πŸ‘ Poison πŸ‘ your πŸ‘ data ☠️

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Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info).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.

@alice

Hi, this is relevant to my interests. Is there a full set of instructions available for the data broker part of it or is that something I should just go look up?

Thanks for your efforts so far...

@resister check out the list of brokers here: https://github.com/optery/optery-data-brokers-directory

Removal is a game of whack-a-mole (as they regularly just reimport or purchase data from each other if there's a gap). That's why poisoning is more effective.

GitHub - optery/optery-data-brokers-directory: Welcome to Optery’s open-source directory of data brokers and opt-out information, the largest of its kind.

Welcome to Optery’s open-source directory of data brokers and opt-out information, the largest of its kind. - optery/optery-data-brokers-directory

GitHub
@alice very much appreciated

@alice

Would you be ok with me reposting this stuff to Bluesky and giving credit?

Not that anyone pays attention to anything I do on there anyway...

@resister if you do, could you please just link to the post? I'd rather drive folx to Fedi than make my work accessible elsewhere.