Why do this? Because surveillance capitalism wants you to be less free. It wants you to be glued to the screen. It wants you to buy whatever advertisers want you to buy. But you can fight back by deliberately poisoning your data.
There’s no reason to over complicate this. Set boundaries with yourself. Set a budget, cut up your credit cards, try the envelope system, set limits to how much time you spend on social media.
I wonder if you could make a self-hostable data poisoning automation utility. Put in a bunch of credentials for various social media sites, and it creates unintelligible usage patterns associated with your online identities. Not so much for poisoning training of generative AI, but for destroying any internal profiles any party might attempt to build on you by correlating your online behaviour.
Sounds like that alternative to Ublock that I can’t think of the name of right now that not only blocks ads but also gives a click-through input to every single one, poisoning any ad metrics for the ads as well as any targeted ad profiling on you.
I think the add-on is : adnauseam
That’s the one, thanks.
I ran this for a while. It generated some interesting ad choices for me.
Do you mean by that that it changed what ads were shown to you over time? As in it changed your profile? Curious as to the impact it has :)
Random things I never saw on the page. Some of the ads I did see were foreign. It had a effect but it also at the time loaded the browser up enough I finally got rid of it.
janeway: “get on it”
She’s saying that when you use social media, only like, read, etc., stuff that you want to learn from or you like listening to. Scroll past the flight or flight stuff, that’s the story they want for you. Your feed will quickly be a nice place to hang out and it will poison their data.
Data poisoning can go a lot further than this. There are fascinating (and hilarious) videos by people who poison their music with inaudible (to humans) noise which, when it’s stolen by an AI company and used to train a model, will cause the model to output unintelligible garbage. Images can also be manipulated this way so that the model sees a completely different image than the human. Then there are the Nepenthes traps for AI data trawlers which trap the trawlers in an inescapable web of nested webpages of nonsense. The future is bright.
How does it poison their data to share your honest preferences with them? Doesn’t that give them the most accurate dossier possible so they can hit you with ads that micro-target your interests?
That’s not poison. Thats helping them profile you. 🤔
I’ve gotten a lot out of YouTube by leafing through the recommendations on videos that I liked and saving any promising ones to ‘watch later’ playlists by topic. I have a couple dozen of such playlists, each with multiple dozens of videos. Could live off these for a year at least.
Of course, as mentioned, this is the opposite of poisoning the data.
an inescapable web of nested webpages of nonsense
Like the most annoying webpage from the old Internet?
https://web.archive.org/web/20030402051520/http://www.mostannoyingwebpage.com/v1/
Thank you so much
We used to call the email equivalent of a nepenthes trap a teergrube.
“fight back against surveillance capitalism and malicious advertisers by watching this youtube video”
Get a load of this! Can’t make this stuff up…
You gotta meet the people where they’re at to get them informed. If this information was hidden away in some privacy/security-centered blog, a fraction as many people would see it.
I know, I was just pointing out the irony that youtube is one of the primary offenders of surveillance capitalism
I agree with you! There’s a layer of irony.
I wish the fediverse would get a wider user base, like loops and peertube. The more people use it, the more viable it will be as an alternative.
What’s the tl;dr for people that don’t want to navigate to YouTube?
But the video has boobies… /s
Don’t engage with algorithms, especially ones trying to sell things, like major corporate social media.
Pretend to be something you’re not, especially vulnerable targeted populations. This lowers their ability easily target minorities.
Pretend to be something you’re not
In my life, I was Noel Gruber who worked at Taco Bell in Uranium City, Saskatchewan. But in my dreams I played a different role. I was Monique Gibeau in post-war France! A hooker, with a heart of black charcoal.
So the fact that I occasionally get ads in Spanish, despite being a native English speaker in a mainly English-speaking country, means I’m doing something right?
I would say so. You can also intermittently make a new profile, and seed it initially with wildly different personal info and interests.
It is a good practice to restart independent accounts and not reuse them on multiple devices.
You can also silo types of information, like location, personal stats, email, browsing history, web searches, chat services, calls, etc.
I second this. If you get a response can you please let me know?
A response is in! :)
Thanks OP.
Best I can do is AI generated transcript: https://pastes.io/if-i-told-
The irony in this being a youtube link though
No one knows other video sharing sites exist
It’s ok though. Using MPV to watch YouTube is a good way to stick it to the man
