I don’t care if I get wrongly labeled/categorized due to this. It’s not like my profile was an accurate representation of who I am before I turned on ad nauseam. If someone gets dragged into a court room for clicking ads, that would be funny, and I doubt they would have a hard time finding support from orgs like the EFF, gofundme, etc.
One long term benefit of this is that if a lot of people use it, advertisers will start seeing diminishing returns on their investment in internet ads. This will lead to reduced spending and less ads overall.
adnauseam does not do this. It only adds to your personal information. It doesn't hide anything.
> I don’t care if I get wrongly labeled/categorized due to this.
Then you must not care when you suffer the consequences of having been wrongly labeled/categorized. Nobody can make you care about yourself, your money, your safety, or your time if you refuse to.
> It’s not like my profile was an accurate representation of who I am before I turned on ad nauseam.
Again, nobody cares about how accurate it is or not. It's about quantity, not quality. Accurate or not, that data will increasingly impact your life in very real ways. The more data they have, the worse it will be for you.
> One long term benefit of this is that if a lot of people use it, advertisers will start seeing diminishing returns on their investment in internet ads.
this isn't actually true, because advertisers don't care. That's why the world is still and increasingly filled with ads that aren't laser focused on you as an individual. We have more and more ads on network TV, on billboards, on radio etc. None of them were stopped because they sometimes showed an ad to someone who doesn't care about it. Seriously, they don't care. You clicked, that's good enough for them. Sales aren't even always the goal. Being seen (or the appearance of being seen) is often all they need.
You're honestly only hurting yourself.
Right: regardless of what the ad is, just by auto-clicking on it you provide a signal that when aggregated together can roughly piece together your browsing history. As a toy scenario, maybe you only visit tech blogs, and tech blogs usually have tech related advertisements. The fact that you have auto-clicked on ads that were on tech sites, and not say fashion sites, is itself a strong signal that can be used to infer browsing history.
Also I think advertisers are already used to dealing with click fraud and so track metrics that won't meaningfully be impacted by this strategy.
> adnauseam does not do this. It only adds to your personal information. It doesn't hide anything.
It does hide it. It hides it between a bunch of garbage data. That’s the point.
If the CIA wants to assassinate me, a browser extension isn’t going to help. But if I start seeing ads for adult diapers while I’m browsing the internet, I’m going to laugh and feel good about knowing they wasted a few cents.
> Accurate or not, that data will increasingly impact your life in very real ways. The more data they have, the worse it will be for you.
Sorry, but that’s ridiculous. It sounds like FUD a spam blog operator would say lol.
> this isn't actually true, because advertisers don't care. That's why the world is still and increasingly filled with ads that aren't laser focused on you as an individual. We have more and more ads on network TV, on billboards, on radio etc. None of them were stopped because they sometimes showed an ad to someone who doesn't care about it. Seriously, they don't care. You clicked, that's good enough for them. Sales aren't even always the goal. Being seen (or the appearance of being seen) is often all they need.
When something isn’t working, you stop wasting money on it. Ads aren’t going to completely disappear, but if collecting personal data on individuals stops being effective, then marketers will need to turn to other means of targeting. It won’t happen tomorrow, but I did say “long term”