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A comment on The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history. Parent comment

Re:The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your locat... by genewitch on Thursday September 16, 2021 @04:06PM (#28556790)
I check this from time to time and mine has always been completely blank.

Even on my phone when I search for "tires in <city>" it assumes I mean a city in the east coast of the US. Maps/Waze are only marginally better, showing me results 170+ miles from my current location, generally.

I use trackmenot and ad nauseam plugins on my main computer, so my ads are always 100% irrelevant - if I see them at all. Ad nauseam clicks every ad it sees, and stores the banner. It tries to track how many dollars of ad spend its wasted on your behalf, too. I'm somewhere north of $17k at this point lifetime clicks.

I know I'm not winning this fight but I can make it more hilarious for me in the meantime.

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Re:The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your locat... by iamstupidsimple on Thursday September 16, 2021 @06:46PM (#28558767)
That $17k would've either been rejected as ad fraud in the best case, and just ended up funding the companies you hate at worst.
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Re:The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your locat... by genewitch on Friday September 17, 2021 @05:48AM (#28563244)
That's assuming they can dis-aggregate my traffic at the F5 gateway well enough[0], otherwise they're just saying all traffic out of that rack in Dallas, TX is invalid. A personal web browser clicking ads on pages i visit doesn't feel very fraudulent.

[0] google routinely can't, and i stopped using search because it made me do photo captchas every time. If google can't, i'm guessing other people are going to have less luck.

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Re:The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your locat... by iamstupidsimple on Saturday September 18, 2021 @09:06AM (#28575937)
Being Captcha'd likey means that those systems know not to trust your clicks. I seriously doubt you're doing any damage here, and at worst you're helping the companies you dislike.
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