Is it possible to make my data worthless?

Chadsalot@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 112 points –

Inspired by a question I saw a while back, is it possible to make my data/online presence useless/undesirable to companies to purchase?

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I think we will eventually see tooling for data-poisoning, and it will become a valid counter-measure for maintaining privacy.

They already exist. AdNauseam is a good example of that - it clicks advertisement links for you so it's harder to know what you're into.

Plus, if advertisers are paying for cost-per-click, it’s costing them money for each ad that is clicked on

Yes... but the money goes to the ad network tracking you and building profiles. So I would disregard the cost aspect.

You're still generating data that will be sold. I doubt most companies do any sort of deep analysis on the data when they can just throw it at an algorithm and let it do it's thing

I don't fully agree with the approach, and I also think that generating no data is better in this case, but the reasoning is that the data being generated contains so much noise that it's useless for profiling. Or even poisonous, since it might create associations that don't exist (e.g. selling dildos to zealots, or advertising books on quantum mechanics to pet owners). As such, its attractiveness and thus selling value decreases.

Yeah but I don't think the people who buy the data actually see individual clickrate. If it was a massive adoption thing sure but if only 0.005% of people do it it's statistically meaningless