Inspired by a question I saw a while back, is it possible to make my data/online presence useless/undesirable to companies to purchase?
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.
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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.
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
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.
Garbage in, garbage out.
No. People are always going to pay for your data even if you make it incorrect.
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.
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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.
Plus, if advertisers are paying for cost-per-click, it’s costing them money for each ad that is clicked on
Yes… but the money goes to the ad network tracking you and building profiles. So I would disregard the cost aspect.
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
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.
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
It’s impossible to make your data completely unattractive to purchase but using something like the adnauseum extension on your browser can make your data less useful when it has been purchased.
What does that do?
I could go on and on about it!
Please. Proceed.
unless this is a quote/meme I’m not familiar with
It just clicks on every ad you encounter. Ad nauseam.
It is a kind of quote/meme. Ad nauseum means on and on (literally until you get sick of it).
It’s a uBlock Origin fork that “clicks” on any ad it comes across off-screen.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
There are browser extensions that fill up your data/presence with meaningless junk
Like what?
I was hoping someone else would comment since I don’t use it myself
I think it’s this
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.
Don’t worry it probably already is.
Meta and Google disagree.
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.
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Ransomware has never looked attractive until now.
