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The author highlights tracking, profiling & targeting. Just yesterday, I Asked HN but none responded: can't we just flood the trackers with random data instead

by f055 6y ago

The author highlights tracking, profiling & targeting. Just yesterday, I Asked HN but none responded: can't we just flood the trackers with random data instead of fight so hard to block them? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324946

MattGaiser 6y ago
1. It would be hard to build a system that couldn’t be filtered out. Something is liked and unliked? Just don’t include it. Mouse isn’t moving randomly on the page? captcha time. Not to mention that they could randomize the element class names and ids or at least change them regularly so it would be a constant arms race to keep up. 2. You don’t want to be randomly liking crazy stuff on Facebook or randomly retweeting. There are real world consequences for doing the wrong thing there.
- baryphonic 6y ago
  I agree that these are technical challenges, but they're not insurmountable. Any extension could itself track normal user behavior (e.g. mouse movement speed, scrolling), and "learn" to mimic that. And as long as the "likes" are themselves quite randomized per extension, it's unlikely that the random likes will have much of an impact. It also seems not hard to filter out porn, politics and religion from the subjects being liked. I think the bigger risk is one or credibility - once the ad-revenue disruptor thing is in place, the creators might be tempted to sell their user data for a profit.
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
Like a chrome extension that sends trackers lots of randomized user actions and garbled data instead of just blocking them? We'd make the data unreliable and render it useless! What an incredibly sly counter-attack. I think it could take a fair amount of work to be effective (i.e. reverse engineering APIs, formatting payloads, etc) but I'm sure a community of engineers would support those efforts if it were in wide enough use. The problem here is that those engineers may be deterred by the possibility of getting sucked into legal battles. Maybe if it were backed by an organization that could allay that fear like the EFF, Mozilla or the FSF then I could see this actually having a shot of being genuinely effective.
- severine 6y ago
  Are you aware of https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ ?
  - f055 6y ago
    Ah thank you! I knew I remembered there was something along these lines already but couldn’t find it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
thanksforfish 6y ago
It's an interesting approach, but I'd assume only a small group of tech savvy users would do it. It's also a dystopian future that feels worse than the adblock arms race. I'm still hopeful that we'll figure out micropayments in a way that let's web content survive without needing the ad tech garbage. Until then I block and navigate away from sites that do ad-block-blocking.

by f055 6y ago

MattGaiser 6y ago

1. It would be hard to build a system that couldn’t be filtered out. Something is liked and unliked? Just don’t include it. Mouse isn’t moving randomly on the page? captcha time. Not to mention that they could randomize the element class names and ids or at least change them regularly so it would be a constant arms race to keep up. 2. You don’t want to be randomly liking crazy stuff on Facebook or randomly retweeting. There are real world consequences for doing the wrong thing there.

baryphonic 6y ago
I agree that these are technical challenges, but they're not insurmountable. Any extension could itself track normal user behavior (e.g. mouse movement speed, scrolling), and "learn" to mimic that. And as long as the "likes" are themselves quite randomized per extension, it's unlikely that the random likes will have much of an impact. It also seems not hard to filter out porn, politics and religion from the subjects being liked. I think the bigger risk is one or credibility - once the ad-revenue disruptor thing is in place, the creators might be tempted to sell their user data for a profit.

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

Like a chrome extension that sends trackers lots of randomized user actions and garbled data instead of just blocking them? We'd make the data unreliable and render it useless! What an incredibly sly counter-attack. I think it could take a fair amount of work to be effective (i.e. reverse engineering APIs, formatting payloads, etc) but I'm sure a community of engineers would support those efforts if it were in wide enough use. The problem here is that those engineers may be deterred by the possibility of getting sucked into legal battles. Maybe if it were backed by an organization that could allay that fear like the EFF, Mozilla or the FSF then I could see this actually having a shot of being genuinely effective.

severine 6y ago
Are you aware of https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ ?
- f055 6y ago
  Ah thank you! I knew I remembered there was something along these lines already but couldn’t find it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

thanksforfish 6y ago

It's an interesting approach, but I'd assume only a small group of tech savvy users would do it. It's also a dystopian future that feels worse than the adblock arms race. I'm still hopeful that we'll figure out micropayments in a way that let's web content survive without needing the ad tech garbage. Until then I block and navigate away from sites that do ad-block-blocking.