Any jurisdiction where this is supposedly illegal, it hasn't been court tested seriously.*
Per your link: "What you're describing is essentially the extension AdNauseam. So far they have not had any legal troubles, but they technically could." That stance or an assertion it's not illegal is consistent throughout the thread, provided you aren't clicking your own ads.
"The industry" thinks you shouldn't be allowed to fast forward your own VCR through an ad either. They can take a flying .. lesson.
* Disclaimer: I don't know if that's true, but it sounds true.
No, the illegal-ness doesn't come from the clicking, it comes from the fact you're clicking with the intention of defrauding someone. That's also why filling out a credit card application isn't illegal, but filling out the same credit card application with phony details is.
> I hate advertisers so I'm gonna get back at them by making them pay more.
If it's something that's been held up in court already then of course I have to accept it, but I can't say the reason seems immediately intuitive.
Charges of fraud doesn't require a contract to be in place. That's the whole point of criminal law, it's so that you don't need to add a "don't screw me over" clause to every interaction you make.
You’re not defrauding anyone if you have your extension click all ads in the background and make a personalized list for you that you can choose to review.
The intent is convenience and privacy, not fraud.
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.
To be fair, you put it in your own face, by visiting the site...
If you send me an unsolicited mailer with a microchip that tracks my eyes and face as I read it, you’ve already pushed too far. To then claim my using a robot to read it for me is fraud ignores the invasion of privacy you’ve already instituted without my express consent (digital ads are this).
It’s not fraud if it’s self-defense from corporate overreach.
At best that gets you off the hook of fraud charges, but not tort claims, which are civil, and don't require intent.
>It’s not fraud if it’s self-defense from corporate overreach.
There's no concept of "self-defense" when it comes to fraud, or torts.
The goal of Adnauseam was to hurt Google, and other big adnetworks, from what I understand.
By blocking:
-> Advertiser is not harmed
-> For the adnetwork: No ad revenue
-> Publisher is not harmed
-> Pages load faster
==
With fake clicks:
-> Advertiser is harmed
-> Publisher is harmed
-> Adnetwork is okayish with the situation (to a certain point)
--> Google is accidentally earning more revenue (at least temporarily, until you get shadow-banned), your computer / page loads slows down and you enter a legally gray area.
(+ the side-note below: clicking on every ads leak your browsing history because in the URL there is a unique tracking ID that connects to the page you are viewing)
Clicking with the intention of helping doesn't help. Only clicking with genuine interest helps.
How? Publishers do need revenue and this can deprive them of this income.
You're defrauding nobody. People purchase visibility and clicks when they purchase advertising. not conversions or sales.
It's so different that it can't even be compared. There's nothing similar there.
>>The intent is convenience and privacy, not fraud.
> You're still harming the business, so my guess would be something like tortious interference.
No, you're not harming the business. You're simply not following the business idea of the "business". Anyone can have a business idea of some type. Not a single person on earth has any obligation to fulfill that business idea. But somehow some people believe the opposite.
Again, you're ignoring intent in all of this. It's not illegal to default on a loan, or even to refuse to pay it back (eg. bankruptcy), but it is illegal to take out a loan with the specific intent to not pay it back (eg. if you know you're planning on declare bankruptcy right afterwards).
What about extensions that skip embedded ads in a YouTube video? Is that tortuous interference with the view counter that creators use to market their reach?
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...
1: Ad companies are not going to go after individual users, rather they would target the maker of any such plugin
2: If they did go after an individual user, they would have to prove damages, and an individual is unlikely to do more than a few bucks of wasted ad spend for a company, not even a rounding error, making the legal cost and political cost of targeting the person running the script enormous compared to the potential return from anything other than a grand slam nuclear judgement in their favor.
2) Yep! And as mentioned in other threads, it would give the users on their ad platform more money but degrade the quality of their ad platform.
I was just alarmed by how many people are not only okay with, but defending, the current state of ad tech. I think it's a noble effort to go against the grain and withstand any potential legal trouble to subvert it as it seems there's no recourse to be made in the courts unless an entity has the aforementioned time and money to fight it in the courts.