I’m always curious whether using privacy software somehow marks us as higher value targets such that what metadata we do end up leaking is given disproportionate focus for advertisers and whatnot. Joke’s on them: I’m using the foolproof technique of strategic poverty.
Same.
This is my thinking about it. I doubt that advertisers pay any attention to that. But I think political surveilence might, or maybe even industrial espionage. Like govs targeting reporters. Whistleblowers. Human rights activists. Opposition party politicians. Or important scientists, engineers.
The reason I think that is, advert ecosystems are about mass aggregation on the cheap. They want as much behavioral data as they can about everyone. For as little cost as possible. But it’s statistical, they aren’t interested in individuals in particular. But, political or industrial surveilence is more about high value targets. Important individuals.
So my guess is, taking extreme measures for totally innocent privacy reasons could make someone stand out from the endless legions of ppl who don’t do that. But it wouldn’t be advertisers who care. It’d be like three letter agencies.
Sadly strategic poverty only works against those who want to make you buy something. It does very little (and in fact may make things worse) against actors who want to know if they should target you for not being white/straight/wealthy, etc.
https://github.com/digital-grease/fauxx#readme
I have found this app. Kind an “intelligent agent” (marketing speech) that poisons the data collectors databases with noise. They’re going to have a hard time to find out which of the online actions were eeally from me or my new nice “agent” creating noise.
A little disengenuous considering the article is a blatant plug for e/OS. They’re not wrong though. It might be written plainly enough to share with average Joes who just don’t understand the threat data harvesting poses to them.
Edit: typo
