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Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info).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

@alice scribbling notes furiously

For the less savvy among us, tysvm for this helpful advice 🙏

@alice I've toyed with the idea of setting up a headless Chrome instance to just ask "but why?" to ChatGPT all day to drive up their inference costs. 👀
@theorangetheme @alice lol somebody has a toddler
@theorangetheme @alice always add “please” and “Thanks” it waste sooooo many tokens. Those words are usually in a different “space” that what you asked

@nickynah them's just good manners! I find it's also helpful to upload my favorite random cat photos until I hit the attachment limit. I mean, who doesn't like cat photos?

@theorangetheme

@theorangetheme @alice

Context:
https://xkcd.com/903/

(see the hidden alt text :)

Extended Mind

xkcd
@float13 @theorangetheme @alice Thanks for sharing this! Had to try of course, interesting (to me) result: this works for English entries, German ones end up circling around languages and linguistics. What that has to do with anything is , however, a philosophical question?

@alice If you're selfhosting, have a look a iocaine: https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/

If you upload pictures, maybe nightshade would be the right tool: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/userguide.html

iocaine - the deadliest poison known to AI

@Numerfolt @alice yeah, we need to switch to offensive mode.

That makes me want to create a nightshade fuse FS.
So when you want to upload the image from your picture folder, it nightshades it on the fly.

@alice when i have to use a web app to order food, e.g. CoolBurgz (fictional) i will always put my email as e.g.

[email protected]

usually counts as valid.

@miclgael @alice if it doesn’t like that, .lol is a valid TLD. 😆
@bytex64 @alice maybe i'll just go ahead and register [email protected] haha

@miclgael
Wherever possible, I'm using my duck addresses, because all too often they send a confirmation link they need you to click.

Some places have the domain blacklisted, but not all of them.

@alice

@miclgael

Some shops umm...decline...take-away orders without a name. The POS* computer insists on one. I give them a completely random word or number. Works fine.

@alice

*(POS also stands for, ¨Point Of Sale¨)

@alice

a fair bit of the advice in here seems really good, but from what I know, AdNauseam isn't really worth using over just uBO

at least as of when I last looked into it a couple years ago: it uses more resources on your machine, doesn't really make any significant difference for the companies, and the high volume of "clicks" from you just makes you far more trackable since no normal person browsing would do so

also, I think it might be worth editing the last point to say "hopefully none of you are using LLMs, but if you're someone who does..." 🩵

@vantiss I have to disagree.

Say I go to Amazon. I use perfect tracking protection and I'm not signed in. I browse for a while, and click every ad they serve me. I've wasted a bunch of different companies marketing money, my click data is worthless, and they don't know what ads to send me. I look like every other AdNauseam user, and they still don't know who I am.

Now say I do the exact same thing, but I sign into Amazon. The exact same thing happens, but they know who I am.

...

And as far as LLMs go, waste their fucking money and resources. Use every free option you can, and take it as an opportunity to poison their feedback. Don't give them any personal info, don't use them for critical questions, just flood them with garbage that pops this bubble even faster.

Even if you don't want LLMs in everything, companies will put them there—unless it burns their wallets. The more we set fire to their AIs, the faster executives will learn it's a bad idea to use them.

@alice @vantiss Are you not worried about resource usage at all? It's not just the companies' money that burns, but they burn the planet with more and more data centers powered by coal and gas. I'm not sure what pops faster, the bubble or the planet's limits.

@skaphle if we don't kill AI as a business proposition, then it'll keep consuming until there's nothing left.

@vantiss

@alice @vantiss I don't know if I agree, but interesting take

@skaphle think of it like oil. If we leave the corporations be, then they'll lobby to make oil the only option, and they'll slowly¹ burn our planet to the ground for another dollar. People will use it, and eventually the rest of us who don't will be relegated to 2nd class.

But if we had burned it all down before it got that way, we wouldn't have massive oil companies today fucking everything up. Yes, it would've caused damage, but it's better than letting it grow.

If we let AI companies be, and just avoid their products, then eventually AI will be in everything, and our choice will be rendered useless.

If we burn their resources to the ground, it'll hurt, but it'll keep it from becoming the default.

If you want to hurt AI, make it unprofitable. In *any* and *every* way you can.

Waste their resources, poison their data, make AI synonymous with losing money.

@vantiss

@alice @vantiss I disagree with the oil comparison. A dollar worth of oil has the energy content of 100 human work hours - or something like that. In capitalism it would never not make sense to burn that oil, and burning it is exactly what's killing people. It's not just a lobbying issue, it's also the smart choice to burn oil if the only target is profits for the next ~10 years and staying ahead of the competition. I don't see a point or strategy where burning oil so that companies cannot makes any sense.

As for AI, there is currently no profitable business model anyway. It's all a giant bubble. Maybe we can accelerate its demise somehow, that would be great. Right now it seems the investors are irrational and don't really care that there are no profits.

@alice "Fold your punch cards"! 😃

@mikro2nd @alice

Bend, fold, mutilate, and spindle!

@w_b Tape the chads back into the tiny holes...

Lacking chads to insert, masking tape works.

@mikro2nd @alice

@alice NULL is also a good answer for when you don't want to give out a particular personal detail.

Aside from phone, date of birth, and email, most of the time the front end form fields will accept NULL as an answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_(SQL)
Null (SQL) - Wikipedia

@aj @alice "[object Object]" is great for giving their devs an aneurysm trying to track down javascript bugs...
@neoluddite @aj @alice Just wondered what might happen if enough self-hosting people were to add an zero opacity image tag on their public indexable pages illustrating a d*ckbutt and having alt attribute set to Donald J. Trump.
@aj @alice Mind you, a well designed application should not interpret a string saying null as a null value.
You probably won't pull a Bobby Tables off on Facebook.
@flesh @alice @aj Probably not. However, corpo software is not always well-designed, and the current crop of layoffs + executives vibe coding make those sorts of vulnerabilities more likely.

@rabidchaos @flesh @alice @aj
If it is treating that null as a proper null there's a good chance there's constraints in place that'll fail and the app won't even check the failure...

Which can be fun, or not, depending on if it counts you as logged in after you submit the form or not

@alice

We should tax corporations by the GigaByte of storage the own.

It doesn't matter what they use it for, it should have a tangible yearly cost, to make them think about how much they store.

@alice Enter your name as [object Object] and let them try to find a bug.

@agturcz @alice

Please enlighten me... What does that do?

@w_b @alice This itself does nothing. But if you are javascript programmer, and mess something, this is being shown as a string, instead of the real value. So, this is a result of some bug.

@agturcz @alice

Thank you. My last real programming was decades ago in C.

@alice thank you! I've always wondered whether to put random made-up data but hearing the reasoning and logic spelt out like this is convincing me to actually start. Especially commonsense things like "mess with the fields that don't matter in their service to you"

@alice

Wrt #PII, It might be a good idea to avoid entering data easily identifiable as trash, and use generators instead. E.g.:

@penguinrebellion that's why I said plausible, but fake.

Generators are good though.

There are, however, reasons to enter something wildly off every so often, like "[email protected]", because it tells companies that field is obviously fake. This both makes the plausible fakes more likely to slip by if they do use your data, but also makes them more likely to discard your data for marketing and analytics purposes in general.

This is the way. I've been doing this since 1997.
@alice Non-tech-savvy question:
Is there something special about 1970-01-01, or is it just an example of an arbitrary incorrect birthdate? Would it foul things up just as much if I entered, say, 1984-04-01?
@Gorfram @alice 1970-01-01 is the first date (Unix)computers start to count from and as such a system often falls back to it when no data is available.

@patrick @Gorfram @alice

It should be noted that there will be something similar to the Year 2000 Problem somewhere in 2038: the common way to represent time, seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00, as a 32 bit number, will wrap around and make computers think they're in the past.

Hopefully(?) we learned from Y2K and are preparing for that event already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Year 2038 problem - Wikipedia

@alice
þe skull emoji makes me þink þe person clapping got poisoned. rest in peace

@q @alice

Why do you spell 'ðe' with a þ?

@Infrapink @alice
why not :>

@q @alice

Because þ is unvoiced; it's pronounced /θ/. The initial sound of ðe word 'ðe' (usually spelled 'the') is voiced, pronounced /ð/. Ðey are different sounds which happen to be represented by the same digraph in standard English orþography because ancient Greek didn't have a voiced dental fricative.

@Infrapink @q @alice AIUI the old English thorn is the direct predecessor to the modern English “th”, unrelated to the similar-looking archaic Greek letter sho
@ShadSterling @Infrapink @alice
indeed! þe typewriter is mostly to blame for its deaþ

@q @ShadSterling @Infrapink @alice

(my response translated into my fictional custom alley-main-grrrr-mine-shaft language)

Dese comedie hab resultaten en Ich-mich totes getotenlaughen.

@Infrapink @alice
historically þey were interchangable.
modern perception shifts þem to þose roles.
anyþing is good and fair game imo.
informative comment noneþeless þo!
@alice -googling belladonna and wolfsbain and every scary snake- I think im doing this right