How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you | MIT Technology Review

If you can’t beat them, sabotage them? 💩

In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference next week, researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage:

Data strikes, inspired by the idea of labor strikes, which involve withholding or deleting your data so a tech firm cannot use it—leaving a platform or installing privacy tools, for instance. Data poisoning, which involves contributing meaningless or harmful data. AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google’s ad-targeting algorithms. Conscious data contribution, which involves giving meaningful data to the competitor of a platform you want to protest, such as by uploading your Facebook photos to Tumblr instead.

This article reminded me of another I read years ago that suggested that Millennials were telling Facebook that their friends were their brothers and sisters, and intentionally throwing garbage into the social networks algorithms. This seems like a space that could even benefit from some tooling to help people introduce maximally confusing content to the algorithms.