Some friends and I have been talking and we think the better choice would be to write something that would flood your profile with data.
Your stuff may still be there but with that much noise it would make the data useless.
Your stuff may still be there but with that much noise it would make the data useless.
They could choose to ignore low confidence measurements and still assume you are the same person from that point in time last year. Given that they can measure the standard rate of change in people’s interests (per interest even), and how quickly interests fall out of style, they can then extrapolate how relevant certain ads might be for you today based on your old data.
Imagine that. They don’t just own your data today, they own all the forecasts of your data for years to come. Go home and sleep on it.
Maybe so, but the success of marketing has different probabilities for different individuals. So, if you're Facebook, it wouldn't make sense to invest in de-poisoning poisoned tracking data if they'd have a low chance of success with their marketing messages. Also, I'm doubtful any de-poisoning technique is perfect, so the resulting profile is probably worse for targeted marketing, all else being equal, as well.
Better if you can get your account suspended for something that doesn't provoke a law enforcement response.
If you already use FB services, stop using them and don’t give anymore data. They will still know about you, but at least you won’t give them any new information.
You’ll probably get ads for people who are paranoid or security conscious.
Isn't that like NP-hard or something?
Furthermore, would they care? Realistically, you're padding their numbers. Things can be popular simply because they're liked (whether it's synthetic or not).
If you do it all at once it’s trivially easy. They know a person doesn’t just become a new person overnight.
If you commit to creating an elaborate fake personality by doing things your fake self would do, it can be harder, but not impossible. Certainly not a problem for some of the greatest minds in Silicon Valley.
For many years Facebook thought I was Jewish and was spamming me with ads to become a rabbi and move to Israel, but I am the least Jewish person you'd ever meet. And that could easily be determined by publicly searchable data about myself.
- Seed a crawler with your own profile (or any other). Make it find 50~100 public contacts with public timeline in your network. Scrape their shares along with their timestamp deltas to their corresponding previous shares. Omit the very first, for that it lacks a proper timestamp delta. Put them all in a collection.
- Pick any one by random, post it all the same, after the same amount of delay as the original share against its previous share. Repeat.
You may shuffle the sentences whenever there are more than just one sentence, to obfuscate things a little.
How would it handle historical data? I don't think you can backdate messages and photos.
Also could you use ML to be more discrete to avoid the spam flag?
Too much trouble to even start that.
For example, the Hola "unblocker" C&C people have this service. https://luminati.io/
Do it progressively enough, and when would FB know the difference?