How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you

MIT Technology Review ^ | 5 Mar, 2021 | Karen Haoarchive page

[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.

[zeugma]

Start by getting a REAL firewall instead of a router from Best Buy.

I like routers that work with DD-WRT

[Scaramouch]

“I shop online for tampons. Throws their whole algorithm off.”

I love that!

[reintarnation]

I have some javascript code that I sometimes let run for a few hours. It runs google searches on random sets of words. The old ‘garbage in - garbage out’ routine.

On a more serious note, Google has moved way beyond simple tracking. It buys up data from everyone. Say you’re taking a flight from Denver to Portland. It has your flight number, seat assignment, parking lot or Uber travels, drinks and purchases in the airport and on the plane, etc. And tracked your cell phone all the way.

It does this for nearly everything you do.

[nicollo]

Seems like a lot of work for no actual gain. Oh great so now the ads aren’t something that you would be interested in, so what. Google probably thinks AdNaseum is great, since they get paid on click-throughs, please click everything.

Gurgle may love that, but advertisers will not. I think adnauseum is brilliant.

Gurgle is an extorsion racket: most online ad buys are simply to keep the other guy from placing an ad instead of you. Keyword buys are even worse: big companies just out-bid everyone else. If they gain anything from the buy, I doubt, but they do gain by not letting a competitor have a top of the page return.

It's disgusting and anti-competitive. F** Gurgle.

[Noumenon]

Good advice on all counts. Battery removal works well, but fewer phones offer that option these days. Wonder why that is? Depending on the need, burner phones are another good option. We’re headed for a panopticon society whether we like it or not.

[CJ Wolf]

I remember the last time the net was gonna jam the data gathering system. Scheduled for a few days after 9-11-01.

[nicollo]

I shop online for tampons. Throws their whole algorithm off.

My wife and I do the equivalent of that with online movies. We use the same account for everything, so the Netflix, etc. algorithms are entirely confused and feed us a constant flow suggested time-travel romance and Jason Statham knockoff movies.

[PistolPaknMama]

Autocorrect can go straight to he’ll

Apparently. :)

[discostu]

Advertisers won’t know the difference. 99% of click throughs already result in no sale. Advertising is about repetition. You hit em again and again and again and hopefully when they actually want a product in your category they think of you. Adnauseum is stupid and using it is just jerking off.

[nicollo]

advertisers pay per click. yes, they do care.

[SunkenCiv]

AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google’s ad-targeting algorithms.

Heh...

[discostu]

Again, they won’t notice. Unless millions of people start using it. It’s just not an issue.

[I_be_tc]

thanks