Do Be Evil
I’ve long thought we need a way to run sybil attacks against trackers, with the goal that all the numbers and statistics these things produce would be off by at least an order of magnitude (in both directions, at random).
Oh wait, seems like nobody wins?
If the value of a click goes to zero then does it make sense to show ads?
I'd much rather make the people who do not want ads block them entirely than creating artificial garbage clicks, especially since those still send data to the major data-collectors.
I think all of the wins in your scenario are short-term only.
There is no end game where they don't implement every feature you're worried about unless it's not profitable before they go out of business.
Working at the time in the web analytics field I never released it.
If the domain wasn't google.com, this would look like a fairly sketchy click. At least for Firefox, this isn't a link to an add-on, rather it's a download. While I understand that no everything in addons.mozilla.org is to be trusted, I don't think it's a good idea to train people to install random things they download from weird looking random pages online.
You fundamentally misunderstand the forces at play if you think this is a failure on their part. They are incentivized financially to be user hostile. There is no magical moral compass embedded within the market that rewards those who make product decisions based on what people want, or what's good for them. They're an ads and tracking company. Approximately nobody would opt-in to their dragnet. Their whole operation is using free services as bait to track and manipulate as many aspects of human life as possible. There is no meeting where someone internally might say "hey, what do you think the user wants, what's best for them?" It's "we want the users to feel/do X, how do we get them there?"
Sadly I do understand, I just don't want to.
Would you like to open this link in your phone’s default browser or download Chrome?
Yes/Download/Ask me again every time
24-sept-2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37636447 34 comments
16-dec-2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25439834 172 comments
25-mar-2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19479809 41 comments
Most sites work with googletagmanager.com blocked. Privacy Badger will block it if you ask, although it gives you a warning that some sites may break. Generally not ones you really need.
(function() {
var a = document.createElement("script");
a.type = "text/javascript";
a.id = "__gaOptOutExtension";
a.innerText = 'window["_gaUserPrefs"] = { ioo : function() { return true; } }';
document.documentElement.insertBefore(a, document.documentElement.firstChild);
})()
"matches": [
"http://*/*",
"https://*/*"
]Of course any other tracking (or GA tracking) could use this as a part of fingerprinting.
My main point is that the extension itself does not load GA, which the parent seemed to say. It can also be used for other fingerprinting since it is a variable accessible by other scripts.
uBlock Origin, as well as many other ad blockers, can already do this making this extension redundant.
Eero just blocks the domains afaik.
"Hide your evil"