Inspired by the discussion in ‘they already have your data’ I was reminded that AdNauseam exists. I rarely see it mentioned in privacy circles but the idea seems attractive to me, I’ve used it before and since it’s based on uBlock Origin it was just as effective in adblocking and the “poisoning” itself unobtrusive. How do you guys feel about it? Are there reasons it should be avoided?
What happens if one of the ads is a malicious link?
Nothing. Because it discards any data returned from the click.
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#how-does-adnauseam-click-ads
Sensible. Thanks.
From the FAQ: AdNauseam simulates clicks on Ads by issuing an AJAX request to the adserver in a background process. This request is made without opening any additional windows or pages on your computer. The text-only request is safely discarded by AdNauseam before it has a chance to execute in the browser (no DOM is constructed and no code is ever allowed to run). Further, all cookies from AdNauseam’s visits are automatically blocked before they reach the browser’s local storage.
Do advertisers maybe require a bit of JS to be run to validate a click? I can’t imagine they’re happy to lose money to completely invalid clicks…
The ad serving companies (Google) don’t care about what happens after the click (yet). As far as I’m aware no “handshake” process exists that would allow an advertiser to communicate with the as server and validate a click (such a process could be abused).
Most likely the advertiser would be using some form of client side analytics, so the click wouldn’t show up in their statistics, meaning the advertiser would see a huge discrepancy between the clicks they saw in the campaign and the clicks the ad server reports.