Some years ago I was by chance listening to a radio program about advertising. They interviewed a marketing guy and he insisted that it was illegal for you to visit the bathroom or the kitchen while the ad was running (on TV or on the radio). Completely nuts.

The intent isn’t to defraud. The intent is to curb their uninvited data collection and anti-utility influence on the internet.

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.

Even one of the users here above mentions the malicious intent:

> I hate advertisers so I'm gonna get back at them by making them pay more.

What if someone unironically wants to automatically click all the ads to support the websites they visit

> it comes from the fact you're clicking with the intention of defrauding someone.

You're defrauding nobody. People purchase visibility and clicks when they purchase advertising. not conversions or sales.

I mean, (not to you, as we go in the same direction, in general), just block it.

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)

I still wonder about that. I don't have a contract with the advertiser to provide genuine data back about what ads I've clicked and what I haven't. The website operator does have such a contract and so cannot hire a bot farm to spam click the ads.

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.

An AI agent did it. Obviously I can't be expected to watch over all the things it does.

You are just wrong on many levels and keep repeating the same mistruths.

Doubtful

Not doubtful at all. He literally laid out the definition of click fraud for you.

As someone who ran ads on web sites as far back as 1995, that has been the term the industry has used forever.

Replying with a dismissive "doubtful" demonstrates that you don't know what you're talking about.

Back up a bit. AdNauseam and similar tools are not illegal. The only real avenues would be violation of ToS, fraud, computer abuse or similar. For an individual running this on their home PC for their own use it would be a real challenge for anyone of any size to prove harm.

Now like I already said, if you are running a botnet clicking on your ads that is entirely a different story.

So tell us what does having the extension installed prove?

How did I cause financial damage? I didn't charge anybody anything. I didn't pay anybody anything. I agreed to no terms and conditions

Google wouldn't have gone out of their way to block it on Chrome if it didn't work.

The other assumption here is that ad networks want to filter out all clicks but the most legitimate.

I don't think that's a very lucid assessment of how advertisers operate on the Internet. We all agree that they could take these steps. If AdNauseam doesn't look like outright fraud in the logs (which they don't if it's all distinct IPs and browsers), I don't think they want to cut it out from their revenue and viewer analytics.

I mean, you're also telling them almost every site you visit. That's strictly worse from a privacy perspective than blocking ads outright.

If they could raise the price they already would have