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dhowe / AdNauseam

AdNauseam: Fight back against advertising surveillance
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Silent mode #2353

Closed SoniEx2 closed 11 months ago

SoniEx2 commented 12 months ago

It would be neat to see a variant of AdNauseam designed to maximize ad impressions. Instead of trying to hide ads in detectable ways, it should just render a black box over ads in an undetectable way. Would that be possible? Who knows. Well, maybe ppl with webext dev experience know, but anyway.

Such a "silent mode" would be intended to block ads for being an assault on the mind. It would be particularly important for video ads (preroll etc), but to be truly undetectable it should apply to all ads.

And importantly, since websites increase ads shown to meet impression targets, existing detectable adblockers cause non-adblocker users to see more ads, while "silent mode" would cause them to end up seeing less ads. Thus, "silent mode" is win-win for everyone, regardless of whether or not they use an adblocker.

It does mean you lose the performance advantages of a traditional adblocker. But honestly, sometimes that's very much worth it.

dhowe commented 11 months ago

Good suggestion @SoniEx2 I implemented this some time ago, then started to think about how the black-box overlays could be used in interesting ways to subvert ad-surveillance (on an opt-in basis)... for one example, 'donating' that space to sites/systems proposing alternative models... But never came up with anything concrete

SoniEx2 commented 11 months ago

@dhowe that's just adware.

dhowe commented 11 months ago

not sure what you mean, but in any case, I'm going to move this to Discussions, please follow-up there