👏 Poison 👏 your 👏 data ☠️
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Wrt #PII, It might be a good idea to avoid entering data easily identifiable as trash, and use generators instead. E.g.:
@penguinrebellion that's why I said plausible, but fake.
Generators are good though.
There are, however, reasons to enter something wildly off every so often, like "test@example.com", because it tells companies that field is obviously fake. This both makes the plausible fakes more likely to slip by if they do use your data, but also makes them more likely to discard your data for marketing and analytics purposes in general.
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The goal is to make corporate data less profitable.
Even stuff as simple as setting your birthdate to 1970-01-01 everywhere, adding [TEST] or [DELETED] as your name or account notes anywhere you don't need them to know your name.
Using plugins like AdNauseam to poison ad trackers (and cost them marketing dollars).
Using VPNs set to different locations.
Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info). Bonus points if you correct it to someone else's info on their site that's similar to yours.
Only fill in required fields when you sign up for anything, but only provide correct info if it matters for you to use the service, otherwise provide plausible, but incorrect, data.
If you use LLMs anywhere, use the free tier and always vote thumbs up for bad answers and down for good ones. It wastes their resources and drives up their costs while making their training data worse.
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Haha, you'd like my mother, the guerilla witch. She makes customer cards in every shop and switches them then with other people, bonus points if both have a strongly different consumer profile.
When she's bored, she responds maliciously questionnaires of evil corporations.
She studied psychology and statistics and says "it is anyway horribly difficult to get useful answers out of these marketing datasets, why not make it a bit harder for them?"
.@earthworm TIL I have a second kid.
My education is in psychology and statistics, and I do shit like that whenever I can.
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@apriloq that's easy! They all do!
But they're also very incestuous, so poisoning one will often cause a trickle down their pantleg to the next one who is thirsty for your data.
An easy way to start finding targets is to google your name, then explore the links you didn't sign up for.
Sites like:
- Spokeo
- BeenVerified
- Intelius
- TruthFinder
- MyLife
- Whitepages -
@djtoebeans @isol I use the nearby pizza place's number for my loyalty cards—as do a lot of other people.
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@theorangetheme I'd love to make a bot that just hits all the big LLMs and corporate "help" bots, and simply shuffles their answers to each other randomly, then randomly up or downvotes the replies.
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Hi, this is relevant to my interests. Is there a full set of instructions available for the data broker part of it or is that something I should just go look up?
Thanks for your efforts so far...
@resister check out the list of brokers here: https://github.com/optery/optery-data-brokers-directory
Removal is a game of whack-a-mole (as they regularly just reimport or purchase data from each other if there's a gap). That's why poisoning is more effective.
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@zavaj you're welcome!
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@Irenetherogue sure! There are low tech ways to do it—just lie...to every corporation, app, and marketer you can. Make it plausible, but wrong.
Bonus: include something wildly implausible once in a while. It makes folx more likely to overlook the subtle ones.
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