Mozilla created a tool that opens 100 browsing tabs to mislead web trackers

[Shawn Knight]

Bottom line: It goes without saying that attempting to open 100 tabs at once will put a serious strain on your computer’s resources. In testing, my CPU usage immediately shot up to 100 percent and stayed there until I decided I’d had enough and killed the newly opened tabs.

It’s understandable to be annoyed by intrusive third-party ad trackers that essentially spy on your every move and serve up ads related to what marketers think you might be interested in. Aside from ad blockers, however, what recourse do you really have?

Mozilla feels your pain and wants to help… well, sort of.

The software community has launched a tool called Track THIS that’s designed to throw off web trackers in a big way. When launched, the tool opens 100 browsing tabs that load a variety of websites based on one of four pre-set “alter egos” – hyperbeast, filthy rich, doomsday or influencer. The idea is to feed bogus browsing data to advertisers so they can’t target you as efficiently.

Mozilla notes that a session will only impact the ads you see for a few days – after that, you’ll slowly start to see ads that better align with your true browsing habits.

In short, this isn’t a practical solution to combat web trackers or one that you’ll even want to use on a semi-regular basis. I am curious to see how well it works, however, and if I’ll notice a difference in the ads I’m served over the coming days.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/80706-mozilla-created-tool-opens-100-browsing-tabs-mislead.html

 

[treetops]

I thought about something like this to waste robo callers time, email spam etc. But I don't know how viable it would be. If we generated a hundred fake phone numbers\emails\identities for every real person, it would cut into their profits, at some point it would no longer be profitable.

On the other hand say yahoo email, in every data base they could put in some flag emails, if anyone logs into them it could be an early detection that their has been a breach.

 

[VitalyT]

That's like when you hate your phone so much, you want to send it down the balcony. And the phone manufacturer comes up with suggestion that in order to develop a better crashing momentum, it is best that you jump with the phone. That's basically what Mozilla just suggested. Thanks a lot!

 

[wiyosaya]

To me, it seems like denying third-party cookies would be a simpler answer.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Finally a real use case for 64 Threadripper threads.

 

[Athlonite]

In testing, my CPU usage immediately shot up to 100 percent and stayed there until I decided I’d had enough and killed the newly opened tabs.

Well all I can say is you must have used a pretty crap system then as my Ryzen 7 2700 never went over 48% usage Oh and if you leave it to get to 100 sites opened it will just keep going I got upto 120 website tabs open before I killed it

 

[ChrisH1]

Based on the ads I get presented with, I must be a seriously weird person ...

 

[Adhmuz]

Well all I can say is you must have used a pretty crap system then as my Ryzen 7 2700 never went over 48% usage Oh and if you leave it to get to 100 sites opened it will just keep going I got upto 120 website tabs open before I killed it

How fast do you get all 100 tabs open and loaded? My final tab opens at 50 seconds and all the tabs finish loading at 60 seconds. When I run it it never exceeds what looks like the 100 tabs. It definitely stops opening pages after 50 seconds for me however. All tabs loaded Chrome is using just over 7GB of Ram.

 

[Athlonite]

How fast do you get all 100 tabs open and loaded? My final tab opens at 50 seconds and all the tabs finish loading at 60 seconds. When I run it it never exceeds what looks like the 100 tabs. It definitely stops opening pages after 50 seconds for me however. All tabs loaded Chrome is using just over 7GB of Ram.

Proly about a minute or so in Opera but I'm in NZ so everywhere but NZ sites are slow to load anyways and all the site that loaded are from the U.S. or European servers and I was watching the tab count quite closely and it just kept opening more tabs after it reached 100 it actually got to 120 tabs before I killed it