Posted on 03/31/2018 9:06:30 AM PDT by ptsal
Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned a lot about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and how Facebook uses your data. The revelations have pushed many users—including some brands and celebrities—to leave the social network altogether. Rather than simply deleting your profile or profile information, however, some are advising a slightly different tactic to protect your online identity: tainting that data.
Developer and former systems administrator Kevin Matthew published a script that goes back through your Facebook posts and edits them with randomly generated characters.
Based on his knowledge as a systems administrator, Matthew explains that “even by conservative assumptions, your data never really disappears permanently” when you deactivate or delete your Facebook account. With that in mind, the next best thing, he argues, is to go back through your history on the social network and “poison” (or otherwise obfuscate) all that data.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailydot.com ...
I’m damn tired of seeing ads pop up on media sites, of items I have looked at on the net. One was wigs. Several on Drudge and they were moving to boot. Very distracting and very disturbing.
Funny. Anyone who’s ever been on the Interweb knows that you’ve been tracked. The whiners over Facebook are, well, whiners.
I’ll stay on FB. Met some old friends, hooked up with some old girlfriends, keep in touch with my kids, this whole mess of becoming verklempft over FB data is hilarious.
Stay or go. Those of us who stick around know that our data will be gathered and used. Those who don’t stick around were idiots to begin with.
Because he said to run the script once a month for a few months to delete your info on older backups.
That means you have to carefully plan your removal, and take several months doing so (according to the author’s plan).
This assumes that eventually Facebook no longer restores old backups or looks in them for data mining old content.
That depends on just how far back they go to mine data. If I was buying data from them, I’d want it to be fairly fresh.
I’ll bet they don’t too far beyond one year back to pull data.
If you’re periodically overwriting old data, eventually the oldest “clean” data will drop off the search sources.
thanks, only joined twice under fake ID just to be able to pick up some information on an open account related to research, then unsubscribed immediately.
Did you know FB has a window to update your voters registration in case you moved? Talk about a way to change elections with fake votes.
What’s interesting is when you have to call a customer service person for your credit card and they swear they aren’t able to see your password or personal info but after a few minutes they always slip up and tell you the first letter of your password or your dog’s name. Of course they see everything on you.
bgill wrote:
Did you know FB has a window to update your voters registration in case you moved? Talk about a way to change elections with fake votes.
Uh oh....
Women in … custody who would otherwise be subjected to the Trump administration’s attempt to force them to bring to [the] pregnancy to term.”
Uh’m, they can pay for it themselves.
The taxpayer shouldn’t pay for an elective surgery or to snuff out another person’s life.
POISONING THE FACEBOOK DATA WELL
As a Masters in Computer Software, here is the approach to poisoning the Facebook data well. It can be done.
Facebook could not just revert back to archived data because it is unknown when good and bad data occur.
RANDOM: Random character insertion into your data is least effective, easiest to program, but easiest to detect and reverse.
TRANSFORMATION: Words would be transformed based upon type or class, such as Color: white is green, red is blue etc.
Person: father is grandma, niece is cousin etc.
This requires a big dictionary, but it is impossible to detect.
TRANSPOSE: Words of similar part of speech are transposed within the paragraphs. eg Dog chased the cat. > Cat chased the dog.
REPLACEMENT: Part of Speech is replaced.
eg Dog chased the cat. > Dog married the cat.
Random garble would occur in the final stages.
PROGRAMMERS: Any motivated programmer can get started. Just point Facebook to your website and press the Garble button.
ADVERTISERS: Ad companies would become annoyed as data, over time cannot be trusted. In fact, the entire Facebook site could be destroyed in this fashion. But I do not recommend this.
A Garble button would be nice though. Any takers?
ANTONYM REPLACEMENT
The most effective way to poison the Facebook data is with an Antonym dictionary. It would be irreversible and quite effective.
And yes, it could bring down Facebook permanently.
eg The cat ran well. > The cat ran bad. > The cat ran benevolent. > The can ran deserted.
Antonyms are divergent. Replace each word with iterations of antonyms.
Bookmark
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.