this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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what do you mean by 'mess with digital footprint'
google (and other ad companies) keep a digital profile (or footprint) of all your clicks. so, for example, if you click on an ad for a fantasy book, they will save that you are at least interested on fantasy books, giving you more ads for that. in theory that might not sound so bad ("hey, at least the ads will be more relevant") but in reality the amount of data that they store is incredibly invasive.
by clicking random ads, the quality of that profile would go down, as it will no longer be your true interests, thus "messing with digital footprint"
That seems like the only way you don't get an accurate profile is if the ad is completely unrelated to the page content.
Basically tells advertisers and trackers that you click on every single ad (a common metric used to gauge interest), so it's harder for them to tell what you're interested in and build a profile of you
Seems like not clicking on any ads should have the same outcome...
I don't see ads, so who knows what is in my profile.
Worse actually, since we usually visit a subset of the web, and by "fake clicking" all the ads of all the websites we visit, we actually give google a pretty good profile of the websites we visit, and that's bad. Fake clicking is not as private as people think it is.
You get tracked based on how you interact. This obfuscates that beyond just "I block all of them".
It still only clicks ads of the webpages you visit, which again is a pretty good tracking pattern. I prefer to be tracked as "blocks all of them" than "clicks all the ads of these webpages, which are about XYZ, so they must have interests in XZY, which is actually true since I did visit those websites".
Google tracks everything you do so they can deliver targeted ads to you
By clicking every ad it is harder for them to build a profile
They also take these profiles and sell them so companies know what demographic to focus on