🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)Mar 20
👏 Poison 👏 your 👏 data ☠️
Show thread🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)Mar 20

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Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info).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

Show threadJames Bartlett 

@alice
Agreed on all points except one: If you're providing incorrect data to poison the data broker's systems, please don't just type in a "random" email address unless you're confident that it's not someone's real email address.

On any given day, I receive about a dozen emails from various websites where an email address was required for registration, and someone typed in my email address while providing their "fake" info. Pizza order receipts, airline flight confirmations, golf tee time registrations, etc.

The worst part is that these are misdirected, but otherwise legitimate emails, so I can't just mark them as spam, because that will poison the spam detection algorithm's dataset.

So yeah, if you're gonna type in a fake email address, please make sure that it doesn't belong to someone first, and the easiest way to do that is to use a nonexistent domain, preferably one that no one would ever register, like "${random_guid}.com"

Mar 20 at 5:05pmWeb
Show threadShadSterlingMar 20

@JamesDBartlett3 @alice those are spam, and should be reported as such. Any system that doesn’t validate email addresses before adding them to a list will be used maliciously in attempts to overwhelm target email addresses by signing them up for every vulnerable mailer.

Also, the more complaints that buyers get as a result of buying data from brokers, the less the data is worth. I wouldn’t worry about a made up address I use once happening to be real

Show threadAprazethMar 20

@ShadSterling @JamesDBartlett3 @alice @alice

Remember, 👉@👈.com is a correct valid formatted e-mail address