Google account with ADN flagged as underage

[mneunomne]

Based on a user report at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/reviews/2009246/ whereby an account was flagged by Google as 'under-age'. This is, at least thus far, a one-off case with no discernible link to the use of AdNauseam. Nonetheless an interesting discussion continues below.

[dhowe]

Do we have a series of steps with which to try and recreate this ?

[TranscendentThots]

I don't have specific steps to reproduce, unfortunately, but here are some notes:

• You could try using A/B testing: Make a new Firefox Profile, install AdNauseum, set the Fake Click Rate to specific values, Watch a couple videos, and then disable AdNauseum and see if the platform gives you any weird warning or error messages, or seems to have otherwise flagged the account.
• However, it might be fundamentally impossible to perfectly mimic the behavior of normal users, especially if youtube does something unusual server-side that would cause a human to twig on different properties of the content than a machine is capable of understanding. (I.E. serving business ads from a toy company's advertising account, just to check whether the user's behavior conforms to the source URL or the content of the ad.)
• To clarify, it didn't claim I was under 18. It claimed I "may or may not be under 18" and gave me buttons to click on to "attempt to resolve" the problem.
• Instead, I deleted my Google account afterwards because I wasn't using it for anything important to begin with, and I interpreted this form of enshittification as a deliberate strategy by the platform to try and fingerprint my account for some unknown nefarious purpose, so unfortunately I can not easily reproduce or even take a screenshot of the [+] icons.
• The "Safe Search" switch was deactivated and greyed out after the platform decided I "may or may not be" under 18. This would be fine, except that I keep Safe Search turned off by default, since I am over 18. This meant that the switch was now locked into the "Off" position. Essentially, this means that kids who use the platform and ever switch Safe Search off could end up locked into a scenario where, thanks to the actions of Alphabet Inc, Google, and the YouTube platform, these children are being forcibly exposed to NSFW search results, with no way to opt back out of it again.
• It's possible that YouTube makes assumptions about visitors when actual metrics are not available. They could use a random seed, or the behavior histories of other users coming from the same geographical location, for example. This could make Youtube's "default behavior" less and less predictable/reproducible over time, especially if they're using AI to power their response to this plugin.
• If youtube serves completely random ads to "unknown" visitors, clicking on an ad for a childrens' product may be a trigger that makes the algorithm assume you're a child.
• Likewise, clicking on an ad for something only adults would need, like investment services, might make the algorithm assume you're an adult.
• Clicking both might put you into this new, unknown third bucket, "may or may not be under 18."
• If Youtube can somehow detect the presence of AdNauseum in the first place, they might run these systems only when AdNauseum is hiding ads, to make detecting and responding to the changes more difficult. Alternatively, they might be easy to reproduce manually with a fresh Firefox and Youtube account, by simply clicking one child ad for every one adult ad until the system flags you.
• I remember that I had dragged the "how often does it pretend to click on ads" slider almost but not quite all the way to the left. So "how many times the user clicks" might be a leading indicator of what the algorithm does with AdNauseum users.
• In 'the real world," the algorithm's choice of ads, the user's behavior, and the profile youtube is always building on each user, and the video recommendations feed are processes that operate in lockstep, reinforcing and modifying each other.
• Since clicking on completely random products is not something a real user would do, this may be a deliberate strategy to distinguish "typical" users, who fit comfortably into different buckets for advertising purposes, from "fake" users, who click all products and services equally.
• There may be other "fake user" buckets than "may or may not be under 18."
• As a side note, I've noticed that whenever I make a new firefox account to try and keep my activities compartmentalized, random elements on a platform such as the placement of ads or buttons, the size of borders, headers, line breaks and whitespace, and sometimes even branding elements and basic page layout, tend to vary from account to account. It's unclear to me what the purpose of these changes are, but I doubt it's random. (Maybe some sort of fingerprinting? Or a way to tie anonymous screenshots to specific end-user profiles?) It's also unclear who, specifically, this New Account RNG is intended to help, ISPs, platform holders, or law enforcement agencies. but I'd frankly be astonished if it weren't somehow used to target whistleblowers.
• If we assume that Full Enshittification is the desired endgame of all publicly-traded online platforms, and that the prime interest rate going up means that the so-called "growth mindset" era is finally coming to an end, this may be a component of Big Tech's endgame, where they implement techno-feudalism and divide the world by user (not by account or device) into technological haves and technological have-nots.
• What little I think I know about this topic, (other than my firsthand experiences the other day,) I learned from youtube videos that were force-fed to me via the Recommended Videos algorithm near the start of the Biden Administration. Therefore it's conceivable that I'm the one being played, here, not AdNauseum. So take all of this with a grain of salt.
• And if end-users start all saying different things at the same time, look for similarities in their behavior in their user stories that the platforms might conceivably twig on. (Unfortunately, they probably know more about my browsing behavior than I can remember, at this point.)

And finally, this is a bit of a rant, but bear with me: Tech articles and cryptic statements by politicians have, for a while, now, been openly hinting that the free and open internet is going to come to an end "eventually." If this is one of the things those comments were in reference to, it may mean that everything from legislation to law enforcement to TOS changes is all being coordinated in order to do whatever it is YouTube is trying to do here.

(Force people to watch ads? Force each user to use a single account tied to their IRL contact information? Kick political undesirables off the internet? Silence certain voices so they can push through more draconian legislation? Distract from the embarrassment of their anti-trust case? Go after Mozilla? Outrage parents during Thanksgiving Day Weekend by locking kids' accounts with the Safe Search switch in the Off position in order to manufacture consent for a public policy change???) We don't know and we have no way of knowing. What we do know is that they're afraid to talk about it publicly, lest the public weigh in.

It's impossible to prepare for an unknown coming sea change or any specific form of retaliation from corrupt authorities and platform holders, but please do whatever you can to protect yourselves and your families and your communities, online and off, this holiday season.

We don't know what Google is up to right now. All we know for sure is that it's the opposite of "Don't Be Evil."

[r7l]

Why use a Google account in the first place? Even more so being logged in with it. Reading your comment, you're not very supportive of their company, business model or general way of thinking. Using an extension like this, you might be better off avoiding accounts by companies using the information you provide. A life without (or minimal) a Google account is easily possible.

[TranscendentThots]

Frankly, I was using Google Drive, but only minimally. I'm in the habit of compartmentalizing my online life, with different accounts for different tasks/projects. This has been my default usage pattern for literal decades.

Then a few years ago, Google showed me search results saying the FBI says we should all be running ad blockers now, so I installed uBlock. Then, the other day, YouTube's rollout of their Ad-Blocker Blocker pulled the rug out from under me, so I turned it off again and groused about it on Reddit. That's where I found out about AdNauseum, and since it's Recommended by Firefox and it claimed to fix the problem, I decided to give it a try.

Then I wondered AITA, turned it off, and noticed the [+] floating over an ad for some kinda pink doll crap next to my Linus Tech Tips video Recommendations.

Google knows what it's doing, here. I just wish I did. It's cagey and it's creepy and it's entirely unclear to me how this is supposed to make them money.

But one thing's for sure: I'm not special. If I had this gut reaction, so are thousands of other users, right now. Maybe millions.

[mneunomne]

@TranscendentThots your insights are valuable in the broader context of google account usage and privacy, but it seems to me that this issue you have experienced might be really hard to reproduce, and if so, would be a lot of time to have different google account freshly created with and without adnauseam to compare the behaviour, auto-click on some particular ads to see if this flagging was caused by adnauseam.

My assumption would actually be that since its a freshly created account google perhaps flags it as someomne underage trying to create different accounts? At least this seems to me a more plausible assumption than this being AdNauseam based.

AdNauseam is compatible with other privacy extensions/browsers and feel to free to use them along side.

I would suggest that we move this topic to the discussion, unless we find some clear ways to reproduce this behaviour.

[TranscendentThots]

I should stress, the account was at least 6 months old, and the "over and under 18" status clicked in immediately when I turned AdNauseum on, did a test run, and then turned it off again. It was literally my first day using AdNauseum.

I'm actually kinda surprised it had two ads with conflicting ages to click on, and was able to click both of them with the False Clicks setting turned down as low as it was.

[TranscendentThots]

Actually, let me try to reproduce it, real quick.

I'll type what I do and let you know if it worked.

1. Launch firefox
2. Navitgate to the URL about:profiles
3. Create a new Firefox Profile
4. Navigate to youtube.com
5. Note that video recommendations seem to targeting an adult male demographic: At least two new videos about a recent mass shooting. Custom automotive work. Outdoorsy stuff. DIY building a giant bear trap that can cut a human in half. Gun Culture. The top left ad is for a cooking product. Halfway down the page, I am invited to watch the movie Burlesque, Free With Ads. Sidemen Speed Dating. Sketch Comedy about oldschool video games only (metaphorical) Boomers would get.
6. Go to google.com and mash some random keys into Search and hit enter to get to the Safe Search button. Block the "allow Google to access your location" prompt.
7. Turn SafeSearch off. search for sex. they're naked, but it's tasteful. Search for porn. Results are weirdly softly lit, more like magazine covers designed around the idea of porn than porn itself, but clearly explicit. It's seriously like if an Ad Agency tried to fake porn without ever having made porn before, or even particularly liking sex. I struggle to describe it, it's a mood.
8. Navigate to the URL about:addons. Search for AdNauseum. Install it. Click Add. Click Okay.
9. Okay, this is an interesting deviation from my previous experience. It popped up a full-page link to moz-extension://183b47bc-5fce-4aaf-aa43-76fe0dd210f6/firstrun.html I could swear this did not happen the last time I installed it. Maybe Ublock was still active and it prevented the page from displaying? Either way, to mimic my previous actions as closely as possible, I'm ignoring the pop-up and configuring AdNauseum from within Firefox.
10. Navigate to about:addons, click Extensions, click ..., click Preferences
11. Okay, this is hard for me, because there's a ton of settings here, and I don't fully remember my thought process the last time I did this.
12. One important note: I notice that Activate Malware Blocking is red and says ERROR. Now that I see it, I remember this from last time. I am turning it on. Click Reactivate. That was definitely my first move, last time, since it's bright red and a warning. Why isn't this turned on by default?
13. Click Hide Ads and Click Ads and turn the Clicking down to Rarely, two notches from the leftmost position.
14. Navigate to youtube.com
15. Scrolling down, I see no ads. I can't remember what video I watched the previous time I tried AdNauseum. These results seem more like the Fresh Account results I got in Step 5 than my old search results after 6 months of casual use. I search for Game Dev. I scroll for a bit and end up clicking a random The Spiffing Brit video. (Side note: GDC is notably absent from the search results. Do devs not use GDC anymore? Are they losing relevance? Or are they just less profitable for YouTube than the fly-by-night tutorial-themed social media influencers?)
16. YouTube announces its lifelong dream to Become Television by offering me a free trial of something it describes as Cable TV, the thing id displaced in the early 2000s. I click the X because why would I make YouTube worse by replacing its videos with Cable programming?
17. I suddenly realize how long the playback is taking and set the speed to 2x.
18. I just realized that this video is chopped up into 11 chunks. Is that 11 ad breaks? Does YouTube just show tons of extra ad breaks when someone runs one of these plugins now? I can't think of any reason for them to do that, but I'm also certain it wouldn't show me this many ads on a new video, normally. It's like they're deliberately defrauding advertisers, or something. like... if they know an AdBlocker is running, and they choose to display more ads, that's just... I mean, what else can you call that but deliberate fraud against their business partners? Am I missing something, here? Either they think the views are real, or else they don't. They can't make both assumptions at once.
19. I notice it's started a second video, so I stop the playback.
20. Navigate to about:addons, and disable AdNauseum.
21. Go back to youtube.com
22. The default Recommendeds are kinda weird. The top two rows look similar to the video I watched while everything beneath the fold looks like the default demographics. Weird. Top left ad is some kinda Mr. Beast promotion called Beast Tour, promising me $1000 for linking my bank account. But then I realize that the account is called Beast Quiz, and Beast Quiz is not linked from MrBeast's official page, though it does use a logo similar to his. Hopefully I'm not infested with malware already just from looking at the site. I absolutely do not click any further than the landing page. If I'm infested with malware already just from visiting the page, I guess I'll see you tomorrow after I reinstall the operating system. I feel like this is probably the malware ad the guy above me in the one-star reviews was talking about. If so, it could mean YouTube is deliberately matching ads from known scammers to users it caught running AdNauseam.
23. After clicking the sponsored fake MrBeast video, I'm seeing a lot of get rich quick videos beneath the fold.
24. Googled it. Known scam confirmed: https://www.makeuseof.com/mr-beast-giveaway-pop-up-scam/

This test was inconclusive, but I feel like this reinforces the overall vibe I got that youtube is twiddling with ads behind the scenes while ad blockers are turned on. I have no idea if my computer is now infected just from visiting the landing page, or if that other user perhaps fell for the Beast Tour scam. I leave it to you guys to look at your code and figure out if "auto-clicking" the Beast Tour scam ad could actually load the landing page in a way that would run malicious code, if it is there.

And I'm sorry if it's digressing, but there's no way these weird ad mismatches aren't deliberate malicious compliance by Google. This just doesn't happen under normal circumstances. It doesn't happen on other accounts or devices. So far, it only seems to happen after using your Add-On, specifically.

Good luck figuring this one out. Please don't delete this thread. Keep it logged as a bug report until we know better. And I hate to say it, but if you get a lot more user stories like mine? Resist the temptation to label this situation "Not a bug, AdNauseum is functioning correctly." You're more ethical than that. You're endorsed by Mozilla, for crying out loud. Get your top people on it, ASAP, and if you need to temporarily take the app down until we can understand what's going on, then do that.

Above all, please resist the temptation to hide this situation from your users by burying my and other users' feedback. I don't know what's going on here, but this is some very un-google-like behavior. It's worse than normal enshittification, and specifically, it's worse in a way that actively harms their brand. Follow the steps here 5-10 times, maybe with some free VPNs or something, just to get a broad array of test cases. See what happens.

[dhowe]

Note that creating a new Firefox profile does not necessarily result in a new google profile. In fact, it is equally likely that other tracking means, e.g., via IP, or via browser fingerprint, etc, will still identify you as the same user, but one who has been creating new browser profiles

[TranscendentThots]

Okay. But that doesn't make sense. If Google thinks I'm the same user who got flagged as "possibly under 18" yesterday, then that means that Google knowingly showed someone who was possibly under 18 porn today. If I'm the same person who deleted their account the other day, then why are the search results actually worse now than they were then?

If Google already knows who I am, then they are using that information to do everything under the sun except show me relevant ads and videos. That's not even enshittification. I don't know what that is. Who pays them? Who benefits from this? I don't get it.

[mneunomne]

@TranscendentThots one quick note regarding your testing. We can't at the moment auto-click ads on youtube, we are just blocking. Only certain types of ads we can collect and auto-visit. So i'm not sure

I won't close this issue for now as you have requested, but it seems abstract what is the behaviour you are trying to reproduce, and I can't invest time in it at the moment. To understand the impact of auto-clicking ads in the algorithm behaviour of each google account is a matter that would take full data research to reach any sort of meaningful conclusion, and it is not the scope of what we can manage at the moment with AdNauseam I believe (we are currently 2 people).

But feel free to share here more discoveries that you make, since it is interesting to us and other users.

[dhowe]

This is a very interesting area of research (to me at least), touching on privacy, algorithmic fairness and bias, to name just a few areas: and its clear more work need to be done.

Here is one related paper but not-so-recent paper: https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/07/06/110198/probing-the-dark-side-of-googles-ad-targeting-system/

and our own, somewhat-related experiments, also from the MIT Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/06/1015784/adsense-google-surveillance-adnauseam-obfuscation/

The recent Algorithmic Behavior Modification by Big Tech is Crippling Academic Data Science Research article summarizes many of the difficulties in doing such research, as discussed above. Perhaps someone has a link to the full paper?

Would be great if others could post additional links to relevant articles/papers below

[TranscendentThots]

Basically, my concern is that Google wouldn't be flagging accounts in such a weird way if it weren't planning on axeing a bunch of end-users later as a step in enshittification. There's obviously nothing you can do about Google's internal practices, but if running ad blockers is what's actually been degrading the user experience of Search all this time, it would be nice to know about it.

This doesn't strike me as a corner case. This strikes me as the general case. Frankly, I wasn't using ADN long enough to become a corner case. (Although I'll admit, I did tweak a slider, so not a truly default case.)

[TranscendentThots]

Also, side-note: Why is the default behavior "click on 100% of ads?" Why not .01% or a random figure between 0.1% and 0.3% or whatever the average is?

Metaphorically speaking, if this is Privacy Gurellia Warfare, you're showing up in the demillitarized zone blaring rock music from the back of a neon-covered monster truck.