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A comment on Google Squashed a Chrome Extension That Flooded Ad Networks with Disinformation. Parent comment

Re:Google Squashed a Chrome Extension That Flooded Ad Networ... by 0xADADA on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @10:31AM (#13644137)
You'd be advised to read their book, by Nissenbaum and Brunton that describes the theory behind privacy through obfuscation. It argues that by clicking all the ads, all useful information is lost in the noise. Simply put, the signal-to-noise ratio is so heavily biased to noise that the signal is lost. https://www.amazon.com/Obfuscation-Users-Guide-Privacy-Prote...
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Re:Google Squashed a Chrome Extension That Flooded Ad Networ... by dguido on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @10:33AM (#13644151)
Neither of these people are technologists with any experience in the ad industry or data science. They're lawyers and artists. Why would I trust that they know what they're talking about in this domain?
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Re:Google Squashed a Chrome Extension That Flooded Ad Networ... by stult on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @10:47AM (#13644324)
Why not evaluate their arguments on the merits rather than relying on authority (or lack thereof)? And it's not like this is a particularly technical subject anyway.
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Re:Google Squashed a Chrome Extension That Flooded Ad Networ... by mattmanser on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @10:59AM (#13644415)
How is it not technical?

You have to understand statistics, ad networks, etc. plus all the stuff that can be used to identify you online, cookies, e-tags, browser storage, browser property sniffing, etc. plus how all that works in regard to domains and sub-domains, what's accessible cross-domains, etc.

The parent is alluding to that while all that ad clicking might obfuscate your reception to ads, it might have the downside of making it extremely easy to distinctly recognise your browsing habits and let every ad network uniquely identify you and link it to other data they have on you.

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Re:Google Squashed a Chrome Extension That Flooded Ad Networ... by falcolas on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @11:52AM (#13644892)
By allowing their ads (and thus their software) on the web page in the first place, you've already provided all of that data to them. The click doesn't really provide any further, useful data.
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Re:Google Squashed a Chrome Extension That Flooded Ad Networ... by dguido on Tuesday February 14, 2017 @10:56AM (#13644391)
Absolutely, and I've outlined cases where I have technical disagreements with them in my original post and elsewhere in this thread. I was merely responding to the accusation that I should blindly listen to them because they wrote a book.
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