The FBI is buying Americansโ€™ location data

In a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the FBI director admitted that the agency is turning to data brokers to get around warrant requirements.

The Verge
@evacide I'd love to see more folx poisoning data.
@alice @evacide i feel like i have a decent enough homelab set up where i could get into it but i dont know where to start. ๐Ÿ˜…

@miclgael anywhere. The goal is to make corporate data less profitable.

Even stuff as simple as setting your birthdate to 1970-01-01 everywhere, adding [TEST] or [DELETED] as your name or account notes anywhere you don't need them to know your name.

Using plugins like AdNauseam to poison ad trackers (and cost them marketing dollars).

Using VPNs set to different locations.

Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info). Bonus points if you correct it to someone else's info on their site that's similar to yours.

Only fill in required fields when you sign up for anything, but only provide correct info if it matters for you to use the service, otherwise provide plausible, but incorrect, data.

If you use LLMs anywhere, use the free tier and always vote thumbs up for bad answers and down for good ones. It wastes their resources and drives up their costs while making their training data worse.

@evacide

@alice @miclgael @evacide
I have already been entering random dates for my Date of Birth because I just assumed that was part of the authentication infoโ€”like a poor man's 2FA. I'm always surprised when I unexpectedly get happy birthday wishes from some automated system.

@bornach the reason to use 1970-01-01 is because it's Unix epoch time, and usually means something is formatted as a date, but has invalid data. In my years in marketing, it's often discarded when using birthdate to determine age demographics for campaigns, because it's *more likely* to be an error than a real birthdate, and it's easier to discard anything that whiffs of bad data, because sending marketing materials costs money.

@miclgael @evacide

@alice @bornach @miclgael @evacide or use Feb 29th on a non leap year if it lets you. Programmers love this.

@alice @bornach @miclgael @evacide I've tended to use April 1, (randomish year) but your argument for 1970-01-01 is enticing.

Wonder what I'll get if I enter @0 into a few date fields.

@alice @miclgael @evacide If you want to really ruin the day of developers, throw random broken unicode characters and html entities into strings to make it look like the encoding failed

@ellesaurus @alice @miclgael @evacide

I see you have chosen violence, Elle. Time will tell if that was the optimal path for you.

@ellesaurus @alice @miclgael @evacide

"All user input is evil."

@Enema_Cowboy All user inputs are evil, but some user inputs are more evil than others

@ellesaurus @alice @miclgael @evacide

Why, hello random site! My name is
๏ฟฝ๏ฟผโ‚ฌรฝ and I'm [object Object] years old.

(Yes, please don't point at the irony of me using my real name on here)