I don't understand #1, it's obviously not click fraud but how is it regular fraud? They want to track my clicks in order to gather profiling information about m

I don't understand #1, it's obviously not click fraud but how is it regular fraud? They want to track my clicks in order to gather profiling information about my personality in order to better influence/manipulate me. So now I use some technology to help me fuzz this information, I could do the same by clicking myself and browsing websites I dislike myself. Which would be boring and time consuming, hence the automation. Where in the spirit of the law is the ability to surveil consumers reading choices in order to influence their spending enshrined? It just emerged when people realized that the information was valuable. There were similar projects involving sharing customer loyalty card numbers for grocery stores, and I never saw the argument that sharing your card number with others was fraud. I think you are seeing that if consumers protect themselves against this type of surveillance then the lazy (and cheap to measure) metric of clicks becomes a less effective metric for measuring advertising placement value. It exposes the fact that those measuring this were barely providing value to advertisers and publishers in the first place. That doesn't make it fraud, that just inconveniences a large industry that pays a lot of bills. Those are very different things, both ethically and legally. As to 3, this has clear objectives, they are apparently just much farther reaching than you are comfortable with or agree with. I get it, I worked in the online advertising ad network business for many years, however I never fooled myself that this business was anything other than an unethical anti-consumer endeavour. That's why I don't do it anymore.