Just read about this extension, thanks. The concept is rather interesting. Most probably you can cause some problems for corporations if you constantly add informational noise, but I don't think it will really change anything significantly. You see they will still get real information about you, even if it has some noise. Your real behavior is the most valuable here, and it will not go anywhere.
Also I'm quite sure Google can detect automatic actions very well, it's a thing they need for detecting bots, who click on ads or leave comments on youtube. Same goes for most of the tech corporations.
I think there are variations of the approach that could make many kinds of tracking pretty useless.
Part of my confidence comes from my bias that 'AI' is mostly hype. Google hasn't manage to filter all spam from their results nor to 'read the users mind' particularly well when parsing search results. I think they'd have trouble separating generated results from real ones.
Somehow this reply sounds combative. That's completely unintentional.
I look forward to your next post.
right now the sensors (tracking) are largely trusted, because there isn't enough corrupt data hitting them to warrant countermeasures. if they are vacuuming up data, throw in sand. then broken glass. then wet wool. and - critically - lots of it. defeat the sensors by overwhelming them with tons of questionable data.
are these huge tech companies capable of filtering out all that cruft? of course, but this is an easily winnable arms race at the individual level, because it's too costly to try to do for billions of people. i see it manifesting sort of like digital guerilla warfare.
I just forwarded it to a student of the space. Such a long and well thought through article with great hilarious images along the way.
Thanks for writing, I've signed up for more spam from you.
For example, Google can figure out if you are a bot with its "I'm not a robot" checkbox. This means that they can probably also figure out that fake automated requests are indeed fake.
Not necessarily. Given a noise script doesn't have to run unattended, the script could easily just prompt the user to solve any captchas it encounters, so that couldn't be used to distinguish real from fake.
>if you're from IT — well, it would be like learning the alphabet once again. Probably you won't find anything new; if you do, that is a bad sign for your employer.
But after seeing a few other positive comments about it I decided to go back and give it a read, and I'm so glad I did. Great article.
