain country.
I don’t know about NZ (or wherever you are), but IP addresses for residential access in the US don’t really change all that much. It’s… concerning.
What are they going to do? blacklist me and stop serving me ads?
Oh no
Yeah, I can’t find an answer whether the “click” is behind some obfuscation, or if the “click every ad” is the obfuscation step itself by attempting to poison the data. The latter may work but yes, may actually increase tracking. Wish that answer wasn’t so hard to find on their site.
Did you look at the FAQ?
https://github.com/dhowe/adnauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-does-adnauseam-click-ads
Thanks, I didn’t see this, there was a different embedded FAQ that didn’t have the specific Q & A below.
But, if anything, it seems to confirm the ad itself is just legitimately clicked from the user’s IP address and hidden from the user, and that there is code execution protection, but not that there is any privacy protection? It’s still very ambiguous.
How does AdNauseam “click Ads”?
AdNauseam ‘clicks’ Ads by issuing an HTTP request to the URL to which they lead. In current versions the is done via an XMLHttpRequest (or AJAX request) issued in a background process. This lightweight request signals a ‘click’ on the server responsible for the Ad, but does so without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. Further it allows AdNauseam to safely receive and discard the resulting response data, rather than executing it in the browser, thus preventing a range of potential security problems (ransomware, rogue Javascript or Flash code, XSS-attacks, etc.) caused by malfunctioning or malicious Ads. Although it is completely safe, AdNauseam’s clicking behaviour can be de-activated in the settings panel.
Also wouldn’t this be directing a ton of money to google? (or I guess any other ad provider)
The advertisers are paying for the opportunity either way. Clicks cost them more money than just displaying the ad. Useless clicks cost them money for nothing.
No, because it devalues their click through, as no sales will result from those clicks.
It’s kinda like printing money, there’s more of it, but the overall value hasn’t increased.
I always liked using this on the premise of privacy-through-obfuscation. If the powers that be must get information from me, then i’d prefer to give them garbage information.
And lots of it.
Exactly. You can’t completely avoid being tracked but you can ensure that your profile is just noise without any value to advertisers
Google has put a lot of effort into detecting and blocking stuff like this. They call it “click fraud”, if you want to look it up.
It’ll just mean they start ignoring clicks from you.
if enough people start doing it might be effective
Not sure how true it was, but there was a YouTuber claiming that their videos were getting entirely demonetized because too many of their viewers had Ad blockers enabled. So even though 75% of people were seeing ads on the video, Google was keeping that ad revenue, withholding it all from the creator because 25% weren’t getting ads. The claim the youtuber made is that this will probably predominantly impact creators with a more tech savvy / privacy aware audience, resulting in less of that niche content.
Anyway, this is anecdotal, but I wouldn’t put it past Google to pass the issue to the creators for the actions of their consumers, even though it’s not their fault.
google has way too much power. its threat to everything
Creators who care about privacy should not support Google’s monopoly by using YouTube as their platform of choice.
That, I guess, it’s the whole point. Stopping being tracked 🙂
Throw in a dash of track-me-not (https://www.trackmenot.io/) and maybe they’ll start ignoring your search queries too! Worst case my actual searches are so buried in the bs deciding what to market would be easier from my screen-name.
They call it “click fraud”,
No, click fraud is using botnets to click ads in your site to increase your revenue.
You know this is the good shit because when it first came out a few years back google was running a huge disinformation campaign against it. You’d search for “adnauseum” in google and the first result would be an article from some weird advertising company calling is “insecure” and “malware” without any actual argumentation behind those claims, while no other search engine returned that article (I lost the screenshots, so yall are just gonna have to take my word for it). They also delisted it from the chrome store for not discernible reason. They were afraid.
But nowadays I’m willing to bet that they figured out how to detect adnauseum’s fake clicks and filtering it out. Stuff like that needs a talented development team to keep it up to date.
Has the same limitations as uBlock Origin with Manifest v3 and won’t work in Chrome.
If you’re still using chrome at this point that’s on you.
I use Librewolf. The comment was meant as info for those who think that having uBlock as a base still holds significance in light of Manifest v3.
I meant the general “you.” “People” would have worked.
Or a Chrome derivative
The solution is simple. Chrome ditches manifest v2? Ditch Chrome.
Interesting, was wondering about this. This would also “help” the websites with more ad income right?
if thats true, brb setting up a website and a not farm
Haha I imagine they need at least unique ip addresses to count. Now I wonder if for clicks to count you need to properly click through and load the target website with the same “browser fingerprint”.
Careful: that then enters the world of ad fraud, which randos like us doing the clicking isn’t considered as.
This would just give money to the advertisers.
This transfers money from the advertiser to the advertising agency, without creating a sale for the advertiser. This devalues the services of the agency.
I still don’t want to give those fuckers money. If I just use uBlock, the ad is never seen, thus no sale is made and the slimy ad company gets money.
Some ads have used browser exploits to infect visitors in the past. So this is a very, very bad idea, if it actually is implemented in a way that is hard to filter for ad networks.
So the way I understand this to work, it’s 100% safe from the type of attack you’re describing.
You are clicking the link (asking the advertiser for the data) but then never actually fetching it.
So you can never get the malicious payload to be infected.
Im too scared to trust it works out fine in the end to use it, been raised on the idea that interacting with an ad in any way other than task managering the pop up is dangerous. Wheres the part of the code that makes it safe and a write up of how it functions, otherwise im fine just blocking ads with regular ublock.
the part that’s safe is in the browser. it’s a basic fact of how http requests work that you can just request data and then not read it.
also, “task managering the popups”? unless i’ve missed some very weird development that has literally never worked, because popup windows are part of the parent process.
Back on Windows 95 through XP, each individual window was a process that could be killed in Task Manager, and popups opened in a new window.
really? sounds like a weird span of systems considering they share so little code. i’d like to read on how they did that.
It’s wholly incorrect.
What makes you think uBlock is safe without checking relevant code sections?
Why can’t uBlock Origin and this thing work at the same time?
because it’s a modified uBlock Origin, so it’s like running two ad blocking plugins at once, which isn’t recommended. and if uBO blocks an ad first, AdNauseam won’t be able to detect it and click on it.
anyway, I remember reading a long time ago how that approach isn’t going to harm ad companies anyway, because [technical reasons that I don’t remember at all].
It’s a bit redundant to run both at the same time, considering they both practically do the same thing and one is built off of the other.
I don’t know, just sounds like I’d be contributing to the marketers metrics so they can show “it works”. it’ll only make them invest in ads more. if anyone thinks capitalists are these genius level manipulators who know how everything works I only refer to the richest person alive being the least charismatic, least knowledgable, unfuckable troglodyte who keeps making an ass of himself.
if any of these companies suffer any losses or reduced profits they’ll just fire hardworking people, not one of them will turn around and say maybe the ads aren’t working when you actively work to show them that it is working.
… until they keep having to dismiss people and go, “… huh.” This is a marathon we’re playing. You certainly don’t have to use it, but I think the philosophy makes sense, especially given how AdNauseam doesn’t click on acceptable ads that don’t track you.
they will never go “huh”. you give way too much credit to corporate management.
That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard, you’d have to be deranged to want an extension clicking random shit.
Edit: I’ve actually read it now and while not so bad, I still wouldn’t use this on a computer that has my stuff on it.
it doesn’t actually click on stuff. it “clicks” so that the advertisers’ and your digital footprint’s statistics get messed up, but you never see the results of the clicking, nothing pops up, nothing gets downloaded
Can’t tell if 4/1 gag or not! Brilliant!
This has been around for years. It’s legit.
Good start. Now make a version that clicks each ad a random number of times from randomly generated IP addresses.
That’s not how IP addresses work.
You can fake your IP. There isnt really any authentication at the IP level. Just make a packet and overwite the IP field.
Edit: I was corrected. The TCP handshake requires you to have a valid IP you can respond from. So even though you can fake your IP, you can’t use that to talk to most websites.
You need a TCP handshake prior to sending any http payload.
Oh yeah. Forgot about that.
What if we use a Visual Basic UI to hack the IP address by netmask?
Yes, but this only works if you connect your VPN via 3 block chain proxies.
IMO, this is a bit much.
It’s one thing to block ads, it’s another thing to essentially participate in an ad fraud scheme. If this simply hurt Google, I would have no issues (they are corrupt criminals, an American oligarchic institution), but you also risking harming independent sites that have done nothing wrong.
Why is advertising ok, but any response in opposition of it, is not?
This is an excessive approach that risks collateral damage to 3rd parties who are not involved.
I have no issues with blocking ads (internet is unusable without ublock origin + Pihole), but actually simulating clicks is IMO not the right approach.
I still don’t get why you think it’s not the right approach. Seems perfectly fine to me.
Because this will cause problems for independent website operators.
Blocking ads is one thing, but this risks fucking up their digital advertising accounts.
Isn’t that the point, to fuck up digital advertising accounts so the data is unreliable and can’t be used?
Remember, advertising is jist a new word they made to wash over the ick with its original name, propaganda. I’d rather not participate in any propaganda.
To each their own. I’m in your boat too, I think.
