4 ms·
I don't understand this, they say it prevents tracking but, actually, this helps ad companies track you since they will now know you will click their ads whenev
by mpeg 12y ago
I don't understand this, they say it prevents tracking but, actually, this helps ad companies track you since they will now know you will click their ads whenever you are visiting a certain site.
With ad blockers that prevent the HTTP request, those third party sites aren't able to track you. The publisher can always track you but that won't be shared with their advertisers or networks.
Disclaimer: I work in the adtech industry.
- hobs 12y agoYou have my upvotes, while you may think "well now they know nothing because they think I like everything!" instead it will be "I just told every ad network that I visit this website, another notch in the information about me belt." You cant get around that fact, and the information is not some firehose they cant take or something ( also this kind of behavior is eminently detectable by the ad network, nobody clicks ALL of the ads).
- jackmaney 12y agoThank you, I was about to post more or less the exact same thing. I used to work in the adtech industry.
- adjwilli 12y agoI'm not endorsing AdNauseam, but the idea is that the information the ad companies track will be useless since the target person will appear to have clicked on every ad regardless of true interest in the product. For instance it will make it appear that a single, heterosexual male is interested beauty products or diapers.
- cbr 12y ago"this user clicks on absolutely everything we put in front of them" seems really easy to filter out...
- zmmmmm 12y agoIt would almost certainly be filtered out as an outlier in any sensible algorithm. With all the bots that routinely scan web pages for all kinds of reasons I am sure that filtering out the "clicked on every ad" behavior is probably particularly well handled at this point.
- adjwilli 12y agoYeah, you're probably right. AdNauseam would do better to click on only a percent randomly.
- mpeg 12y agoYes and that will screw up the advertiser's stats, but in terms of tracking you actually give more third parties access to your data. All they need to track you is either access to your device (by serving you code, or saving data in it, like cookies), or ip address + http headers and timestamp (which they would definitely get if the HTTP request goes through by clicking on the ad).
- pb2au 12y agoIn addition, the overzealous, erratic clicking originating from an obscure extension could make it pretty easy to detect these users. The only result would be filtering out their traffic from counting towards any PPC ads and more accurate tracking of the individual users. There isn't an upside to running this extension.
- tomp 12y agoDoesn't the ad network get that information already when you load the ad?
- psykovsky 12y agoThey don't get any information if you use the hosts file to send all the requests for their (sub)domains straight to localhost or even /dev/null
- mpeg 12y agoIn addition to psykovsky's comment, the ad network is not the only player in this space (or the one you should be more concerned about) When you see and click on an ad, you might be also getting tracked by DSP / retargeter / affiliate / analytics companies.
- josho 12y agoTheir hypothesis is that bad data (I click everything) is worse for the ad networks than no data (ad blocker). I suspect the hypothesis is wrong for two reasons. Those clicks make the network money, and a small percent of bad data across their network is noise.