this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Privacy
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Whatever data profile they already have on your can be obscured to make it useless vs them probably trickling in data.
Think of it like um...
Having a picture of you with a moderate amount of notes that are accurate, vs having a picture of you with so much irrelevant/inaccurate data that you can't be certain of anything.
But the picture of me they have is: doesn't click ads like all the other adblocker people (which is accurate)
Why would I want to change it to: clicks ALL the ads like all the other adnauseum people (which is also accurate)
They build this picture from many other sources besides ad clicks, so the point is to obscure that. Problem is, if you're only obscuring your ad click behavior, it should be relatively easy to filter out of the model.
You are just moving the problem one step further, but that doesn't change anything (if I am wrong please correct me).
You say it is ad behaviour + other data points.
So the picture of me they have is: [other data] + doesn’t click ads like all the other adblocker people (which is accurate)
Why would I want to change it to: [other data] + clicks ALL the ads like all the other adnauseum people (which is also accurate)
How does adnauseum or not matter? I genuinely don't get it. It's the same [other data] in both cases. Whether you click on none of the ads or all of the ads can be detected.
As a bonus, if adnauseum would click just a couple random ads, they would have a wrong assumption of my ad clicking behaviour.
But if I click none of the ads they have no accurate assumption of my ad clicking behaviour either.
Judging by incidents like the cambridge analytica scandal, the algorithms that analyze the data are sophisticated enough to differentiate your true interests, which are collected via other browsing behavious from your ad clicking behaviour if they contradict each other or when one of the two seems random.
adnauseum does not click "all the other ads", it just clicks some of them. Like normal people do. Only those ads are not relevant to your interests, they're just random, so it obscures your online profile by filling it with a bunch of random information.
Huh? No one in the Cambridge Analytica scandal was poisoning their data with irrelevant information.
is what the top level comment said, so I went off this info. Thanks for explaining.
I didn't mean it like that.
I meant it in an illustrative manner - the results of their mass tracking and psychological profiling analysis was so dystopian, that filtering out random false data seems trivial in comparison. I feel like a bachelor or master thesis would be enough to come up with a sufficiently precise method.
In comparison to that it seems extremely complicated to algorithmically figure out what exact customized lie you have to tell to every single inidividual to manipulate them into behaving a certain way. That probably needed a larger team of smart people working together for many years.
But ofc I may be wrong. Cheers
As far as I know, none of them had random false data so I'm not sure why you would think that?
I feel like you're greatly exaggerating the level of intelligence at work here. It's not hard to figure out people's political affiliations with something as simple as their browsing history, and it's not hard to manipulate them with propaganda accordingly. They did not have an "exact customized lie" for every individual, they just grouped individuals into categories (AKA profiling) and showed them a select few forms of disinformation accordingly.
Good input, thank you.
You can use topic B as an illustration for topic A, even if topic B does not directly contain topic A. For example: (during a chess game analysis) "Moving the knight in front of the bishop is like a punch in the face from mike tyson."
There are probably better examples of more complex algorithms that work on data collected online for various goals. When developing those, a problem that naturaly comes up would be filtering out garbage. Do you think it is absolutely infeasable to implement one that would detect adnauseum specifically?
Sometimes yes. In this case, no.
I think the users of such products are extremely low (especially since they've been kicked from Google store) that it wouldn't be worth their time.
But no, I don't think they could either. It's just an automation script that runs actions the same way you would.