[3] Created in 2014 by Daniel Howe, Helen Nissenbaum, and Mushon Zer-Aviv,[1][4] the software is a digital rights advocacy project that counters surveillance and data profiling employed by online advertising networks.

[8] Nissenbaum, a professor at New York University, published her book Obfuscation to explain how irrelevant data can be used to preserve user privacy.

[11] Zer-Aviv had previously anticipated the possibility of Google removing the extension[5] and believed that the company did so to safeguard its use of advertising as an income source.

[6] AdNauseam blocks and repeatedly sends click events to all ads served by web domains that ignore the user's Do Not Track preference.

The experiment ultimately gained $100 of income for the AdSense account, which MIT Technology Review interpreted as evidence of AdNauseam's efficacy.

[7] Electronic Frontier Foundation representative Alan Toner described AdNauseam as "a piece of agitprop theater" intended to "creatively protest the surveillance mechanism behind advertising".