AdNauseam [0] is a browser extension designed to protect users' privacy and combat online tracking and advertising networks. It is available as an open-source browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Edge. Unlike standard ad blockers that merely hide ads, AdNauseam goes a step further by randomly clicking on ads in the background. This action confuses ad networks and hinders their ability to build accurate user profiles or deliver targeted ads. Thereby, users’ privacy is protected.
At first glance, AdNauseam seems like an individual strategy to protect ones own privacy. However, as Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum who co-designed the browser extension explain in their paper [1], AdNauseam also has collective aspects. Obfuscating single user profiles does not only protect these individual users but also the larger user community. Aggregated statistics get less accurate and less valuable for advertising networks, thus creating this spillover effect.
[0] https://adnauseam.io/
[1] Howe, D. C., & Nissenbaum, H. (2017, May). Engineering Privacy and Protest: A Case Study of AdNauseam. In IWPE@ SP (pp. 57-64).