| ▲ | analogpixel 5 hours ago | |
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. | ||