We need more posts like this. I'd love a follow-up where instead of removing it injects fake data to the system. I am tired of passively being digitally assaulted. If they are going to do this to me without my knowing consent I want to fight back.

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matheusmoreira 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, like AdNauseam. We're way too polite when it comes to these exploitative corporations. Start poisoning their data sets. Start costing them as much money as humanly possible. Drive their returns on investments as close to zero as possible, ideally well into the negatives.

	▲	KumaBear 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Just wait when L4 and L5 vehicles become mainstream. Tinkering with the car will be illegal. Because of our safety and the scare of bad actors.

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analogpixel 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm always surprised there aren't more projects that just pump random data back into all of these system. I think awhile back there was a plugin that would click on every advertisement it saw over and over, but got shutdown for some reason. But how hard is it to just have everyone inject nonstop data to all of these tracking systems? if nothing else a drive somewhere is going to eventually fill up.

	▲	jmward01 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Hmmm... This isn't evil enough. This could actually work. This data is valuable which means there are entities that will pay to bias it. If you want a business to look more traveled, create fake driving tracks to it. If you want insurance to give you an amazing deal, build a system to slow your driving to look perfect. Random is likely easy to detect but why not get paid to forward fake data that someone else wants to inject! They will spend real time figuring out how to make it look real and get value out of it which will -really- destroy the dataset.
	▲	mywittyname 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There have been plenty of projects that do send junk data to these endpoints. The problem is the junk data gets users noticed because some manager looking at dashboards gets an alert about some supersonic Corolla driving down the Pacific. And they go yell at the team responsible. As a result, analytics endpoints generally have some authentication and verification built into them. Obviously, with enough time it's possible to reverse engineer these components. But that's a lot of time and effort vs just blocking the request.

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mywittyname 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just be aware, this is something that will be noticed. I've been building analytics systems for a while now and have had people do this. Usually it gets picked up by the anomaly detection system or as an alert in the ETL pipeline when we try to transform it.

Personally, I just plop it into a "dead letter office" table, then verify it's not malicious. But it's possible other companies would handle this differently.

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HNisCIS 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Feed it the current location of the ISS and see what happens to your insurance rates.

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rllearneratwork 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

this is great idea! Hackers of Hacker News let's have more projects to overwhelm bad actors with bad data. Perhaps using OSS LLMs for that.