Re:The Fantasy of Opting Out
by waynecochran on Thursday February 18, 2021 @11:18AM
(#26181702)
Is there any hope in feeding the surveilance noise -- a lot of it? e.g., create bots with my credentials that visit random web sites, have a phone that reports bogus GPS coordinates, numerous dummy accounts, that sort of thing...
Or if enough folks gang up and feed the system an avalanche of random (or misdirected) information that we can drown our signature in a sea of noise?
Re:The Fantasy of Opting Out
by marshmallow_12 on Thursday February 18, 2021 @03:06PM
(#26184736)
short term: i expect so, long term not so much. At best, some occasional fuzz will mar an otherwise clear picture of you and your activities. Too many fake accounts will only force users to surrender more personal information in order to authenticate themselves.
From Dan Geer's portentous talk "Cybersecurity as Realpolitik"[1][2]:
>> Privacy used to be proportional to that which it is impossible to observe or that which can be observed but not identified. No more -- what is today observable and identifiable kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, so what might be an alternative? If you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward rules of data procedure administered by a government you trust or control. If you are a pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your answer will tend towards the operational, and your definition of a state of privacy will be my definition: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI
[2] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt