But I agree that it's pointless to delete visible data about yourself, because statistics are already stored somewhere else and you don't have power over it.
It might well be useless to start today with your existing accounts. But it's a principle worth knowing about nonetheless. It's certainly possible to poison data from the beginning of your contact with a service - especially for ones less pervasive than Facebook. An account that never sees entirely true data may not be able to build up an accurate profile.
Having said that, providing false information does violate the ToS for most sites. Which probably isn't a federal crime, given US v Lori Drew, but it's certainly not a good idea for an account you can't afford to have suspended.
Call it Social Chaff as a Service (SCaaS).
note: I know that some people actually would. but philosophically speaking I just don't get it, it's almost like its missing some kind of deeper point.
You give them too much credit. This would require some PLM being concerned with such activity enough to add the anomaly detection. Unless they are way proactive over theoretical issues.
Starting salary for a postdoc is a bit less than $50k, and this is after 5+ years of grad school, during which you make even less (often $20-30k) One can expect to be a postdoc for 3-5+ years before becoming remotely competitive for an independent (faculty) position, and another 5 years before the job is relatively secure. The competition for these jobs—and the remaining industrial ones—is savage and unpredictable.
This is bad for so many reasons: frantic people don’t do careful experiments or do good science, very smart people opt out all together and figure out how to make you click on ads instead, and a lot of time, money, and effort gets wasted in the churn.
If you want more cancer research and less ad optimization, nag your reps to improve how we fund research!