I don’t really understand AdNauseam. Can’t they also not build a profile with a normal ad blocker, but you also completely avoid interacting with the trackers (so better for performance, data usage, etc)?
Yes and no. It’s harder, but even with an adblocker, your internet signature (things like browser size, are you blocking ads, did you send a “do not track” header, etc) is enough to identify you in a lot of cases. AdNauseam goes the opposite direction, instead of hiding your data, it fills their data collection with so much garbage that they’ll have a hard time figuring anything out about you. From what I understand, it doesn’t actually load the ads, just sees where the ad points to, and tells the ad provider that you clicked it while at the same time blocking it. So it would be very slightly worse in terms of performance and data usage compared to uBlock Origin, but not in any noticeable way, since the stuff it sends is much smaller than any actual content.
I don’t really understand AdNauseam. Can’t they also not build a profile with a normal ad blocker, but you also completely avoid interacting with the trackers (so better for performance, data usage, etc)?
Yes and no. It’s harder, but even with an adblocker, your internet signature (things like browser size, are you blocking ads, did you send a “do not track” header, etc) is enough to identify you in a lot of cases. AdNauseam goes the opposite direction, instead of hiding your data, it fills their data collection with so much garbage that they’ll have a hard time figuring anything out about you. From what I understand, it doesn’t actually load the ads, just sees where the ad points to, and tells the ad provider that you clicked it while at the same time blocking it. So it would be very slightly worse in terms of performance and data usage compared to uBlock Origin, but not in any noticeable way, since the stuff it sends is much smaller than any actual content.