Reviews for AdNauseam
AdNauseam by Daniel Howe
Review by TT
Rated 4 out of 5
by TT, a year agoIt's honestly a 4-star addon, but I'm temporarily setting this to one star to get the dev's attention. Read on, and you'll see why:
It works great (for now,)and I realize it's Recommended by Mozilla, but I wanted to warn people about Google's increasingly weird TOS, and specifically, this addon's seemingly dangerous interactions with it.
When you allow this addon to run in the background, it clicks on "all ads" or "some ads," which for some reason causes Google to flag your account as "may be under 18." (Maybe it auto-clicked on a Polly Pocket ad? I dunno.)
The ambiguous wording here is, I suppose, by design. They're not accusing you of BEING underage, they're just saying maybe you are, maybe you aren't.
Of course, the only way to find out your account has been flagged in this way is to click the [+] button in the corner of an ad that Google knows darned well has nothing to do with your Recommended videos. Which means the only way you'll even become aware of it this phenomenon in the first place is by running Ad Nauseam, then turning it off again.
(Intriguingly, if you had Safe-Search turned off before you installed the plugin, becoming "maybe under 18" disables the Safe Mode button in a way that literally makes it impossible for you to enable it again. Is Google seriously trying to say that they both think you may be under 18, *and* that they're deliberately going to force you to see NSFW search results???)
The fact that the [+] only shows on ads that are drastically different from your Recommendeds shows that Google already knows exactly what it is doing, here. They're serving incongruous ads on purpose. The question is why?
It's unknown what Google's goals or long-term plan are, but combined with various other clauses in Google's TOS, this "may be under 18" phrase has some unfortunate implications:
The worst-case scenario I can imagine is, Google bans you, (that is, the user, the person, not the account,) from all of their platforms simultaneously, and also flags you in a database as some sort of child molester, ostensibly because you were over 18 when they served you your search results, but under 18 when you viewed them, and by clicking on the search results, you, an adult, were distributing NSFW content to yourself, a minor. And WEI rollout means they *might* have just enough information to track you as you move from account to account, so they could make it stick.
I doubt they'd have a legitimate legal case against anyone, since you literally can't be two ages at once. But if the goal is just to separate the internet into technological haves and have-nots, this is one excuse they could use to make sure anyone running AdNauseam ends up as a have-not, all the while telling regulators that the metrics say they banned a bunch of pedros.
That's just one of the baffling interpretations of the faux-legalease in these TOS that treats each user as a quantum superposition of their browsing behavior, rather than as a person.
(That said, they can also ban any user they want for "not being profitable enough." They added that gem in 2019. Which you'd think would be good enough to let them do away with all accounts that use ad-blockers, across the board, so I'm not sure what the goal of this stealth ad semi-shadowban is.)
I'd say "stay safe out there," but with the FBI demanding that literally everybody run an ad blocker, I'm not even sure I know what "safe" means anymore.
Not a complaint, just an observation. I would add one star if this situation could somehow be addressed by the addon. (But of course, it can't. That's the point.)
I'll set it back to 4 stars if the dev responds. He seems to take one-star reviews very seriously if past behavior is any indication. (Sorry for the inconvenience, Daniel. For what it's worth, I really like the use of negative space on your website.)
Also, apparently, for the guy above me, KOLJAAAA, it auto-clicked on Malware. Yikes! I wonder if Google is also doing THAT on purpose.
It works great (for now,)and I realize it's Recommended by Mozilla, but I wanted to warn people about Google's increasingly weird TOS, and specifically, this addon's seemingly dangerous interactions with it.
When you allow this addon to run in the background, it clicks on "all ads" or "some ads," which for some reason causes Google to flag your account as "may be under 18." (Maybe it auto-clicked on a Polly Pocket ad? I dunno.)
The ambiguous wording here is, I suppose, by design. They're not accusing you of BEING underage, they're just saying maybe you are, maybe you aren't.
Of course, the only way to find out your account has been flagged in this way is to click the [+] button in the corner of an ad that Google knows darned well has nothing to do with your Recommended videos. Which means the only way you'll even become aware of it this phenomenon in the first place is by running Ad Nauseam, then turning it off again.
(Intriguingly, if you had Safe-Search turned off before you installed the plugin, becoming "maybe under 18" disables the Safe Mode button in a way that literally makes it impossible for you to enable it again. Is Google seriously trying to say that they both think you may be under 18, *and* that they're deliberately going to force you to see NSFW search results???)
The fact that the [+] only shows on ads that are drastically different from your Recommendeds shows that Google already knows exactly what it is doing, here. They're serving incongruous ads on purpose. The question is why?
It's unknown what Google's goals or long-term plan are, but combined with various other clauses in Google's TOS, this "may be under 18" phrase has some unfortunate implications:
The worst-case scenario I can imagine is, Google bans you, (that is, the user, the person, not the account,) from all of their platforms simultaneously, and also flags you in a database as some sort of child molester, ostensibly because you were over 18 when they served you your search results, but under 18 when you viewed them, and by clicking on the search results, you, an adult, were distributing NSFW content to yourself, a minor. And WEI rollout means they *might* have just enough information to track you as you move from account to account, so they could make it stick.
I doubt they'd have a legitimate legal case against anyone, since you literally can't be two ages at once. But if the goal is just to separate the internet into technological haves and have-nots, this is one excuse they could use to make sure anyone running AdNauseam ends up as a have-not, all the while telling regulators that the metrics say they banned a bunch of pedros.
That's just one of the baffling interpretations of the faux-legalease in these TOS that treats each user as a quantum superposition of their browsing behavior, rather than as a person.
(That said, they can also ban any user they want for "not being profitable enough." They added that gem in 2019. Which you'd think would be good enough to let them do away with all accounts that use ad-blockers, across the board, so I'm not sure what the goal of this stealth ad semi-shadowban is.)
I'd say "stay safe out there," but with the FBI demanding that literally everybody run an ad blocker, I'm not even sure I know what "safe" means anymore.
Not a complaint, just an observation. I would add one star if this situation could somehow be addressed by the addon. (But of course, it can't. That's the point.)
I'll set it back to 4 stars if the dev responds. He seems to take one-star reviews very seriously if past behavior is any indication. (Sorry for the inconvenience, Daniel. For what it's worth, I really like the use of negative space on your website.)
Also, apparently, for the guy above me, KOLJAAAA, it auto-clicked on Malware. Yikes! I wonder if Google is also doing THAT on purpose.
Developer response
posted a year agoHey TT, thank you for your extensive review, we had never come accross such an issue before, could you share with us some more info regarding it on the issue ticket I just created on our github page: https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/issues/2439
We are discussing some possible implementation that can help deal with such unwanted ad visits here as well, feel free to share your opinion: https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/issues/2440
We are discussing some possible implementation that can help deal with such unwanted ad visits here as well, feel free to share your opinion: https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/issues/2440