> The issue may be that it works a little differently than your standard ad-blocker does: instead of just blocking the advertisements and trackers from rendering on any site you view, it also virtually “clicks” on them — all of them.

Oh, so it's click fraud. Yaay. I think as tech people we're so obsessed by our ability to do things we don't consider whether we should.

The choice of method is very deliberate on the side of the developer [1]. It's not like they didn't consider whether they should, it's just that you don't agree with their reasoning.

[1] Quoting from the article:

> [The developer] said that AdNauseam is “definitely an activist tool” that intentionally and deliberately is “trying to show that this hostile disrespect for online privacy would be met with hostility on the part of the users.”

Tracking isn't "hostility and disrespect": it's remembering people to show them a thing they liked before. There are many easy ways for web users not to be remembered.

Please mention some of them.

I get Google bubbled all the time and receive either targeted ads or nag screens from Google itself. I would love to be able to use Gmail without such issues.

Additionally many sites fail to work properly unless certain tracking JavaScript is enabled.

Sure.

1. Start an incognito window.

2. Tell Google you prefer untargeted ads.

Re: 2, Google also has a cool search engine you can use to learn about things like how to stop ads from remembering you.

Except there's no gain for them, other than to help promote privacy. Would I be in he wrong for clicking every ad myself, if I had no an to buy, just to fuzz the data collected about me? It would be the same "fraud." How is a tool to help me protect my privacy and penalize those who would violate it a bad thing? I never consented to being tracked and even opted out but advertisers do it anyway. Which is worse?

The gain is the ego boost from damaging someone else's business.

Click fraud is when you profit from the behaviour. You as a user do not in general profit from clicking the ad.

Interesting comment here (in one of the reviews for this addon for firefox): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/rev...

If you have a YouTube channel (s) and your logged in to that channel it will get your channel suspended for Violation of TOU #4 Section H

Google really doesn't like this one..

Because it fundamentally breaks their advertising model?

Google simply does not want any competition on the ad market.