Tell me if this is a legit idea
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Source: this article about the ridiculous collection capabilites of data brokers: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about-them
Idea: Data brokers, in order to capture something, anything, about you need to cast a very large net; they collect first and filter second. Because these systems are designed to capture information from thousands of sources at the same time, it's theoretically possible to feed bad data to the brokers. What I'm talking about is "privacy by obfuscation". Feed so much crap into your personal dossier that it is no longer valuable to buyers.
Short of a couple documentaries, I'm not completely up on how data brokers work, but tell me if this is possible: Someone builds an application that you can run, fill in a couple factual identifiers about yourself in order to map you to you, and the app will create troves of lies (bogus email addresses, past jobs, phone numbers, sibling names, likes, etc...). It will then spoof several known data leaking services and send it along. Based on how smart data brokers are, this can eventually be evolved to change or muck up your dossier beyond the point of recognition.
Say this huge long shot of a project actually works... nobody should notice: data brokers nor the sites that buy dossiers because their systems all recognize it as legitimate data. So you have to get the word out. Viralize it until someone like Facebook does some digging and recognizes that all this stuff they've been buying is trash.
Everything is hackable. Everything! It really isn't a question of if this can be done; it's a question of how much would it take. The work of an amateur programmer with deep knowledge of analytics... or more?
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@TAHIN said in Tell me if this is a legit idea:
Idea: Data brokers, in order to capture something, anything, about you need to cast a very large net; they collect first and filter second. Because these systems are designed to capture information from thousands of sources at the same time, it's theoretically possible to feed bad data to the brokers. What I'm talking about is "privacy by obfuscation". Feed so much crap into your personal dossier that it is no longer valuable to buyers.
IBM used me as an example case for this a decade ago. One of the biggest controllers of my own data that there is out there.
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@TAHIN said in Tell me if this is a legit idea:
Everything is hackable. Everything! It really isn't a question of if this can be done; it's a question of how much would it take. The work of an amateur programmer with deep knowledge of analytics... or more?
Problem there is, if you make a program to do it, it's probably pretty easy to make a program that will filter it out.
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It would almost have to be a subscription service where the program is regularly modified and sends stuff out on a continued schedule, to make it seem like more of a feed that emulates the real world.
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IBM used me as an example case for this a decade ago. One of the biggest controllers of my own data that there is out there.
So IBM collected real stuff or fake stuff?
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@TAHIN said in Tell me if this is a legit idea:
IBM used me as an example case for this a decade ago. One of the biggest controllers of my own data that there is out there.
So IBM collected real stuff or fake stuff?
IBM used me as the case of the person generating the most controlled content so that algorithms know me only by how I want them to know me.
