Let us open 100 tabs of pure madness to fool trackers

by doener • 7 years ago

75 42 7 years ago

enriquto• 7 years ago

Beautiful! But this could run as an invisible background job alongside the ad blocker.

tty23002• 7 years ago

It already exists, Its called ad nauseam. Its an adblocker that opens every ad in the background. Google has banned it from the chrome store so that says something.

farazzz• 7 years ago

I get the feeling that trackers are smart enough to detect this kind of activity

And besides, I imagine most people who care enough to use tools like this have personalised ads disabled already

H8crilA• 7 years ago

I'd say this kind of noise is too irrelevant for adtech income to spend even 1 engineer quarter on filtering it.

However, if it becomes popular...

invalidusernam3• 7 years ago

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but if I am going to get shown ads I would rather they are tailored to me instead of being irrelevant.

Vinnl• 7 years ago

That depends on whether they're tailored to show me products I might be interested in, or misleading information that has been tested to work well to influence people with my political inclinations.

Causality1• 7 years ago

There are browser extensions like Noiszy and AdNauseam that pollute your history and activity profile on an ongoing basis.

hjanssen• 7 years ago

Which has the side effect of requiring you to input a captcha every time you quickly want to google anything.

StreamBright2• 7 years ago

I would rather pay for google and have no surveillance & ads.

cloud_thrasher• 7 years ago

If ... opening 100 tabs doesn't crash your browser or freeze your computer first.

squarefoot• 7 years ago

DuckDuckGo might be a cure to this problem. I set up it as default search engine on home main pc a few weeks ago and although I still have sometimes to resort to Google for a few searches, it got remarkably better compared to the past.

Semaphor• 7 years ago

Which has the side effect of requiring you to input a captcha every time you quickly want to google anything.

As I mainly use DDG and considering I get a fuck-you hardest-level (or simply "sending too many requests") recaptcha every time I want to use a site that uses it… What difference does it make? For the few cases where DDG's stupid "let's ignore search terms" decision bites me I can simply use startpage with !sp

dvfjsdhgfv2• 7 years ago

No, AdNauseam doesn't work this way, and there are no problems with captcha whatsoever. Other anonymizing solutions might have this effect, but not AN.

zaarn2• 7 years ago

I already have to do that, if you're on Firefox, you get treated like a bot and have to solve 10+ puzzles on recaptcha, possibly even just ending on a "network error" screen regardless.

sriku• 7 years ago

Are we incentivizing trackers to get more powerful ? This seems to be the equivalent of antibiotics overdose.

devttyeu• 7 years ago

Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283382

(Links to the blog post about this - https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/hey-advertisers-track-this/)

aasasd• 7 years ago

Doubt the effectiveness of doing this one time. I already go on stints looking for something that's not in my long-standing interests. My browsing history will correct the aberration afterwards.

IMO, to hide true traffic you'd need to run a constant steam of noise requests, in which the real visits would be undiscernible. And the noise might need to be non-uniform, unpredictable and still follow the patterns of normal traffic, so it can't be filtered out.

mygo3• 7 years ago

I propose peer-to-peer networked browsing. Whenever someone else visits a website, it loads on your browser, with your cookies. Their browser anonymously and securely sends the URL to your browser. It runs in the background, loading fully rendered web pages headlessly. And also these URLs never make it on to your browsing history. In fact you do not ever see the URLs at all, for the privacy of the network. They exist only for the trackers.

Solved.

johnday• 7 years ago

Seems like a good way to get arrested.

progval• 7 years ago

So... Tor but with you sending your cookies to everyone else?

dspillett2• 7 years ago

I though of something similar some ago: rather than loading whole pages of sites users don't visit themselves, share cookies for tracking sites so every now and then my google ad cookies get swapped with someone random, my facebook tracking cookies with someone else, etc. This would get around the "background visiting something you really don't want anyone thinking you deliberately accessed" because you only load what you would have loaded anyway, just with different tracking cookies each time.

Thinking it through though there are potentially massive problems, the first of which is that I can think of ways to circumvent it to a large extent with deeper fingerprinting, and if I can no doubt the ad servers could if they the system became popular enough for them to care. Other issues would include making sure useful cookies were not swapped out causing both security and usability issues for the participants.

buboard• 7 years ago

This assumes that trackers are accurate

vbsteven• 7 years ago

This reminds me of that old emacs email extension that inserts a bunch of random keywords into every email.

gerikson• 7 years ago

M-x spook.

https://everything2.com/title/M-x+spook

ga-vu• 7 years ago

This never worked for me.

samdung• 7 years ago

HaHa. This is pure evil. I'm liking it. The 'Anti-Tor' is here.

ComodoHacker• 7 years ago

If we want to fight tracking, both users and publishers have to see some benefit in it. Now publishers want first-party tracking and don't care about third-party; while users mostly don't care.

curiousigor• 7 years ago

For a website that's has an agenda against trackers, you'd think they wouldn't include google analytics / trackers...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Go_Movie_Mango• 7 years ago

Prime Question : Does this fool google reCaptcha V2.0?

Let us open 100 tabs of pure madness to fool trackers

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