Giving fake info feeds the machine. It means you still consume, and a bad actor profits.

I disagree. Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism, makes it useless. Ultimately I'm inclined to believe that privacy through noise generation is a solution.

If I ever find some idle time, I'd like to make an agent that surfs the web under my identity and several fake ones, but randomly according to several fake personality traits I program. Then, after some testing and analysis of the generated patterns of crawl, release it as freeware to allow anyone to participate in the obfuscation of individuals' behaviors.

▲

noam_k 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You might want to take a look at differential privacy. It takes an unintuitive amount of noise to make the system useless.

You also need to account for how "easy" it is to de-anonymize a profile.

(Sorry I don't have links to sources handy.)

	▲	aleph_minus_one 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You might want to take a look at differential privacy Differential privacy is just a bait to make surveillance more socially acceptable and to have arguments to silence critics ("no need to worry about the dangers - we have differential privacy"). :-(

▲

b112 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism

Yes, but in this case which we're discussing:

It may often times be trickier than that - content often mixed of course. My 10 y/o hit me with a request yesterday to play Among Us where the age verification system wanted my full name, address, email, AND the last 4 digits of my SSN. I refused.

The bad actor still gets ROI, eg 'paid', for another bit of user data.

Making the overall system less useful is good. However, not allowing a company to profit, and giving fake info still allows for that, is paramount. EG, even with fake info, many metrics on a phone are still gamed and profitable.

That's why they're collected, after all. For profit.

▲

fsflover 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sounds a bit like AdNauseam Firefox extension.

▲

thbb123 5 hours ago | parent [-]

In my vision, it's the opposite of ad blocker, it's something that generates non existent traffic and views beyond what I would have done.

	▲	wholinator2 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I believe that is what adnauseum does. Fake clicking ads and things like that

▲

acomjean 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Last century my dad would give our pets names out with our real phone #(oddly or by mistake). The pets did start getting phone calls.

If the info becomes bad, it becomes much less useful and valuable.

I’m in the us and we o need some rights to privacy.