adnauseum-track-me-not-and-privacy-through-obscurity.md (5515B)
1 # AdNauseum, Track Me Not, and Privacy Through Obscurity 2 3 ## Date: 2025/10/4 4 5 ## Context 6 7 AdNauseum [1] is a fork of uBlock Origin [2] that hides ads, clicks them in the background, and aggregates the clicked ads in an easy to view interface. The key difference between UBlock Origin and AdNauseum is AdNauseum both hides and clicks ads. 8 9 Track Me Not [3] is a browser extension that mimics human search queries to obscure real queries in the noise. 10 11 ## Usability 12 13 AdNauseum is as effective as uBlock Origin at hiding advertisements. For a user, there is no trade off in the usability of the web when compared with uBlock Origin. This is nice because more restrictive approaches to privacy, like GNU IceCat [4] and Tor [5], hinder modern web usage. 14 15 Similarly, Track Me Not has almost no impact on the usability of the web. I say almost no because the traffic it generates likely increases the probability of being shown CAPTCHAs, given that the traffic it generates is likely distributionally different than normal traffic. 16 17 ## Effectiveness at Improving Privacy 18 19 AdNauseum is likely worse at protecting your privacy than UBlock Origin. By clicking ads in the background, there is an inherent trail of where you have been. In some ways this trail exists the moment the ad network sells the ad you are shown, but by using a more obscure technology than UBlock Origin, you are more likely to be fingerprinted. Despite this, AdNauseum makes the modern web a better experience to use than not having an ad blocker. 20 21 Track Me Not may also hinder privacy, depending on your privacy goals. The inherent problem is it is phoning home to search engines over time, giving them information about where you are. Search providers are also likely to fingerprint you on the basis of these strange searches. The possible saving grace is that by having so much noise in your search history, it could difficult to figure out what you are interested in. I am uncertain about the value of this though as there are likely going to be two search distributions; Track Me Not's, and yours. This allows sophisticated search providers to ignore the synthetic requests and track your real requests while also gaining real time IP information. 22 23 In short, I find the idea that these tools improve privacy to be dubious. 24 25 ## Why You Still Might Want to Use Them 26 27 The value of these tools is they are a form of active resistance against ads and tracking. While your privacy is likely hindered by them, you are sending a message. That message costs ad networks and search providers money. In the case of AdNauseum, clicks are expensive for advertisers because most people ignore ads, and Track Me Not imposes computational costs on search providers. Even so, by clicking on so many ads ad networks may catch on and stop charging as much per click. Similarly, search providers may block you or start giving CAPTCHAs which likely impose less computational costs on them than running a query. 28 29 ## My Thoughts 30 31 You probably shouldn't be using them. While I enjoy active resistance, this is unlikely to be the right way to do it. It may mess with their knowledge about you if they are not sophisticated, but any sophisticated search provider or ad network, which I think most of them are, will easily sus out inauthentic traffic and gain more information about you as a result. 32 33 Instead of using these tools, I recommend doing the following to improve privacy: 34 35 - Use Tor when possible 36 - Avoid sites that require signing in 37 - Don't use social media 38 - Use a privacy respecting browser 39 - Use UBlock Origin 40 - Use a Pi-hole [6] and privacy respecting DNS servers 41 - Minimize your usage of search engines 42 - Use a variety of privacy respecting search engines 43 - Use local AI tools (if you must use any at all) 44 - Use E2EE messaging when possible 45 - Minimize the trackability of financial transactions 46 - Don't carry a phone and minimize your usage of it 47 - Avoid proprietary software and software that collects data 48 49 This results in me doing the following: 50 51 - Using Tor for most of my traffic 52 - Avoiding sites that require signing in 53 - Not using social media sites 54 - Using LibreWolf [7] as my default non-Tor browser 55 - Routing all non-Tor DNS requests through a self-hosted Pi-hole with additional domain filtering 56 - Using DuckDuckGo and a variety of public SearX instances for search 57 - Running Ollama [8] models locally 58 - Preferring communication with PGP encrypted emails, Matrix, or Signal 59 - Using cash or Monero when possible for transactions 60 - Not carrying my phone with me and only using it when it is the only means of achieving a specific goal (ie. SMS 2FA, communication with certain individuals, etc.) 61 - Only using Libre software that doesn't collect data 62 63 Unfortunately there are sometimes exceptions to the above for the purpose of completing my work in an efficient manner, but in my personal life, I am unwilling to compromise on these things. 64 65 ## Citations 66 67 [1] - [https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam](https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam) 68 69 [2] - [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock) 70 71 [3] - [https://github.com/vtoubiana/TrackMeNot](https://github.com/vtoubiana/TrackMeNot) 72 73 [4] - [https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/](https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/) 74 75 [5] - [https://www.torproject.org/about/history/](https://www.torproject.org/about/history/) 76 77 [6] - [https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/) 78 79 [7] - [https://librewolf.net/](https://librewolf.net/) 80 81 [8] - [https://ollama.com/](https://ollama.com/)