So I had this drafted out like a year ago, but with the whole Facebook stuff going on, I guess it is about time I actually posted it. This is a practical guide to really scrambling the internet’s knowledge of you. There are three primary camps on a spectrum for data privacy: 1) Hide all the data pertaining to me, 2) Accept and embrace our new overlords (this person believes they benefit from corporations knowing as much about them as possible), 3) fuck with the algorithm. I am of camp three.
Now, it isn’t hard for me to mess with data collection systems because I am constantly seeking information for a novel or short story. This leads to a weird set of bad data as I am doing searches as a character I created not as Theodore. Thus, Theodore looks like hundreds of different people all rolled up into one. Which is what I want, I want tracking companies to have difficulties understanding what I am interested in. As someone who consistently has to analyze millions upon millions of datapoints for work, I can tell you that bad data is the worst thing to have for an algorithm. Often, if I had a bunch of bad data, I just excluded it from my analysis instead of attempting to clean it (depending on the sensitivity of the data) as my computer can crash during this process. At a certain point, when the incorrect data is a significant amount of my dataset, I will dig into why this bad data exists and then correct the collection point upstream. However, when looking at 100,000,000 data points, the last thing I want to do is correct 1,000 of those. [Click “Read More” to find my plan to take down AI]
Since I am an amalgam on the internet, and I buy varied products, I end up getting very strange advertisements. Which is why I get advertisements for vibrator holding pillows (I am a guy), female panties (still a guy who doesn’t wear female panties), a 3D printer, and other knickknacks that seem to be contradictory. So here are some helpful hints to scuttling your data and becoming an enigma to the internet overlords:
- Block (or like) every post from an external source on Facebook
- Even if you love the content, block it
- Even if you hate the content, block it
- Each item you hover over, or click on, tells Facebook your feelings towards a certain piece of content. That content comes from publishers with a certain bend. The moment you like block something, they say you are the contra to that publisher’s leanings. Same thing for liking but the inverse. As such, if you block everything and anything, they don’t know what you are and cannot serve up advertisements that are relevant.
- Buy everything as a gift unless it is a gift
- When you tag something as a gift online, their algorithm ignores it
- When you don’t tag something as a gift, their algorithm adds it to your personal profile
- Everything that isn’t a gift helps them narrow down your interests and then the business can target you specifically with products that are similar. By not letting them know what you want and doing the contra activity, you build a profile for advertisers that is an amalgam of your friends and loved ones, not yourself.
- Search random shit
- Just throw in some weird stuff. I don’t know, like if alpaca’s fuck laying down. Just scramble your interests (maybe avoid putting alapaca and fuck in the same search).
- Or use a search engine that doesn’t track you (duckduckgo)
- Or scramble data through multiple search engines
- Or look up random shit (once again)
- Point being, just scramble the search terms and you should avoid advertisments
If you do the above correctly, you will become an outlier that no one cares about. Your data is worth 300 dollars to Google (one of the best at monetizing human data) and if there are only 20,000 of us, they won’t waste the capital trying to correct the problem (return on investment isn’t worth it). So, stay below the radar and hope we don’t hit a critical mass of people scuttling data. If too many of us screw up their data sets, then they will try to modify their algorithm to smoke us out. In the end, if you are doing all the above properly, and are an outlier, you will see weird advertisements that don’t pertain to you (like vibrator pillows). The “what the fuck” moment is when you know you succeeded. Happy hunting.