The good news is that there might be some Streisand Effect going on here: I'd never heard of AdNauseam. Now I've added it to Firefox: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/</a>.
This extension made no sense anyway!<p>Clicking every single ad is bound to get you so many tracking cookies and give up so much metadata about your browsing that you're working against your own privacy by using it (see also "cookieless fingerprinting": <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13644139" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13644139</a>).<p>Not to mention that it's actively disruptive to the websites you visit (which presumably you like since you are visiting them) by generating so many extraneous and unnecessary network requests. You will slow down your browsing and get your favorite websites banned from the ad networks they use (see: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13644226" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13644226</a>).<p>If you don't like ads, just block them. This plugin is a silly pipedream thought up by lawyers and artists without any relevant consultation from technologists or ad industry experts. It's harmful to everyone that uses it.<p>Btw, if you're using this plugin on Firefox, enjoy the exploits that your browser downloads and runs in the background by clicking every ad! :-D
Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee, though I have no inside knowledge about this case at all.<p>> Do not create an extension that requires users to accept bundles of unrelated functionality, such as an email notifier and a news headline aggregator<p>It sounds like they may have just requested oddly broad permissions. Google really cares about privacy. They really care about consent fatigue from unnecessary permissions. Is it possible this is just an effort to rein in unnecessary permissions & the app will be reinstated after the fat is trimmed?
Relevant - Someone posted a show hn for [1] but it was never released or updated.<p><a href="https://hello-kill.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://hello-kill.github.io/</a>
There's a real disconnect in behavior and branding here.<p>Consider if this extension did exactly the same thing, but was called "Ad Click Faker" and was used by those defrauding companies and sites. That doesn't seem like a positive thing, so I'm not sure why AdNauseum should be either.
Is there any interest level in a Frida script or similar that would fully bypass Google's extension signing so you could load this without the nag into official Chrome?<p>Seems like it might be an interesting little reverse engineering project.