It’s banned because it’s made by people intentionally trying to not just subvert, but inject fake data into Google’s core business model. It’s like asking “why doesn’t Apple allow Cydia in the App Store?”
AdNauseam clicks occur far more often than normal ad clicks, aren’t associated with other ad load events, timing is all similar, ads are clicked regardless of predicted relevancy. There’s dozens of obvious, and hundreds of non obvious, ways to detect if a particular user is a bot or not. Literally legions is PhDs study this attack vector and work at Google and Facebook.
They’re working on actual hard problems, like combating click fraud attempted by organized crime and actual sophisticated actors, and they’re working regardless of the existence of this extension.
This extension just isn’t effective, and any time working in the ad industry makes that overwhelmingly obvious.
Adnausium can just connect us through an anonymizing server so that we can sell our well chosen (by them) clicks to those organized crime and sophisticated actors. Heck, those bad guys would probably be willing to pay me or Adnausium a fractional CPM for the service.
Fake data that you claim can is trivial to filter out and provides Google/FB/etc with a "nice additional data point to identify and track users running it".. in which case it seems counterproductive to ban it instead of simply making sure it isn't featured/recommended.
You can easily adjust the click rate in AdNauseam's settings (assuming I only click 1 out of 50 ads then it will be completely random if Google's ads are clicked once per 1 or 1000 ad loads because they don't know how many ads were loaded by other providers inbetween), click timing is affected by so many load factors that I'd think it isn't even necessary to sleep a random period before clicking. Other techniques, such as "ad traps" are easily countered by IP changes/Cookie AutoDelete extension.
Yeah, I do think it's very difficult to build a profile of a user that automatically clear cookies when closing a tab and often change IP. I'm not saying it's impossible, but certainly difficult. And it would become even more difficult if we encouraged everybody to take steps to protect their privacy rather than dismiss efforts as useless.
This extension doesn't change my IP nor does it auto clear cookies, but are we not allowed to combine multiple tools? I use VPNs (both my own and from work), I often change location (home, office, hotels, cafes, etc.), have several phones/laptops that use different operating systems/browsers. At the office everybody use the same computer model, are you going to blacklist 50+ peoples potential ad clicks from that IP because I use AdNauseam?
I don't think the data scientists at Facebook/Google/others are bad at their job because of their likely inability to invalidate all AdNauseam clicks, nor do I think the addon, with its current userbase, has the slightest impact on their money printing machine.
> Yeah, I do think it's very difficult to build a profile of a user that automatically clear cookies when closing a tab and often change IP
Your browser leaks a lot more information than just cookies and IP.... canvas fingerprinting for example is particularly pernicious. Check this [1] for a demo of the known leaks (there are probably more that aren't in this project yet)
That's true, besides NoScript then it's difficult to deal with canvas fingerprinting.. I do follow/use most of the settings/addons recommended at https://restoreprivacy.com/firefox-privacy/
In any case then I still think the goal should be to recommend AdNauseam to as many people as possible, because it does work against most ad networks, especially when it's accompanied by extensions such as Privacy Badger that will block a lot of tracking domains.
Even the most sceptic users (with regard to AdNauseam's ability to hurt user tracking ad networks) will still benefit from using AdNauseam as an alternative to uBlock Origin, because uBlock Origin is still running under-the-hood. There's nothing to lose and a lot to gain, especially when we in the future figure out how to defeat canvas fingerprinting without disabling JavaScript.
>Literally legions is PhDs study this attack vector and work at Google and Facebook.
You know a society is in decline when their smartest and best-educated members dedicate all their efforts to advertising crap to people to buy, instead of something more constructive like medical technology, space exploration, etc.
AdNauseam clicks occur far more often than normal ad clicks, aren’t associated with other ad load events, timing is all similar, ads are clicked regardless of predicted relevancy. There’s dozens of obvious, and hundreds of non obvious, ways to detect if a particular user is a bot or not. Literally legions is PhDs study this attack vector and work at Google and Facebook.