Hey advertisers, track this

Not paying for content (small games, blogs, vlogs, journalism, code, etc..) in the last 20 years, is now one of my biggest regrets. I remember back then I even had a small addon that was constantly showing me ads and I was getting money for doing nothing, I thought it was nothing.<p>Now we have to suffer fake content, incredibly well researched click-baits, short term conversion optimized (good trailer, bad content) media and of course tracking to incredible extend. Every single machine learning algorithm trying to push us to more extreme world views so we stay on the platform to consume more contend and see more ads.<p>Every time my young daughter is watching youtube, I can see how what it is recommending and how easy it is to manipulate her. Few weeks ago it hit me, that I sold her mind, because I did not pay, and now everything is beyond repair.<p>PS: I just finished listening a great reading of 1984 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wM3GFyuJwQ8</a>) and am in very dark place. &#x2F;

`<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trackthis.link&#x2F;`" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trackthis.link&#x2F;`</a> requests `<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google-analytics.com&#x2F;analytics.js`" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google-analytics.com&#x2F;analytics.js`</a> on page load.<p>Which, besides being a bad idea for privacy on any site, makes much of this particular site&#x27;s ostensible purpose even easier to defeat.

On a sad note, I couldn&#x27;t stop myself thinking &quot;this «doomsday» profile may be a bit dangerous to run, it could get you on some nasty lists&quot; and wouldn&#x27;t dare to run it. Shows how bad the chilling effect has become…

I suspect the comments here are largely missing the point.<p>IMHO, Mozilla isn&#x27;t offering &quot;Track THIS&quot; as a solution to being tracked, instead it&#x27;s a demo of how tailored one&#x27;s ads are, so one will be offended enough to turn off 3rd party cookies.

Seems a bit like the AdNauseam project, except more refined because it allows the user to select a profile.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adnauseam.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;adnauseam.io&#x2F;</a>

There are companies such as Forensiq [0] and a few others I can&#x27;t quite recall now that work to fight ad fraud.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;impact.com&#x2F;ad-fraud-detection&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;impact.com&#x2F;ad-fraud-detection&#x2F;</a><p>Believe me, there are many players in this space that work tirelessly to compromise mobiles and try to emulate real users to earn profits on PPC campaigns.<p>So honestly, this is just a waste of time. Whatever patterns these guys come up with. It&#x27;ll be defeated by those to fight the real bad guys.

THIS is the Mozilla I like ! Impertinent, guerilla, middle finger giving !

I never understood why advertisers insist on giving me &quot;relevant&quot; ads. I find it better if the ads are diverse and all over the place, as I discover new things. The &quot;relevant&quot; ads are usually about stuff I just bought, so useless to me.<p>I find this site insightful in terms of discovering new things. It could be made into some sort of tumbler for ads. :)

It would be nice to see what sites it is going to open. And maybe worth mentioning you can use Container Tab (or maybe even anonymous window) to test&#x2F;verify this without compromising your real fondly crafted advertising profile.

Since before Netscape originally jumpstarted the Web user tracking and profiling surveillance industry, we already knew that one of the big categories of risk of such databases is being penalized for inaccurate information (and being unable to correct it, or even know it&#x27;s there).<p>Think twice before you take a poo in your own profiles.<p>If you want to poison your profile <i>without it backfiring on you</i>, you might want to wait until pretty much all profiles are poisoned simultaneously.

<i>&quot;WARNING! THIS WILL OPEN 100+ TABS IN YOUR BROWSER. BE PREPARED!&quot;</i><p>I&#x27;m on a full fat iMac Pro and that&#x27;s still going to be a big fat &quot;nope&quot; from me :-D

While this looks and feels fun, I also felt so bad - it&#x27;s such a huge waste of energy, computing resources and bandwith.

&quot;Track THIS will open A LOT of tabs. 100 tabs is a lot.&quot;<p>Hah, funny. Maybe on Chromium, where it would already go into swapping hell on my 8GB RAM. However, on Firefox this is rather low - I&#x27;m on ~150 right now and that&#x27;s just because I have cleaned all open tabs a few days ago (it was above 1000 before).

I wonder how many of those tabs are affiliate links?

I don&#x27;t think this does what you think it does.<p>This confuses the algorithms temporarily into thinking that your tastes have changed.<p>They still know who you are. Your devices and browsers are fingerprinted. Your home network is in a database. Your mobile carrier is selling your location data. Your IP address doesn&#x27;t change that often. Etc.<p>Plus, you know there are already multiple teams tasked with filtering out &quot;fake clicks&quot;. They probably are already doing it, assuming that multiple users are sharing a machine or something like that.

I think it would be more constructive it Firefox would include a better visualization of the extend of web tracking.<p>Mozilla had already tried something like this with an extension, it&#x27;s called &quot;Firefox Lightbeam&quot;.<p>With the next Firefox version, statistics about the number of trackers blocked will be included in Firefox, and I think a better version of Lightbeam (more lightweight, visually showing the difference between tracking protection on&#x2F;off and excluding subdomains) should be included as well.

Couldn&#x27;t a burst of unusual activity like this be easily detected? Then again, advertisers probably don&#x27;t go the extra mile to cover the 1% that&#x27;s using this tool...

Of course this works but won&#x27;t solve the root cause and won&#x27;t be applicable to the real world in which tracking also becomes more present. For the time being an ad blocker seems more useful, also I&#x27;d be happy to still use certain features of my browser like the history function. ;)<p>Also I think there is anyway a trend towards less ads. Those who push out most ads - probably online magazines - are changing more to paid subscriptions.

&gt; <i>This will show you ads for products you might not be interested in at all</i><p>You can just say, &quot;your regular browsing experience won&#x27;t be impacted.&quot;

Please let us know what links you&#x27;re going to open.

I feel by doing this, ad makers will create more aggressive tactics to fingerprint users

LOL, ran it in private window. We have a single outward facing office IP address, and a few tabs were for things like bras and lingerie, so I&#x27;m now waiting to see if it affected others on the office network!

The problem with this is that I picked the &quot;Prepper&quot; profile, and then it just opened a bunch of pages with cool outdoor gear that I kind of wanted. Upside hopefully now I get ads for REI I guess?

I like the hypebeast guy wearing a &quot;Superior&quot; t-shirt.

I would like to block Canvas Extraction, but it seems to allow it on every website I visit, and I have to click on the icon in the address bar and turn it off.. late.

Is it broken? I tried it out and it only opened up 2 tabs to random news articles..<p>EDIT: nevermind, you have to go back and visit the Track This tab to have it open up more tabs.

Is there a simple solution to automatically clear cookies when a tab is closed, similar to closing a private mode browser?

I&#x27;m really afraid to click one of those links on mobile. Does it just spawn 100 new tabs?

Mozilla is on fire lately, this is Trump level trolling &amp; I love it