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Comment by thbb123 | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism, makes it useless. Ultimately I'm inclined to believe that privacy through noise generation is a solution.

If I ever find some idle time, I'd like to make an agent that surfs the web under my identity and several fake ones, but randomly according to several fake personality traits I program. Then, after some testing and analysis of the generated patterns of crawl, release it as freeware to allow anyone to participate in the obfuscation of individuals' behaviors.

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You might want to take a look at differential privacy. It takes an unintuitive amount of noise to make the system useless.

You also need to account for how "easy" it is to de-anonymize a profile.

(Sorry I don't have links to sources handy.)

> You might want to take a look at differential privacy

Differential privacy is just a bait to make surveillance more socially acceptable and to have arguments to silence critics ("no need to worry about the dangers - we have differential privacy"). :-(

Sounds a bit like AdNauseam Firefox extension.

In my vision, it's the opposite of ad blocker, it's something that generates non existent traffic and views beyond what I would have done.

I believe that is what adnauseum does. Fake clicking ads and things like that

And just like AdNauseam using it would be dangerous and pointless.

Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism

Yes, but in this case which we're discussing:

It may often times be trickier than that - content often mixed of course. My 10 y/o hit me with a request yesterday to play Among Us where the age verification system wanted my full name, address, email, AND the last 4 digits of my SSN. I refused.

The bad actor still gets ROI, eg 'paid', for another bit of user data.

Making the overall system less useful is good. However, not allowing a company to profit, and giving fake info still allows for that, is paramount. EG, even with fake info, many metrics on a phone are still gamed and profitable.

That's why they're collected, after all. For profit.

> I disagree. Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism, makes it useless.

There's no such thing as useless info. Companies will sell it, buy it, and act on it regardless of how true it is. Nobody cares if the data is accurate. Nobody is checking to see if it is. Filling your dossier with false information about yourself won't stop companies from using that data. It can still cost you a job. It can still be used as justification to increase what companies charge you. It can still influence which policies they apply to you or what services they offer/deny you. It can still get you arrested or investigated by police. It can still get you targeted by scammers or extremists.

Any and all of the data you give them will eventually be used against you somehow, no matter how false or misleading it is. Stuffing your dossier with more data does nothing but hand them more ammo to hit you with.

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