The big networks filter such traffic, the small networks benefit from it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/legal/comments/1pq6kgp/is_it_legal_...
You may also get accidentally get your own website blacklisted or moved to a lower RPM tier, or provoke shadow-ban websites that you like to visit, or... generate more ad revenue for them.
[0] https://www.theawl.com/2015/06/a-complete-taxonomy-of-intern...
{
headline: "We Value Your Privacy",
body: "That's why we collect it so carefully. Accept the cookies.",
style: "darkpattern",
},
How's this any different than going around and filling out fake credit applications to stop "uninvited data collection" by banks/credit bureaus or whatever?
>The intent is convenience and privacy, not fraud.
You're still harming the business, so my guess would be something like tortious interference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPFrTBppRfw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accrington_Stanley_F.C. -- for US readers, the UK has a "football pyramid" in which there's a hierarchy, the elite sport teams you've probably heard of compete in a national league, but every year the worst of those teams can be replaced by the best of those from the league below, and this repeats in layers like a pyramid, until eventually you're talking about friends or co-workers, who play other similar teams in their local area maybe in some public park for the love of the game. Accrington Stanley is in the middle of that pyramid, it's hiring professional players and has a dedicated ground to play football, but we're not talking superstar lifestyles or billion dollar stadiums.
> One public Firebase file. One day. $98,000. How it happened and how it could happen to you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/1kg9icb/one_pu...
"It's just a script that makes a loop, I didn't charge anybody anything, I didn't pay anybody anything. I agreed to no terms and conditions".
It's a very harmful practice to intentionally try to hurt companies, when you can just block what you don't like.
Usually when it's brought up people say it doesn't work or try to spread fear that it is illegal. Google banning them but taking no action otherwise indicates to me and the thousands who use it that it is in fact effective and Google has no other recourse other than their control over the most popular browser.
They paid you to put a little ad banner at the bottom of your screen, and paid you like 5 cents an hour that you had the banner up and you were browsing the web.
It tried to watch your browsing to make sure you were actually there, but of course we wrote some script to programmatically visit random web sites. Then they added mouse tracking, so we added mouse movement to our scripts.
The most insidious part was that it was also an MLM… you would also get paid for usage by people you referred, too, and then even by people those people referred, with diminishing returns from each level. So like 1 cent an hour for my referrals and .5 cents an hour for their referral referrals.
We were broke high school kids, so we put so much time and effort into recruiting people and getting them set up with the auto scripts. By the end we were making in the low 3 figure a month. We knew people who were making even more.
Of course, it soon went out of business because of the dotcom bust as well as the ridiculous business model and rampant user fraud, but it was fun while it lasted.
And it is fine to use the terms click fraud when you conduct artificial clicks with the intent:
Examples:
https://integralads.com/insider/what-is-click-fraud/#:~:text...
One of the top leading company of traffic filtering is literally using these words to describe that.
Other users even 10 years ago:
+ sources from court:
> The opinion states: “click fraud” can occur when “either a (natural) person, automated script, or computer program, sometimes referred to as a `bot,’ simulates the click activity of a legitimate user by clicking on the Program Data displayed, but without having an actual interest in its subject matter or content.”
Etc
You might technically be right. But I'd recommend contacting EFF, if, somehow, installing AdNauseam brings you into legal trouble.
On the realm of search engines and ad networks I love to remind people that Google took out "don't be evil" from their motto and pressured anyone within US jurisdiction to remove Page and Brin's appendix #8 (at the least it's removed from their original school of Stanford).
8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives https://www.site.uottawa.ca/~stan/csi5389/readings/google.pd...
stanford.edu, and the appendix is there. In fact on the link you gave the appendix is cut short - looks like an OCR/copying issue but then at a glance it doesn't seem to happen elsewhere which is a little suspicious. I'm not sure what you're talking about.
[0] http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/1/1998-8.pdf
[1] https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatom...
[1] https://research.google/pubs/the-anatomy-of-a-large-scale-hy...