I try to post mostly positive things, which can be hard these days, but here's a good one:
https://adnauseam.io/
It is a browser extension that silently clicks on all those ads, polluting the advertisers' data streams.
If used by enough people, it would mean that, to the advertiser, it'll look like they got lots of clicks buy not lots of sales.
This means the value of clicks will go down, which means less profit for people who serve up ads.
If you promote this extension, you will be hurting American companies who are just trying to make ab buck. Companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, X, and others. You wouldn't want to make life more difficult for them... would you? 😈🤣
Installed on my "work" browser.
I can feel my Social Credit Score rising by the minute! (Still negative, I'm sure!)
I know it has instructions to install this on Chrome but frankly I don't have time to sort that out yet.
Yeah, Google banned them from the app store, seemingly with the express intent to make it more difficult and time consuming to use this app.
It must be incredibly effective.
The academic paper looks like a fun read too
"We conclude with thoughts on the broader
issues facing privacy tools ... informed by our experience with AdNauseam’s ban from Google’s Chrome store"
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf
Step by step tutorial on how to download viruses.
Do you believe that all apps that do not come from a centralized, corporate controlled app store are viruses?
Not at all. It is the "auto-click on everything that pops up" that is suspicious.
Yeah, that was the first thing they mentioned in their requirements is dealing with malvertising.
I didn't get to the section that covers how they met that goal yet, but if you are interested I can let you know what their approach is so you can see if it sounds sufficient.
I found the answer in III(a) of their academic paper. It makes an AJAX request and does not load the response into the DOM.
The paper talks about the problem of this being distinguishable from a real click (which would parse the response, render HTML & CSS, execute JS, parse CSS, possibly play audio and video files, etc.).
The additional risk in their current implementation seems minimal. Future versions may depend more on sandboxing technologies for protection.
Don't they actually hurt the people who buy ads while giving more money to Google?
Advertisers will quickly move elsewhere if they're not getting the sales from online advertising. In order to combat this, the advertising platform (e.g. Google) will spend more time and money trying to sort out when they should or shouldn't charge their advertisers for a click.
It basicially increases the costs for both the advertisers and the advertising platform.
You are crazy. I have a small business and there is literally no other way to advertise my services except for Google Ads. And if I left they wouldn't even notice.
Would you keep paying for Google Ads if they didn't deliver any sales? If so, would you keep paying them as much or more than you are now?
I don't think it's such a crazy idea that people would find (or create) alternative if the vaule was not there.
It doesn't really matter, as it's unlikely that any ad blocker is going to become so widespread that it takes down Google's entire business model, especially when they control the majoritiy of the people's web browsers...
I've seen google ads work like magic in a couple of businesses I've worlked for. The return on the investment was totally worth it. Having a google ads budget and team working on it is a no brainer. If we kill google ads and don't provide something extremely effective right away many businesses would suffer.
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