Inspired by the discussion in ‘they already have your data’ I was reminded that AdNauseam exists. I rarely see it mentioned in privacy circles but the idea seems attractive to me, I’ve used it before and since it’s based on uBlock Origin it was just as effective in adblocking and the “poisoning” itself unobtrusive. How do you guys feel about it? Are there reasons it should be avoided?
I’m not sure to what extent this works better than not clicking on anything at all:
Given that there’s already a quantity of data about me on the internet from before my “privacy adoption”, the brokers already have an idea about me. If i stopped clicking on ads, that idea would remain frozen in time with my preferences from that time.
If I started clicling on everything to poison that profile, couldn’t the brokers just filter the period when i started clickning everything? In that case, their profile of me would again remain the same they had when I stopped clicking at all, am I right on this?
They can, and they do. That kind of filtering is a grad school homework project.
They don’t care about the quality of an individual profile, it’s the quality of the aggregate data that’s important to them. If anything, your profile might be identified as an outlier compared to the average and simply discarded. They’re not going to look any further than that and try and “rescue” your data, they’ve got a million other profiles to sell to advertisers.
Outlier profiles don’t get discarded. They get run through another statistical filtering step to smooth them out by eliminating the weird data points so that they’re less than a couple of standard deviations away from the core aggregate.