Comment by BurnerBotje
7 months ago
I have an idea that another way of preventing being tracked is just massively spamming trash in the data layer object, pushing thousands of dollars worth of purchase events and such, pushing randomly generated user details and other such events. Perhaps by doing this your real data will be hard to filter out. A side effect is also that data becomes unreliable overall, helping less privacy aware people in the process.
Now there’s a fun idea!! I wonder how difficult it would be to spoof events.
Edit: looks like this might exist already: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/
Since installing it on firefox on this computer (18 months ago or so) Ad Nauseam has clicked ~$38,000 worth of ads, that i never saw.
Between this and "track me not" i've been fighting back against ads and connecting my "profile" with any habits since 2016 or so. I should also note i have pihole and my own DNS server upstream, so that's thiry-eight grand in ad clicks that got through blacklists.
https://www.trackmenot.io/faq
[Preface: I hate ads, I love uBlock origin, I use pihole, I'm a proponent of ad blockers]
I manage a Google Ads account with a $500,000 budget. That budget is spent on a mix of display ads, google search, and youtube ads.
If I knew that 10% of our budget was wasted on bot clicks, there's nothing I can do as an advertiser. We can't stop advertising... we want to grow our business and advertising is how you get your name out there. We also can't stop using Google Ads - where else would we go?
$38,000 in clicks boosts Google's revenue by $38k (Google ain't complaining). The only entity you're hurting are the advertisers using Google. Advertisers might see their campaigns performing less well, but that's not going to stop them from advertising. If anything, they'll increase budgets to counteract the fake bot clicks.
I really don't understand what Ad Nauseam is trying to achieve. It honestly seems like it benefits Google more than it hurts them. It directly hurts advertisers, but not enough that it would stop anyone from advertising.
Google has a system for refunding advertisers for invalid clicks. The $500k account that I manage gets refunded about $50/month in invalid clicks. I'm guessing if bot clicks started making a real dent in advertiser performance, Google would counter that by improving their bot detection so they can refund advertisers in higher volumes. If there's ever an advertiser-led boycott of Google Ads, Google would almost certainly respond by refunding advertisers for bot clicks at much higher rates.
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I would worry about being labeled a bot and denied access to websites at all.
What do you expect this to do, long term? I’m curious.
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You're talking about Adnauseum
https://adnauseam.io/
Chrome banned it from their add on store but it can still be installed manually
AdNaueam works against ads, but does it also work against Google Tag Manager?
I've already got most ads blocked by simply Piholing them, but GTM tracking my every move using first-party content is a different kind of interaction to attack.
just block GTM
Would be nice to have something similar to this for Mixpanel and Amplitude
I’d imagine that by this point in time, they are able to filter this specific type of noise out of the dataset. They have been tracking everyone for so long that I doubt there’s anyone they don’t know about whether directly of shadow profiles. These randomly generated users would just not match up to anything and would be fine to just drop
I have a quite common name in my country and snatched firstname.lastname@gmail.com for that name many years ago. Many use it by accident somehow when registering for things. Possibly (hopefully!) half of all leaks containing my email address are for other people. Never thought of what it might do for ad profiling, but hopefully it is adding at least some noise to it.
Maybe I could manually improve a bit on that by deliberately register myself for various random services and just clicking around a bit to pretend I am interested in things I have no interest in. On the other hand with 20 years of tracking I think Google has all my interests and habits nailed down anyway.