Comment by rahimnathwani
Comment by rahimnathwani 13 hours ago
Adnauseam (https://adnauseam.io/) does this
Comment by rahimnathwani 13 hours ago
Adnauseam (https://adnauseam.io/) does this
Don't tell me I'm not allowed to click buttons you put in my face.
Any jurisdiction where this is supposedly illegal, it hasn't been court tested seriously.*
Per your link: "What you're describing is essentially the extension AdNauseam. So far they have not had any legal troubles, but they technically could." That stance or an assertion it's not illegal is consistent throughout the thread, provided you aren't clicking your own ads.
"The industry" thinks you shouldn't be allowed to fast forward your own VCR through an ad either. They can take a flying .. lesson.
* Disclaimer: I don't know if that's true, but it sounds true.
That reminds me of the time I was flipping through TV channels and stopped in on TBN to see what color Jan's hair was going to be. Instead, I found Paul preaching about how anyone watching his programming and NOT sending him donations was stealing from him.
>Don't tell me I'm not allowed to click buttons you put in my face.
No, the illegal-ness doesn't come from the clicking, it comes from the fact you're clicking with the intention of defrauding someone. That's also why filling out a credit card application isn't illegal, but filling out the same credit card application with phony details is.
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.
>People purchase visibility and clicks when they purchase advertising. not conversions or sales.
Again, you're ignoring intent in all of this. It's not illegal to default on a loan, or even to refuse to pay it back (eg. bankruptcy), but it is illegal to take out a loan with the specific intent to not pay it back (eg. if you know you're planning on declare bankruptcy right afterwards).
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)
You're not clicking the button, you're sending a known fraudulent request saying the ad was clicked, when the ad was not clicked
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.
click fraud consists of the person who runs a website themselves clicking, running bots to click, paying someone else to click, etc ads on their own website. it becomes fraud first because they have contractually agreed not to do that, and second because they are materially benefiting from it. an unaligned third party clicking (etc) on ads has neither of those conditions being true, and hence isn't fraud or otherwise illegal.
Doubtful.
If you intentionally loop-download large files or fake requests on websites that you don't like, in order to create big CDN charges for them, then what ?
Without reaching the threshold of Denial of Service, just sneakily growing it.
Nobody benefits, except for the weird idea of the pleasure of harming people, still illegal.
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.
Yes, doubtful it is not fraud, just because you didn’t sign a contract does not prevent it from being fraud.
And it is fine to use the terms click fraud when you conduct artificial clicks with the intent:
Examples:
https://integralads.com/insider/what-is-click-fraud/#:~:text...
One of the top leading company of traffic filtering is literally using these words to describe that.
Other users even 10 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328628
+ sources from court:
> The opinion states: “click fraud” can occur when “either a (natural) person, automated script, or computer program, sometimes referred to as a `bot,’ simulates the click activity of a legitimate user by clicking on the Program Data displayed, but without having an actual interest in its subject matter or content.”
Etc
Wrong. There is no law saying you cannot click every link on a website within your browser. It would not only be impossible to prove but also entirely wrong interpretation of existing laws.
Now if you had an AdWords account and ran a botnet that visited your property and clicked ads, that’s fraud.
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?
You're all over this thread spreading misinformation. AdNauseam has been around since 2014. It is specifically banned in the Chrome store so Google knows of it's existence. If you check the wikipedia page you'll see that they have landed in the press and taken multiple actions against the extension. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdNauseam
Usually when it's brought up people say it doesn't work or try to spread fear that it is illegal. Google banning them but taking no action otherwise indicates to me and the thousands who use it that it is in fact effective and Google has no other recourse other than their control over the most popular browser.
It's also illegal in many jurisdictions (e.g. in the US
Never in the history of HN has a [citation] been so [needed].
And from an actual lawyer, not just some rando cosplaying M&A in his mom's basement.
You deliberate harm and financial damage using a computer bot. Almost all countries have provisions where you can be sued for any type of damage you cause and be asked to repair it (a minima at the civil level).
Big ones detect it, so they don't care to sue. Small ones benefit, so they don't sue.
This is your main protection, there is nothing to squeeze from a single guy. Even if you get him to pay you back the fraud, then what ? It costs more in legal fees.
Still, it's such an odd concept to self-inflict yourself such; it's way better to just block the ads than to be tagged as a bot and get Recaptcha-ed or Turnstiled more frequently.
I've never understood the use-case of Adnauseam. This just, essentially, allows the adbroker (e.g. Google) to get more money from the business putting up the ad. Unless every single person uses it, it's not going to stop business from advertising, it just makes the likes of Google get more revenue.
>> This just, essentially, allows the adbroker (e.g. Google) to get more money from the business putting up the ad.
It lowers the effectiveness of internet advertising. When advertisers feel they're paying too much for the business the ads generate, they'll stop advertising in that way. That's probably the thinking anyway. A less generous stance would be: I hate advertisers so I'm gonna get back at them by making them pay more.
Google is selling their data to advertisers. If you poison their data, you are making the thing they sell less valuable
As a user you still don't have to see the ads but you are also "fighting back" rather than just "hiding from" the advertisers
I think it's great
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.
When the advertiser is paying a bunch of money to Google for ad impressions but not getting increased sales, what will they do?
it's actually the opposite, google adsense and every major ad-network will ban you or put a hold on your account if they think the ad impressions or clicks are automated, so this is a good way to get someone blocked from the ad-network
If that's the case, it makes it all the more curious as to why Google banned the extension[0] on Chrome.
It's also illegal in many jurisdictions (e.g. in the US, viewed as a scheme to defraud advertisers by generating invalid clicks that cause financial harm, by depleting their budgets and push them to spend for fake traffic), but in practice it's way easier to just blacklist that IP / user.
The big networks filter such traffic, the small networks benefit from it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/legal/comments/1pq6kgp/is_it_legal_...
You may also get accidentally get your own website blacklisted or moved to a lower RPM tier, or provoke shadow-ban websites that you like to visit, or... generate more ad revenue for them.