this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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No Stupid Questions

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Inspired by a question I saw a while back, is it possible to make my data/online presence useless/undesirable to companies to purchase?

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[–] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 158 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

E-commerce vet here. It’s easier just to try and not give out that data and to pay to have it scrubbed. But, this thought experiment is fun, so here’s how you’d make your targeting data complete trash.

—-

The most valuable thing about your data is your behavior and demographic characteristics, not your identity.

When you fill out forms, pretend your gender, race, and age is fluid. Also, pretend you’re nomadic. Then behave erratic as fuck online - pay for bibles, butt plugs, taxidermy, and PETA donations

Your data will be absolute trash. You’ll also be miserable because you’re going to be visiting the Amazon drop off center with gag balls and porcelain Jesus figurines every week.

[–] NegativeLookBehind@kbin.social 29 points 1 year ago

Your comment is fucking gold. Thank you.

Maybe you should plan better and get the ball gags in Jesus's size so you can drop them off at the local cult

[–] horsey@lemm.ee 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure. Wiggle your mouse, introduce randomness into your typing, and read about things you’re not interested in. It doesn’t matter though as they’ll still sell your info.

[–] atlasraven31@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago

Garbage in, garbage out.

[–] somedaysoon@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think we will eventually see tooling for data-poisoning, and it will become a valid counter-measure for maintaining privacy.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They already exist. AdNauseam is a good example of that - it clicks advertisement links for you so it's harder to know what you're into.

[–] DudeDudenson@lemmings.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're still generating data that will be sold. I doubt most companies do any sort of deep analysis on the data when they can just throw it at an algorithm and let it do it's thing

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't fully agree with the approach, and I also think that generating no data is better in this case, but the reasoning is that the data being generated contains so much noise that it's useless for profiling. Or even poisonous, since it might create associations that don't exist (e.g. selling dildos to zealots, or advertising books on quantum mechanics to pet owners). As such, its attractiveness and thus selling value decreases.

[–] DudeDudenson@lemmings.world 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah but I don't think the people who buy the data actually see individual clickrate. If it was a massive adoption thing sure but if only 0.005% of people do it it's statistically meaningless

[–] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No. People are always going to pay for your data even if you make it incorrect.

[–] Chunk@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Yeah this. Google has no interest in determining if your data is real or not. They don't care. They only care that the customer isn't aware of the scam.

[–] gmtom@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Companies don't purchase specific user data they purchase datasets.

Like reddit will says "we have x amount of user and here is what data we collect on them" you can access this data for $Y"

So and then those companies use that data to show you personalised ads or whatever and do a fuck ton, like and obscene amount of data analysis on it and your habits to see if it was worth the cost and will renovate with reddit the price to access their data.

So one individual user going weird won't do anything. But if you made a ton of bots and made them act weird you might be able to make the dataset worth less. But honestly probably not that much as they have tools to filter bots and stuff.

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unlink it from yourself. It's harder than you'd think. Use a privacy respecting browser with privacy badger installed and tor or VPN. Use generic credit cards. Use burner emails and phone numbers.

If none of your stuff is linked together and none of it is linked to you, it's not worth much, someone will buy it, but it'll be one of a billion useless records in a huge low quality dump.

[–] Chunk@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It depends on who you're hiding from. If you want to keep the GRU off your back then burner phones sound great. If I don't want Google to know too much about me then burner phones, generic credit cards, and tor are probably overkill.

[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah was just trying to make the personal data worth as little as possible.

Any site you use a card on will link you in Nexus. That stuff is gold.

Even the best privacy browsers leave a fingerprint. You can run the acid test and see how unique you are. Even Firefox private browsing isn't enough to disassociate your traffic from non private.

The problem with VPN is it's somewhat static. Tor spreads your crap out.

But as you say, it's who you're trying to hide from. If you don't want anyone to profit of you, you hide from them all as much as you can.

[–] Chunk@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

You made me think that there should be a private tor-inspired VPN. Users pay money to the VPN company and that VPN company pays 3rd parties to build out their network.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are browser extensions that fill up your data/presence with meaningless junk

[–] sparky678348@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] otter@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago

I was hoping someone else would comment since I don't use it myself

I think it's this

https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam

[–] anarchy79@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't worry it probably already is.

[–] redballooon@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Meta and Google disagree.

[–] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

There’s definitely less valuable demographics but I doubt it would be completely worthless, you’d just be cheaper to advertise to.

I mean it might make it seem like you’re more valuable and then never buy anything, some companies would be paying more to show you ads but get less return, so you’d be costing them more money.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use generated email/usernames everywhere I’m forced to login, in the hope they can’t connect all the dots. Don’t know if it works though.

[–] funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

I work in marketing, had an issue the other day someone did something weird by browsing our site with a personal email address and worked out the naming conventions we use to jump the sign up form for an in-person event and went straight to the thank-you page to get the details.

So then we had his personal email (which we didn't want!) and had to connect it to his work email in the CRM to connect his profile.

So, for the general use cases it would work, but someone that is trying to connect the dots probably could.