Opposition to online surveillance always makes me wonder why nobody has attempted to create adversarial browsers or plug-ins.
I'm not aware of how difficult it would be technically, but wouldn't a good solution to be simply throw troves of noise at Google Amazon and Facebook to drown out the actual signal?
For example, how valuable would online advertising even be if 20% of all users were continously clicking through the ads and opening the landing pages in a virtual browser that the user never even sees?
What about opening every search result at random and simply closing the page again after a few seconds?
Is there some reason this kind of idea is infeasible or illegal?
People actually have created adversarial browser extension checkout AdNaseum (https://adnauseam.io/) which will click every single ad on a page, as well as acting as an adblocker that is based on ublock.
In addition the TrackMeNot (https://trackmenot.io/) extension will randomly create search requests in the background constantly generating useless noise.
If you combine them you get a wonderful situation where random searches are performed and then all the ads on the search result are clicked. I've currently clicked on 2210 ads today while just having it open in another tab on my browser.
> if 20% of all users were continously clicking through the ads and opening the landing pages in a virtual browser that the user never even sees?
Those adoption figures are wildly, unreasonably optimistic. I doubt you could get 20% of HN readers in this thread to install such an extension; you'd be lucky if you got 2%.
I'm not aware of how difficult it would be technically, but wouldn't a good solution to be simply throw troves of noise at Google Amazon and Facebook to drown out the actual signal?
For example, how valuable would online advertising even be if 20% of all users were continously clicking through the ads and opening the landing pages in a virtual browser that the user never even sees?
What about opening every search result at random and simply closing the page again after a few seconds?
Is there some reason this kind of idea is infeasible or illegal?