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.
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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
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.
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.
AdNauseum plugin combined with VPN and private browser mode.
It’s an ad blocker that clicks everything.
I’ve kind of always wanted to use AdNauseum, but since I still depend on my Google account somewhat I’m hesitant to give them reasons to delete me, and I’ve settled for blocking ads and supporting rival services.
Has anyone had their google account banned over this?
Private browser mode in many browsers disables plugins by default, and also doesn’t do anything to stop trackers or data collection. All private mode does is keep your activity private from others who also have access to your device (e.g. family members, roommates), by not saving browser history/cookies/etc.
Also, VPN’s can be helpful, but there are ways to “fingerprint” individual users behind VPN’s by how they move their mouse and click speed and what websites they visit etc… I imagine plugins like AdNauseum could help with that. It’s a clever idea, I’ll have to check it out - thanks!
Firefox can allow plugins in private mode. I only mentioned private mode because it ensures you’re not logged in anywhere.
Is this chaotic neutral or chaotic evil?
I contend that it’s chaotic good.
This is just my opinion, but I don’t think so. I love the thought and wish there was, though. I think no matter what you do, it’s still information about a potential user/customer and still tells someone looking at it about you. “Oh, we have information on about 4% of the population that wants to actively subvert our data analytics.”. Obviously that’s made up, I didn’t bother trying to even guess what a potentially realistic number might be.
Again in my opinion, the only way to provide no value to data analytics is to not be a data point, and good luck with that. Best I’ve been trying to do is disable targeted ads anywhere I can, reset my identifier ids regularly on things like android tv where I can, and try to blast cookies anywhere possible. I don’t know if it even makes a difference or just makes me feel better
Its super unpopular on Reddit and even less popular on here but… Have my data, i dont give a fuck.
What are you going to find out? I’m a straight white man approaching middle-age. I’m into DIY, cars that were cool 20 years ago, music that was cool 20 years ago, cooking on my bbq and trying desperately to avoid becoming old AND fat. I’m wearing New Balance runners and cargo shorts RIGHT NOW. I’ve become a complete caricature of a “Dad”.
You think you can find some embarrassing shit with my porn history? Nope, Ill tell you what my jam is for free. I dont care.
I’m already tighter with my money than a dolphins asshole. Put the prices up, I just wont buy it. I’m on a playthrough of a 22yo videogame on a pc I built with second hand parts because fuck paying $130 for a brand new AAA title.
What are “they” going to mine from me?
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In the 1960s Alka Seltzer was in poor shape financially, they came up with a new slogan “Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz” because although 1 tablet was generally considered to be a sufficient dose, 2 is more. Its more effective and it sells twice as many.
In the 1920sa meat packing company wanted to sell more bacon, so they hired Edward Bernays a marketing exec. He asked his agencies doctor if a heartier breakfast could make people healthier, when he said yes the asked him to write to 5000 other physicians 4500 of them agreed in principal that yes, a more substantial breakfast of which bacon could be a part could make people overall healthier. The marketing company leveraged peoples trust of doctors to pound them full of salt and saturated fat.
People all of a sudden love to act like manipulating people came along with Facebook and we were in some fantastic consumer utopia before. Nope. Its just more of the same shit, just new vectors.
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I think we are talking about our “Data” very differently. When I say “fuck it, they can have mine” I mean the crumbs they can pick apart from someone who takes the most basic data privacy protections and who doesnt go on facebook filling out surveys and literally volunteering their information away. That demographic is their wet dream and they out number people who do understand this stuff by orders of magnitude. Im just not using TOR and HTML scraping to deny giving them so much as a single tracking cookie while hiding behind over 9000 proxies.
I use Firefox with most of the tracking protections turned on, I clear my cookies and cache. I dont fill out surveys or join mailing lists to get access to exclusive offers and I dont like or share every last thing I see on social media. But I still have facebook because I like marketplace and I still use google for searches because its handy and yeah I do turn on “private browsing” for porn.
I’m aware of what they are doing and can do with mass data collection, the real problem as I see it is that people like you and I who do understand are shockingly outnumbered by people who actively give them more than they could ever use, people who honestly beleive they couldnt be manipulated by what the algorithms feed them. Those people have been manipulated by basic psychology tricks since long before data collection and Analytica on social media.
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This is the answer. Clarity and frugality. It doesn’t matter that they can make accurate predictions of your interests if you simply never click.
they wouldn’t spend millions on ads if people were immune to them
The expression “a fool and his money will soon be parted” or a variation of that was first published in 1573.
“A foole & his money, be soone at debate: which after with sorow, repents him to late.”
If you cant go on facebook without buying some T-shirt for $40 because some targeted add knows you’re all about Pickle Rick right now. The problem isnt targeted advertisement.
You basically described the other half of me right here. I waffle back and forth between your view and trying to do something about it. I go back to feeling it’s futile and doesn’t matter anyway, before getting fed up with targeted ads again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I’m aware of it, thats how I fight back.
Ive needed new day to day runners for months, the inner heel is shredded and the soles have very little tread but I havent seen anything I like on a decent sale yet. I know the prices on most of the shit I want and on all the shit I need.
Now my facebook regularly shoves adds for shoes at me 365 days a year. The last pair of new all purpose runners/training shoes I bought retailed for $150 - $200, I saw a targeted advertisement for 25% off and I clicked on it and I got a pair thats usually $160 for $120 did they win or did I win?
I’d say they did, nobody actively advertises a product they don’t want to sell, unless it’s some type of loss leader.
Of course, you got cheap shoes out of it, so perhaps you both won?
The thing is what is valuable or not is up to you. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean they don’t want it. What’s perfectly legal and mundane today can be illegal tomorrow.
If they outlaw blondes with big tits there will be a revolution.
There are a lot of good advice given to me that I didn’t take so I’m not coming from a holier than thou place. I know all the amazing benifits of regularly working out and yet I’m still a lazy bum.
The only difference is I don’t go on the internet replying to posts on working out about how much I don’t give a shit about my health, picking fights with strangers.
I’m already tighter with my money than a dolphins asshole.
Very nicely put :-)
But still an illusion. You are still a true and well adapted consumer, connected to all your pipes in The Matrix.
Saying that you are tight is equal to saying that you feel powerless, because all your money=power is owned by somebody else.
You are actually consuming. You are actually spending your money. You feel like you have no choice, but you have - if you only recognized it.
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.
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.
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.
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Ransomware has never looked attractive until now.
