It's an old addon. But the new ublock combo seems to let it work with far more browsers than before.
This is interesting, and I really like the idea of muddying the waters for ad companies — but doesn't it add to your network traffic? One of the reasons I love ad-blockers is that they dramatically reduce the size of the website and cause it to load a lot faster. By generating clicks to all the blocked ads, it seems like that might generate a whole bunch more traffic and slow down your connection. This would be especially noticeable on mobile devices. I suppose it depends which one you want more, a faster connection, or sticking it to the man.
This does more than just slowing your network down, it actually increases the possibility of being tracked online and is an awful idea. Yes this will muddy the waters of the analytics data that is produced for you, but also you are showing exactly what pages you are on to all advertisers. In fact, the only thing it muddies is your "likeness" of certain things, which is easy to filter out in data science as a user that has too much data associated with it. Simply putting a threshold will prevent your data from being looked at. BUT. Logging data, referer headers, javascript required to produce the advertisement links in the first place, IP tracking, etc, etc, etc, actually gets dramatically ramped up. As more people use ad-blockers, advertisers are actually moving to that data more and more anyway, so you are effectively giving them every real page load that you go to. In order for an advertisement to be "clicked", you have to know the link to begin with. In order to know the link to begin with, advertisers have already for at least a decade required Javascript to be executed to generate the real link. There are also tracking IDs in those links. You are giving them Javascript execution permission to grab data about your machine and fingerprint your browser or worse. This is an anti-privacy protection plugin, not a privacy protection plugin. It's a poorly thought out idea and will trick people who don't know any better to use it. It's almost like advertisers who are currently struggling to deal with the ever increasing percentage (I heard recently it surpassed 50% globally) of adblocking browsers being used wanted to make a plugin to help them track you better, and trick you into doing it willingly.
I like the way you think: Advertiser favorable to pseudo-privacy addon . That's a nice conspiracy. I like the addon. Because we need to face it: being tracked right now is un-avoidable, unless you live in a cave. So I think the right way to fight back is to increase the computer power needed to analyze your data. At one point we might hope, the data are so irrelevant because we multiply and fake them that the ad business become a not so beneficial business. At least it 's easier to do than switch to TOR, no smartphone out of the house, and tinfoil hat.advertisers ... wanted to make a plugin to help them track you better
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#what-is-adnauseams-performance-like-will-it-speed-up-or-slow-down-my-browsing I don't know about mobile, because mobile is the devil I avoid. But on laptop I noticed nothing, which made me suspect the addon is very bad at clicking ...Benchmarks are in progress, however it is safe to say that AdNauseam will be slower than a high-quality adblocker like uBlock, as it must allow certain requests (in order to collect ads) that an adblocker could block. However, AdNauseam will be significantly faster (and safer) than browsing the web without an adblocker. While it depends on the types of pages visited, in our subjective experience, the difference between browsing with AdNauseam vs. uBlock is minimal.