Just curious- if ads are for something illegal, couldn't this expose me to liability for theoretically "clicking" it from my IP/device? And if ads are for something unsavory ( like a "chat with local cougars" site or something similar), wouldn't they start to deliver me more such ads, thinking, wow this IP is the only one clicking every sex chat ad, send them more!
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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How many websites do you browse with links to truly illegal content?
If you live in a country with truly abysmal human rights, definitely don't bother with this plugin, but in most cases you should be fine on the illegal side.
Even if somehow the website you're browsing has some super sketchy ad to buyillegaldrugshere.com or whatever, to get in trouble with the law in most civilized places you'd have to actually buy the illegal drugs, not just ping the illegal drugs IP. Especially since you can pretty easily prove to a judge that your system fetches ad links automatically and without further engagement.
Not saying it can't happen, just that it's really unlikely you would be served an ad for something so illegal just clicking on it is a liability. The literally only case I can think of coming close is CSAM, but even then, if you're regularly browsing websites that advertise CSAM, maybe find other websites to occupy your time? And I can just about guarantee any website serving CSAM ads is already doing illegal shit, so you should probably be more worried about that than an ad-click...
I'm not sure how many ads on different sites are sketchy. I don't feel like finding out, that's why I block it. There have been plenty of reasons that all sorts of illegal stuff gets inserted on well-meaning sites, so it seems like it's inviting all sorts of trouble to automatically click stuff without consideration.
I've used this for a while. Also, I love filling out corpo surveys because I feed them bad data. It's the little acts of chaos.
Another great extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fake-data-haterapps/
If they want real information, they can pay me, and even then, well... :) Don't work for free.
I've been recommending this for awhile, it's nice to see someone else take up the mantle.
Yes, it clicks ads in addition to blocking them. Google removed it from its addon repository even though it wasn't breaking any rules. They just removed it and kept it removed because there wasn't sufficient backlash, the scumbags.
It's the main reason why I use Firefox these days. it's clear that the cabal will not allow anything that legitimately threatens their power structure, and make advertising less-effective for the same price is a gut punch they need.
Automated ad clicks probably are breaking the rules, TBF.
Don't care. At this point I will take being actively malicious toward them.
Monopoly money
That comment is correct on so many levels...
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.
It does if it reports the URL to click home somewhere and users can opt in to pull the list to auto click.
It would DDoS the ad servers. Muwhahahaa
Yes. That’s just what I want. An extension sending all ads served to me to a central location, so my fingerprint can be very easily indexed and stored on a definitely never hacked, leaked, or sold database.
And it would totally never get abused or hit a false positive.
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.
Make sure you're behind a 54mghz ram modem firewall
maybe we can setup a botnet to poison advertiser data.
click all the ads, all over the planet!
Why are you people so concerned about "the data?" Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
This is an effective tool to charge advertisers money without having their ads shoved in our faces. It directly undermines the integrity of the digital advertising ecosystem, and you people are obsessed with "privacy" because your priorities have been decided for you by your oppressors.
what oppressors want me to worry about privacy? what planet are they in?
those people are literally using it to sell us fascism...
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Ad Networks use browser fingerprinting to detect duplicate clicks, which is tied to your hardware, system locale, installed fonts etc.
Sounds like a solvable problem
Chameleon add-on for Firefox, randomly rotates your browser, OS, screen size, timezone, device type, language, and other customizable parameters every x minutes.
I've set it to do so every 5 minutes, and to omit desktop & tablet as device types (else some websites display the respective page) and timezones (messed up 2FA).
I also disabled blackberry and windows phone from the manufacturer ID, that would have the opposite effect from obscuring me.
For the rest of it, it's working great.
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This would still make a connection to the ad servers that can then track me though.
I guess with a hardened browser and a VPN it would be alright.
At this point I think it's better to poison the well.
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.
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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.
I always like this on the premise of charging advertisers money while giving them no audience in return.
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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.
Then that achieves the same goal. If they're ignoring clicks from you, and you're blocking their trackers, then they probably don't have a good profile on you, because whatever they do have is either old, poisoned, or both.
That, I guess, it’s the whole point. Stopping being tracked 🙂
This feels like reverse psychology on a little kid.
"That's it, I'm not tracking you anymore! >:("
"Oooh nooo, what have I done! Oh how much I would wish to be tracked :("
"No, you won't convince me to change my mind >:("
"Oh well, guess I'll have to live without being tracked, what a shame that is."
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