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0 pointsmaximente5y ago0 comments

that may be true for small scale or vanilla automated actions, but every probabilistic layer costs the bad team additional engineering time, compute time, and won't be 100 percent reliable. plus, you only need to obfuscate /you/, not everyone else.

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.

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dkzlv5y ago· 1 in thread

I don't believe in this solution, and I have a few reasons for this:

1. this algorithm will be very complex. Corporations can detect when bots generate incoming traffic, it's a part of their business model: they do not take money from advertisers for bot views/clicks, for example. There's no such service as dry out competitor's ad budget because of that. Google does that very effectively, and it's not a simple patterns detection, it's about the complex behavioral analysis: how you (mis)click on stuff, how you move your mouse, you reaction time, your navigation flows, etc. Simple algorithms that just open new tabs and click a few links won't do it. Probably it is possible to write an algo that would learn from you and mimic your unique behavior; it should also have some crowdsourced mechanism of adequate behavioral patterns: you can't just google random vocabulary sequences and chaotically click on different stuff — this will be caught rather quickly. Given the complexity of this whole thing I think there's just no such party that can create this.

2. some actions cannot be faked. Your purchase history on Amazon, places you go with your mobile phone turned on (telco can track your geolocation), stuff you put out in public using your accounts (twitter, instagram, hn comments, etc.). It will still give out too much information.

3. resource overhead. The web is slow thanks to all the trackers and ads. This solution proposes to leave the trackers intact AND add some machine-generated masking activity, that will additionally slow the device. The majority of the world just won't accept this.

4. mobile. Afaik you just cannot do any this in iOS at all and can do this (to some extent) in Android. iOS doesn't have either browser extensions or any decent ways to automate actions. You will face another issue in Android (which is applicable to iOS as well): apps run in isolated sandboxes, so no outside code can intrude and do any stuff there. You won't be able to _simply_ allow the device do some fake searches on Booking.com while you sleep, for example (complex automations won't be adopted). And mobile is ~60% of internet traffic. If a solution does not work on mobile it won't solve the problem.

Btw, in my next article I will talk about why I think your theses on "I only need to obfuscate me" completely misses the point. It's already published in Russian, so stay tuned for the translation :)

Long story short, since we're all are not unique in any way (we're merely a combination of different popular behaviors that can easily be predicted given enough data), then if the solution is not adopted by the majority of the population, the solution will not solve the problem.

maximenteOP5y ago

right on - looking forward to it!

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