this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Privacy

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[–] hitmyspot 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Adnauseum does this. I think it simulates clicks to ads and corrupts your advertising profile.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

https://adnauseam.io/

As the collected data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user tracking, targeting and surveillance become futile

I don't get it though. The "listeners" could detect this and subtract 1 click from everything in the page. I guess that would only happen once ad nauseum gets popular.

[–] hitmyspot 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Which one would they subtract?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Subtract all of them. That gives zero clicks except for the ones you manually clicked.

[–] hitmyspot 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The trackers can't tell which are manual clicks and which come from the plugin. That's the idea. It obfuscates your tracking by random clicks you don't see. It costs them data and makes tracking you worthless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Maybe I misunderstood but it seems the plugin clicks all the buttons.... every one... once.

So if the website notices that it can "unclick" everything exactly once.

Therefore only the manual clicks will survive because that button was clicked twice: once manually, and once automatically.

[–] hitmyspot 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think there is a setting to how often it clicks. From rare, 10%, to all, 100%. I understand what you’re saying about it now. I didn’t realise the option for all was there. I thought it was more random.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

OK that is better.

Reminds me of how I considered swapping phones with friends for an hour while we each browsed, confusing our otherwise homogenous personality profile being compiled somewhere by Google et al.

But phones are too personalized to bother doing that now anyhow.