No Stupid Questions

E-commerce vet here. It’s easier just to try and not give out that data and to pay to have it scrubbed. But, this thought experiment is fun, so here’s how you’d make your targeting data complete trash.

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The most valuable thing about your data is your behavior and demographic characteristics, not your identity.

When you fill out forms, pretend your gender, race, and age is fluid. Also, pretend you’re nomadic. Then behave erratic as fuck online - pay for bibles, butt plugs, taxidermy, and PETA donations

Your data will be absolute trash. You’ll also be miserable because you’re going to be visiting the Amazon drop off center with gag balls and porcelain Jesus figurines every week.

Sure. Wiggle your mouse, introduce randomness into your typing, and read about things you’re not interested in. It doesn’t matter though as they’ll still sell your info.

I think we will eventually see tooling for data-poisoning, and it will become a valid counter-measure for maintaining privacy.

No. People are always going to pay for your data even if you make it incorrect.

It's impossible to make your data completely unattractive to purchase but using something like the adnauseum extension on your browser can make your data less useful when it has been purchased.

AdNauseum plugin combined with VPN and private browser mode.

It's an ad blocker that clicks everything.

This is just my opinion, but I don't think so. I love the thought and wish there was, though. I think no matter what you do, it's still information about a potential user/customer and still tells someone looking at it about you. "Oh, we have information on about 4% of the population that wants to actively subvert our data analytics.". Obviously that's made up, I didn't bother trying to even guess what a potentially realistic number might be.

Again in my opinion, the only way to provide no value to data analytics is to not be a data point, and good luck with that. Best I've been trying to do is disable targeted ads anywhere I can, reset my identifier ids regularly on things like android tv where I can, and try to blast cookies anywhere possible. I don't know if it even makes a difference or just makes me feel better

Unlink it from yourself. It's harder than you'd think. Use a privacy respecting browser with privacy badger installed and tor or VPN. Use generic credit cards. Use burner emails and phone numbers.

If none of your stuff is linked together and none of it is linked to you, it's not worth much, someone will buy it, but it'll be one of a billion useless records in a huge low quality dump.

Companies don't purchase specific user data they purchase datasets.

Like reddit will says "we have x amount of user and here is what data we collect on them" you can access this data for $Y"

So and then those companies use that data to show you personalised ads or whatever and do a fuck ton, like and obscene amount of data analysis on it and your habits to see if it was worth the cost and will renovate with reddit the price to access their data.

So one individual user going weird won't do anything. But if you made a ton of bots and made them act weird you might be able to make the dataset worth less. But honestly probably not that much as they have tools to filter bots and stuff.

There are browser extensions that fill up your data/presence with meaningless junk

Don't worry it probably already is.

There’s definitely less valuable demographics but I doubt it would be completely worthless, you’d just be cheaper to advertise to.

I mean it might make it seem like you’re more valuable and then never buy anything, some companies would be paying more to show you ads but get less return, so you’d be costing them more money.

I use generated email/usernames everywhere I’m forced to login, in the hope they can’t connect all the dots. Don’t know if it works though.