[Here’s an incredibly fascinating presentation about the war of all-upon-all that is click fraud, and its ugly effects on our privacy. -e]

Oh, the robots were rudimentary at first. Just little snippets of code that would load a web page and pretend to click ads. Detecting them was a breeze.

But there was a lot of money moving into online ads, and robots love money. They learned quickly. Soon they were using real browsers, with javascript turned on, and it was harder to distinguish them from people. They learned to scroll, hover, and move the mouse around just like you and me.

Ad networks countered each improvement on the robot side. They learned to look for more and more subtle signals that the ad impression was coming from a human being, in the process creating invasive scripts to burrow into the visitor’s browser.

Soon the robots were disguising themselves as people. Like a monster in a movie that pulls on a person’s face like a mask, the ad-clicking robots learned to wear real people’s identities.

They would hack into your grandparents’ computer and use their browser history, cookies, and all the tracking data that lived on the machine to go out and perpetrate their robotic deeds. With each iteration it got harder to tell the people and the robots apart.

The robots were crafty. They would do things like load dozens of ads into one pixel, stacking them up on top of one another. Or else they would run a browser on a hidden desktop with the sound off, viewing video after video, clicking ad after ad.

They learned to visit real sites and fill real shopping carts to stimulate the more expensive types of retargeting ads.

Today we live in a Blade Runner world, with ad robots posing as people, and Deckard-like figures trying to expose them by digging ever deeper into our browsers, implementing Voight-Kampff machines in Javascript to decide who is human. We’re the ones caught in the middle.

What Happens Next Will Amaze You