
Baffling Web Trackers by Obfuscating Your Movements Online - Jerry2
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/clive-thompson-10/
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soyiuz
A big fan of work by Helen Nissenbaum's & co.! Check out her _Obfuscation: A
User 's Guide for Privacy and Protest_ from MIT press.Adnauseam requires
AdBlock. Wish it worked with the more lightweight uBlock!

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swinglock
[https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/issues/422](https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/issues/422)

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escap
see also
[https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/67](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/67)

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JD557
> One, AdNauseam, clicks every ad on every page I visit, baffling ad networks.

This seems like a bad idea for everyone involved:

* You leak more information to the ad network (or at least make your datapoint it more prominent in the database)

* You get worst ads (if the ad network uses a smart algorithm to serve personalized ads)

* The ad network gets info with worse information, so it will probably serve worst ads to everyone else (if a lot of people use this)

* The site you visited might end up receiving less money, as it can be accused of click fraud (if a lot of people use this)

Using an ad blocker seems like a much better option (I believe they actually
block most of the tracking javascript from even being loaded, so you are
probably not tracked anyway).

Am I missing something here?

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function_seven
1) I don't care if my datapoint is prominent, if it's bogus.

2) I've never once thought about the quality of the ads I see. I can't imagine
being disappointed that the ads "are worse". They're ads, they're bad to begin
with.

3) Again, not concerned with the quality of ads others get.

4) If lots of people use this, then it will be impossible for advertisers to
distinguish between click fraud by the site and click fraud by the end-users.
The goal is to make click-tracking futile.

The point of AdNauseam is to make tracking useless. So your points are all
endorsements of its effectiveness.

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BeefySwain
It's unfortunate that AdNauseam is incompatible with uBlock

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danieltillett
That is a shame :(

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sdoering
Somewhere in another comment is a link to the relevant issue in their Github.
Might not be a problem for long.

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FilterSweep
from AdNauseum's website (adnauseam.io):

>Working in coordination with your ad blocker, AdNauseam quietly clicks every
blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases.

Are they sure the visit is registered? This seems like a trick that would work
strictly off clicks in circa ~2009-2012, where now, adnetworks tend to check
if you've downloaded some snippet of content (like a pixel tag) before it
registers a hit.

In order to "click everything" you'd essentially have to download a ton of
pages, content, and 3rd party scripts that are never rendered on your screen.

I think the idea is wonderful, but ad trackers have grown more sophisticated
now. I'll have to check out the source later!

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visarga
Another thing to do is to run bogus Google searches to obfuscate your own and
have plausible deniability about what you were actually doing. Bogus searches
could even be selected from topics related to your interests so as not to be
easily identified by Google.

Another protection would be to automatically screen what information goes out
and stop all leaks of sensitive data, like your name, email, card, ad-related
cookies etc on untrusted sites. Dangerous searches could be routed to a
different search engine automatically (say, for example, searches related to
political activism). Making it easier for people to protect their information
goes a long way to achieving privacy.

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falcolas
Related to this, there was (some time ago) an initiative to build out a
"haystack" proxy, which went a step further than this. For every link on the
page, it would randomly follow 3-4 of them. On every page on those linked
page, another random 3-4 links were followed, up to a random depth. The idea
being that you ended up generating so much noise (the haystack) that the
signal (the needle) was lost.

Of course, this wouldn't prevent a dedicated snooper from watching you, using
statistical analysis to find your real trail, but it would certainly hinder
your average tracking network.

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bobcostas55
Any tips on fighting browser fingerprinting?

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rickycook
on the topic of chaff, I use an extension that rotates randomly between
combinations of {Windows,OS X,Linux}, {Firefox,chrome} and various versions of
those things.

though sadly this doesn't work alone, because it only solves the stuff sent to
server (but is far more pleasing to screw with them than to just send
nothing). you still have to use noscript to stop things like the canvas font
rendering trick :(

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listic
What is this extension?

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pacbard
I have used user agent switcher in the past. It sounds like the extension that
rickycook was referring to.

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mirimir
I prefer to compartmentalize and hide. Each area of interest and associated
communities has its own persona, or set of more-or-less linked personas. Each
persona has its own VM, and setup for Internet connectivity (various nested
chains of VPN services and Tor). I also take basic steps to reduce tracking. I
use Disconnect for search, block ads, and allow only scripts essential for
rendering pages.

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guelo
Why would you'd want to obfuscate instead of block the ads?

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superuser2
Since most advertising and tracking currently happens by loading third-party
Javascript, it's trivial for clients to detect and block. If advertiser-
hostile clients proliferate, the industry will shift towards techniques that
are more difficult to block.

Proxy ads through software on the actual webserver; make them part of the
markup like any other page element. Ingest the Apache access logs. Use
website-level cookies and relay them to the ad network on the server side.
Etc.

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malka
Would not that require the advertiser to trust the publisher ?

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ape4
A bit like Jam Elechon Day.

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tagawa
Background:
[http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/jam.html](http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/jam.html)

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a3n
Or the Jammers from The Prisoner:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Your_Funeral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_Your_Funeral)

