Posted on 03/09/2021 9:43:22 AM PST by MtnClimber
Algorithms are meaningless without good data. The public can exploit that to demand change.
Every day, your life leaves a trail of digital breadcrumbs that tech giants use to track you. You send an email, order some food, stream a show. They get back valuable packets of data to build up their understanding of your preferences. That data is fed into machine-learning algorithms to target you with ads and recommendations. Google cashes your data in for over $120 billion a year of ad revenue.
Increasingly, we can no longer opt out of this arrangement. In 2019 Kashmir Hill, then a reporter for Gizmodo, famously tried to cut five major tech giants out of her life. She spent six weeks being miserable, struggling to perform basic digital functions. The tech giants, meanwhile, didn’t even feel an itch.
Now researchers at Northwestern University are suggesting new ways to redress this power imbalance by treating our collective data as a bargaining chip. Tech giants may have fancy algorithms at their disposal, but they are meaningless without enough of the right data to train on.
In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference next week, researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage:
Data strikes, inspired by the idea of labor strikes, which involve withholding or deleting your data so a tech firm cannot use it—leaving a platform or installing privacy tools, for instance. Data poisoning, which involves contributing meaningless or harmful data. AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google’s ad-targeting algorithms.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
I put my cell phone next to my computer as I listen to radio stations so it will gather audio data that is not me. I use browsers that don’t track me. Looking for other ways people are using to either avoid the trackers or to flood the trackers with useless data.
PING!..................
BFL
I was just about to ping you. Will ping ETL instead.
Ping
Ping.
I shop online for tampons. Throws their whole algorithm off.
Start by getting a REAL firewall instead of a router from Best Buy.
I shop online for tampons. Throws their whole algorithm off.
~~~
Bahahaha! brilliant.
So tempted to open edge (I never use edge) and do the same thing.
The funny thing is that they don’t now I’m really a dog.
Nothing kills a punchline like a spelling error.
I do crossword puzzles. My searches tend to be for obscure and pop-culture things.
” AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you”
That’s why there’s an ADBLOCKER extension, and that’s why I never get ads while playing YT videos. But its still info being sent to them what types of video you watch.
Bkmrk
Dogs have problems with spelling.
Poisoning is the right way. I’ve already got YouTube convinced I am a Korean-speaking female. They are wasting a lot of their advertisers’ money on me. :)
I wish some of those machine learning algorithms worked better. I have been trying to train Amazon’s book recommendations for years...
Cradlepoint AER series routers are serious kit. Not cheap, but highly effective.
They sure are.
L
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