AdNauseam: a lightweight browser extension that blends software tool and 'artware' intervention to protect users from surveillance and tracking by advertising networks. AdNauseam works similarly to an 'Ad Blocker', but in addition to hiding advertisements, it simulates clicks on each identified ad (in a background thread), confusing trackers as to one's real interests. Simultaneously, AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users' discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas.
We conceptualize AdNauseam within a broader class of software systems that serve ethical, political, and expressive ends. In light of the industry's failure to achieve consensus on a Do Not Track standard1*, or to otherwise address the excesses of network tracking, AdNauseam allows individual users to take matters into their own hands, offering cover against certain forms of surveillance, profiling, and practices of discrimination. Taken in this light, the software represents a similar approach to that of TrackMeNot, which attempts to relocate power in the hands of individual users, rather then vast commercial search corporations. For further information on this approach, please see this paper.
AdNauseam is a lightweight browser extension that helps protect users against surveillance and data-profiling by online advertisers and ad networks. It does so not by means of concealment and encryption (i.e. covering one's tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. AdNauseam works silently in the background of your web browser by clicking all the ads on a page, thereby obscuring user interests in a cloud of decoy clicks. In light of the industry's failure to achieve consensus on a Do Not Track standard, AdNauseam allows individual users to take matters into their own hands, offering cover against certain forms of surveillance, profiling, and practices of discrimination.
- Authors: Daniel C. Howe, Helen Nissenbaum & Mushon Zer-Aviv
- License: GPL (see included LICENSE file for full license)
- Maintainers: See included AUTHORS file for contributor list
- Web Site: http://dhowe.github.io/adnauseam
- Github Repo: https://github.com/dhowe/adnauseam/
- Bug Tracker: https://github.com/dhowe/adnauseam/issues
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