8 ms·

Can I propose that we start on a "noise" tool/browser plugin for these suveillance captialism companies? Not only would this be very interesting to implement it

Can I propose that we start on a "noise" tool/browser plugin for these suveillance captialism companies? Not only would this be very interesting to implement it woud help to mess up their profitability by training the algorithm in arbitrary stuff that no-one is interested in. It seems more sensible than trying to block them - instead give them loads of bad data ruining their business model? For instance you could pick which set of noise you wanted to feed Google i.e. convince Google you are single mother from Lithuania... or Facebook you're a 63 year old man from Italy or Instagram you are a Teenager from Korea. Every time a tracker or data point is sent to them to "know" you it could be a lie. This would lead you out of your search bubble too so political ads by Russians being bought to undermine Hillary's black vote might be more clear to everyone. Trusting Facebook or Google to do the right thing against their financial interest won't work will it.

janesvilleseo 8y ago
Might be fun. This would be similar to what recording industry did on P2P sites. At first it was easy to get what you were looking for. Then it got saturated with garbage.
- bambax 8y ago
  Did it? I didn't notice it.
  - kevas 8y ago
    Think Kazaa(?) days
  - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
    I barely noticed it back in the day too. I had a friend who was into piracy quite a bit more who complained about getting the wrong movie or getting the wrong mp3s. I don't know if I ran into that issue, but I wasn't really downloading a lot of mainstream stuff compared to him either.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  I recall the P2P sabotage efforts being pretty feeble. I particularly recall Madonna's record company having an album labled as her most recent album shared on KaZaa that was actually just a bunch of mp3s of her saying "What the fuck do you think you're doing!?". Funny stuff. Edit: Found a copy of the audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU5xC00m-gA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU5xC00m-gA
- rchaud 8y ago
  I remember that! From around 2001-2003, a good chunk of the Top 40 tunes found on file sharing networks would be one verse, looped over and over so the MP3 duration was equal to that of the actual song. This worked best on mainstream P2P clients like Limewire, Kazaa, Ares (all based on Gnutella I think), because the fake MP3s would propagate more widely. It didn't work as well (or at all), on relatively obscure, community-based networks like Slsk, where people were more likely to share entire albums, and not just the singles.
Vinnl 8y ago
I've been thinking about this as well, after using a manual version of this strategy. Might still implement it one day. That said, it's pretty hard. It's not entirely clear which data points Facebook uses, but it's very likely you can't influence all of them. For example, friends adding you as contacts, or linking your profile to your phone number. If you also want to continue using it as normal, your normal usage will still give a lot of data about what you view; what you interact with; when you use it; that might stand out from the random stuff - and if you don't want to continue using it as usual, the extension will have to visit the website by itself, without interfering with your regular browsing activity, and without relying on your computer being on. I also think that if something like this would get big enough to actually impact the quality of their algorithms, it'd be pretty easy for Facebook to detect abnormal activity. (And of course, it's not even that much of a problem if the algorithm screws up more often, as long as advertisers believe it's accurate.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
tru3_power 8y ago
I am totally down with this.
JackuB 8y ago
Noiszy does that https://noiszy.com https://noiszy.com
- andy_ppp 8y ago
  Amazing, but I really don't trust them to browse the web for me!
- waynecochran 8y ago
  Can anyone vet this? How do I know they are not evil?
- lozaning 8y ago
  I've used this for quite some time, and can verify it works on some level. Generally after running it my google now suggested cards on Android are all out of right field and totally irrelevant to anything i'm actually interested in.
nurettin 8y ago
They will detect your noise. Then you will end up being one of their "noise client" datapoints, associating you with the actions and behaviors of a person who would pay for privacy and thus they will try to serve you ads according to your behavioural patterns as usual.
- Misdicorl 8y ago
  I think the goal would be to get a sufficient percentage of the entire internet to generate noise, without having to be aware of it. In a world where Firefox and Safari were the major internet browsers, this wouldn't actually be that hard since it could be built into those browsers directly and would already align pretty nicely with their respective parent company ethos
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - pixl97 8y ago
    "You cannot log onto Facebook with this web browser, please use Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge to continue" --FB
    - Misdicorl 8y ago
      Yes, that is one potential countermeasure. I wonder if it would be effective or if it would be the beginning of the end for fb.
      - pixl97 8y ago
        >In 2015, it is expected that 70.1 percent of Facebook users worldwide will access the social network through their mobile phone. What I don't know if that means browser or App. Not effective at all if most people use the app.
    - Misdicorl 8y ago
      Circling back again, the more likely warpath FB would pursue is making FB work very poorly on non-cooperative browsers and excellently on cooperative ones. Then users will blame the browser for being trash rather than FB.
r3bl 8y ago
AdNauseum[0] hides all the ads from you, but clicks them in the background to increase noise ratio. As you might assume, it's not available in the Chrome's extension store. I've used a similar add-on for Google search (the add-on made some human-like Google searches in the background), but I can't remember its name now. Facebook would be a pointless exercise, since the <div> names are automatically generated. You can't even hide the sidebars you never use using CSS because they'll all change their <div> IDs on refresh. That and the murkiness of what exactly is an ad on Facebook makes even the most thorough adblockers struggling to work properly even in an otherwise-ideal situation (a desktop browser with an adblocker). [0] https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- badfrog 8y ago
  > Facebook would be a pointless exercise, since the <div> names are automatically generated. Also: > all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...
  - r3bl 8y ago
    On top of that, Facebook and I have a different view on what constitutes as an ad. A Facebook page that I'm following paying money to reach me is an ad according to Facebook. To me, that's extortion. On the other side, we have notifications about friend suggestions. You can't turn them off in the notification settings. That to me is an "ad" for Facebook itself, even if nobody payed them money. It's an undesired content that pulls my attention away from what I came there to do in order to promote a product.
optymizer 8y ago
I have been using this strategy for years. I can't really tell if it works or not, but it makes logical sense. One issue is that there's data about you that's not generated by you, but by people you know (i.e. John adds me as a contact into their phone along with my birthday and address, Jane friends me on VK and keeps tagging me in pictures that have location data, etc). I suspect that right now, companies give higher importance to data that you've entered about yourself, but once they realize you're feeding them noise, they can adjust their algorithms to trust other people's data about you (if they're not already doing that), which would significantly decrease the effectiveness of feeding them noise about yourself. It will still work for all data points about you that can't be collected from other people (like browsing habits, your phone's location, etc)
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > they can adjust their algorithms to trust other people's data about you (if they're not already doing that), which would significantly decrease the effectiveness of feeding them noise about yourself. Maybe some people can inject noise about their friends, instead. For instance: 1. install the FB app on a phone with an address-book full of garbage and share it with the app, 2. inject fake geotag data in the photos you tag your friends in, 3. put the actual tag on strangers in the background, 4. tag your friends in stock photos, etc. Some of these you obviously can't do with friends who don't consent, since they may get annoyed by all the fake tags, but others would be transparent to most social media users.
sm4rk0 8y ago
Something like this? https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/
- ghobs91 8y ago
  Is this similar to what PrivacyBadger does, or would they complement each other?
  - sm4rk0 8y ago
    Not similar at all. TrackMeNot runs as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser, it's like you suddenly disappeared. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
efsavage 8y ago
If you don't like Facebook/Google/etc., wouldn't you be better off just not using them rather than spending time trying to hurt them? How will data vandalism make your life better?
- the_snooze 8y ago
  You can't meaningfully opt out of Facebook/Google/etc. They're embedded in tons of websites, and your friends will almost certainly give your information to those companies.
  - andy_ppp 8y ago
    And they fingerprint and track you regardless of you having an account!
  - efsavage 8y ago
    You can block trackers pretty easily, or just not visit those websites. You'll probably be a happier person if you just don't visit foo.com than spending any portion of your brief time on Earth trying to trick an ML model into thinking you're a single mother from Lithuania. Also, if your friend gives someone else information about you, do you expect that you should be able to control it? I'm pretty sure many of the details of my life appear in other people's emails, voicemails, journals, etc. that will never have a "forget me" button. I'm mainly suggesting that there are lots of ways to improve this situation, from market forces to legislation, and it's sad to see people wasting time on things that won't work.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      > You can block trackers pretty easily, or just not visit those websites. And since they're buying data from non-internet data brokers such as credit card companies, retailers that track you in their stores, etc., blocking the trackers and avoiding the websites doesn't actually stop the spying. To stop them from spying on you pretty much requires that you stop engaging in large swaths of real-world society.
  - 8y ago
mhuffman 8y ago
This might work. I vaguely remember Google actually panic-pulling a chrome extension that invisibly hid and clicked on every ad of every page visited. So I think they identify this as a tough to protect weakness as well.
dontbenebby 8y ago
>Can I propose that we start on a "noise" tool/borwser plugin for these suveillance captialism companies? It's been done :) http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ
- waynecochran 8y ago
  I read through a lot of this. I think it is still worth another try -- they approach it more from an obfuscation point of view -- I want to take it to the next level and "drown them" in noise. Don't just say "It's been done" and then decide it will never work. It may take several failures to find the best methods -- much like search was a major failure until the right recipe was found.
WRONgG 8y ago
I think the largest issue would be hiding the plugin from their eyes. Like youtubeDL sort of being a secret. The noise creating plugin can't be advertised as such because then the new history is easily un-noiseable. The tool would need to be something like a color picker that has a hidden command to run headerless searches in a tab of your browser. This (sort of) worked for teenagers hiding pictures on a fake calculator app on smartphones years ago, but your mom wont try to pry at your facebook obfuscation. Just a thought
freethemullet 8y ago
We could choose to cease to have preferences, limiting what there is to target.
bussiere 8y ago
i ve done an app with a friend that generate random phone number and add it to your adress book. And my pleasure is to let all the social network to siphon my adress book.
frereubu 8y ago
Reminds me of the good old days of meetups organized by the UK email newsletter NTK (Need To Know) where people would swap supermarket loyalty cards - ideally as far apart in demographic terms as possible, such as a single guy and a mother of two - to fk with the data. Edit for extra nostalgia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_(newsletter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_(newsletter)
rhizome 8y ago
You know, anybody can submit an "Ask HN" post rather than hijacking the comments of another.
soared 8y ago
https://hello-kill.github.io/ https://hello-kill.github.io/

janesvilleseo 8y ago

Might be fun. This would be similar to what recording industry did on P2P sites. At first it was easy to get what you were looking for. Then it got saturated with garbage.

bambax 8y ago
Did it? I didn't notice it.
- kevas 8y ago
  Think Kazaa(?) days
- LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
  I barely noticed it back in the day too. I had a friend who was into piracy quite a bit more who complained about getting the wrong movie or getting the wrong mp3s. I don't know if I ran into that issue, but I wasn't really downloading a lot of mainstream stuff compared to him either.
RankingMember 8y ago
I recall the P2P sabotage efforts being pretty feeble. I particularly recall Madonna's record company having an album labled as her most recent album shared on KaZaa that was actually just a bunch of mp3s of her saying "What the fuck do you think you're doing!?". Funny stuff. Edit: Found a copy of the audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU5xC00m-gA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU5xC00m-gA
rchaud 8y ago
I remember that! From around 2001-2003, a good chunk of the Top 40 tunes found on file sharing networks would be one verse, looped over and over so the MP3 duration was equal to that of the actual song. This worked best on mainstream P2P clients like Limewire, Kazaa, Ares (all based on Gnutella I think), because the fake MP3s would propagate more widely. It didn't work as well (or at all), on relatively obscure, community-based networks like Slsk, where people were more likely to share entire albums, and not just the singles.

Vinnl 8y ago

I've been thinking about this as well, after using a manual version of this strategy. Might still implement it one day. That said, it's pretty hard. It's not entirely clear which data points Facebook uses, but it's very likely you can't influence all of them. For example, friends adding you as contacts, or linking your profile to your phone number. If you also want to continue using it as normal, your normal usage will still give a lot of data about what you view; what you interact with; when you use it; that might stand out from the random stuff - and if you don't want to continue using it as usual, the extension will have to visit the website by itself, without interfering with your regular browsing activity, and without relying on your computer being on. I also think that if something like this would get big enough to actually impact the quality of their algorithms, it'd be pretty easy for Facebook to detect abnormal activity. (And of course, it's not even that much of a problem if the algorithm screws up more often, as long as advertisers believe it's accurate.)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

tru3_power 8y ago

I am totally down with this.

JackuB 8y ago

Noiszy does that https://noiszy.com https://noiszy.com

andy_ppp 8y ago
Amazing, but I really don't trust them to browse the web for me!
waynecochran 8y ago
Can anyone vet this? How do I know they are not evil?
lozaning 8y ago
I've used this for quite some time, and can verify it works on some level. Generally after running it my google now suggested cards on Android are all out of right field and totally irrelevant to anything i'm actually interested in.

nurettin 8y ago

They will detect your noise. Then you will end up being one of their "noise client" datapoints, associating you with the actions and behaviors of a person who would pay for privacy and thus they will try to serve you ads according to your behavioural patterns as usual.

Misdicorl 8y ago
I think the goal would be to get a sufficient percentage of the entire internet to generate noise, without having to be aware of it. In a world where Firefox and Safari were the major internet browsers, this wouldn't actually be that hard since it could be built into those browsers directly and would already align pretty nicely with their respective parent company ethos
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pixl97 8y ago
  "You cannot log onto Facebook with this web browser, please use Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge to continue" --FB
  - Misdicorl 8y ago
    Yes, that is one potential countermeasure. I wonder if it would be effective or if it would be the beginning of the end for fb.
    - pixl97 8y ago
      >In 2015, it is expected that 70.1 percent of Facebook users worldwide will access the social network through their mobile phone. What I don't know if that means browser or App. Not effective at all if most people use the app.
  - Misdicorl 8y ago
    Circling back again, the more likely warpath FB would pursue is making FB work very poorly on non-cooperative browsers and excellently on cooperative ones. Then users will blame the browser for being trash rather than FB.

r3bl 8y ago

AdNauseum[0] hides all the ads from you, but clicks them in the background to increase noise ratio. As you might assume, it's not available in the Chrome's extension store. I've used a similar add-on for Google search (the add-on made some human-like Google searches in the background), but I can't remember its name now. Facebook would be a pointless exercise, since the <div> names are automatically generated. You can't even hide the sidebars you never use using CSS because they'll all change their <div> IDs on refresh. That and the murkiness of what exactly is an ad on Facebook makes even the most thorough adblockers struggling to work properly even in an otherwise-ideal situation (a desktop browser with an adblocker). [0] https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
badfrog 8y ago
> Facebook would be a pointless exercise, since the <div> names are automatically generated. Also: > all ads are supposed to contain the word “sponsored” as part of a mandatory disclosure, so users can distinguish between ads and their friends’ posts. Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” Later, it also added an invisible “Sponsored” disclosure to posts from your friends. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp...
- r3bl 8y ago
  On top of that, Facebook and I have a different view on what constitutes as an ad. A Facebook page that I'm following paying money to reach me is an ad according to Facebook. To me, that's extortion. On the other side, we have notifications about friend suggestions. You can't turn them off in the notification settings. That to me is an "ad" for Facebook itself, even if nobody payed them money. It's an undesired content that pulls my attention away from what I came there to do in order to promote a product.

optymizer 8y ago

I have been using this strategy for years. I can't really tell if it works or not, but it makes logical sense. One issue is that there's data about you that's not generated by you, but by people you know (i.e. John adds me as a contact into their phone along with my birthday and address, Jane friends me on VK and keeps tagging me in pictures that have location data, etc). I suspect that right now, companies give higher importance to data that you've entered about yourself, but once they realize you're feeding them noise, they can adjust their algorithms to trust other people's data about you (if they're not already doing that), which would significantly decrease the effectiveness of feeding them noise about yourself. It will still work for all data points about you that can't be collected from other people (like browsing habits, your phone's location, etc)

CharlesColeman 8y ago
> they can adjust their algorithms to trust other people's data about you (if they're not already doing that), which would significantly decrease the effectiveness of feeding them noise about yourself. Maybe some people can inject noise about their friends, instead. For instance: 1. install the FB app on a phone with an address-book full of garbage and share it with the app, 2. inject fake geotag data in the photos you tag your friends in, 3. put the actual tag on strangers in the background, 4. tag your friends in stock photos, etc. Some of these you obviously can't do with friends who don't consent, since they may get annoyed by all the fake tags, but others would be transparent to most social media users.

sm4rk0 8y ago

Something like this? https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

ghobs91 8y ago
Is this similar to what PrivacyBadger does, or would they complement each other?
- sm4rk0 8y ago
  Not similar at all. TrackMeNot runs as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users' actual search trails in a cloud of 'ghost' queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ https://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser. To the advertiser, it's like you suddenly disappeared. https://www.eff.org/privacybadger https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

efsavage 8y ago

If you don't like Facebook/Google/etc., wouldn't you be better off just not using them rather than spending time trying to hurt them? How will data vandalism make your life better?

the_snooze 8y ago
You can't meaningfully opt out of Facebook/Google/etc. They're embedded in tons of websites, and your friends will almost certainly give your information to those companies.
- andy_ppp 8y ago
  And they fingerprint and track you regardless of you having an account!
- efsavage 8y ago
  You can block trackers pretty easily, or just not visit those websites. You'll probably be a happier person if you just don't visit foo.com than spending any portion of your brief time on Earth trying to trick an ML model into thinking you're a single mother from Lithuania. Also, if your friend gives someone else information about you, do you expect that you should be able to control it? I'm pretty sure many of the details of my life appear in other people's emails, voicemails, journals, etc. that will never have a "forget me" button. I'm mainly suggesting that there are lots of ways to improve this situation, from market forces to legislation, and it's sad to see people wasting time on things that won't work.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    > You can block trackers pretty easily, or just not visit those websites. And since they're buying data from non-internet data brokers such as credit card companies, retailers that track you in their stores, etc., blocking the trackers and avoiding the websites doesn't actually stop the spying. To stop them from spying on you pretty much requires that you stop engaging in large swaths of real-world society.
- 8y ago

mhuffman 8y ago

This might work. I vaguely remember Google actually panic-pulling a chrome extension that invisibly hid and clicked on every ad of every page visited. So I think they identify this as a tough to protect weakness as well.

dontbenebby 8y ago

>Can I propose that we start on a "noise" tool/borwser plugin for these suveillance captialism companies? It's been done :) http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ

waynecochran 8y ago
I read through a lot of this. I think it is still worth another try -- they approach it more from an obfuscation point of view -- I want to take it to the next level and "drown them" in noise. Don't just say "It's been done" and then decide it will never work. It may take several failures to find the best methods -- much like search was a major failure until the right recipe was found.

WRONgG 8y ago

I think the largest issue would be hiding the plugin from their eyes. Like youtubeDL sort of being a secret. The noise creating plugin can't be advertised as such because then the new history is easily un-noiseable. The tool would need to be something like a color picker that has a hidden command to run headerless searches in a tab of your browser. This (sort of) worked for teenagers hiding pictures on a fake calculator app on smartphones years ago, but your mom wont try to pry at your facebook obfuscation. Just a thought

freethemullet 8y ago

We could choose to cease to have preferences, limiting what there is to target.

bussiere 8y ago

i ve done an app with a friend that generate random phone number and add it to your adress book. And my pleasure is to let all the social network to siphon my adress book.

frereubu 8y ago

Reminds me of the good old days of meetups organized by the UK email newsletter NTK (Need To Know) where people would swap supermarket loyalty cards - ideally as far apart in demographic terms as possible, such as a single guy and a mother of two - to fk with the data. Edit for extra nostalgia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_(newsletter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_(newsletter)

rhizome 8y ago

You know, anybody can submit an "Ask HN" post rather than hijacking the comments of another.

soared 8y ago

https://hello-kill.github.io/ https://hello-kill.github.io/