Mastodawn

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Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info).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

Irene (she/they, Sir/Mr.)5d ago

@alice scribbling notes furiously

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

@Irenetherogue sure! There are low tech ways to do it—just lie...to every corporation, app, and marketer you can. Make it plausible, but wrong.

Bonus: include something wildly implausible once in a while. It makes folx more likely to overlook the subtle ones.

Boggin 5d ago

@alice @Irenetherogue I got off when taken to court for nonpayment of Poll Tax (Thatcher thing, yes, I'm that old) because I poisoned their data by missing out a crucial box on the form.

Don't refuse to comply but *always* sabotage their data. It's simply costs them more.

MostlyTato 5d ago

@boggin @alice @Irenetherogue
Back in the nineties I'd pay my phone bill by cheque. BT would charge me an admin fee, that eventually topped £7.50 just to cash a cheque. Of course they wanted to bully me in to paying via Direct Debit.
So I made all my cheques out to 'Bastard Telecom' and didn't sign them. I thought I was being very clever, forcing them to hustle for their fee.
But they just went and cashed them anyway! No idea how as they were unsigned... 🤔

RealGene ☣️5d ago

@MostlyTato @boggin @alice @Irenetherogue
The US Interval Revenue Service is renowned for cashing checks *made out to someone else*.

Earthworm 🐌5d ago

@alice @Irenetherogue

Haha, you'd like my mother, the guerilla witch. She makes customer cards in every shop and switches them then with other people, bonus points if both have a strongly different consumer profile.

When she's bored, she responds maliciously questionnaires of evil corporations.

She studied psychology and statistics and says "it is anyway horribly difficult to get useful answers out of these marketing datasets, why not make it a bit harder for them?" 😈.

@earthworm TIL I have a second kid.

My education is in psychology and statistics, and I do shit like that whenever I can.

@Irenetherogue

Earthworm 🐌4d ago

@alice
aaawww!

u r so sweet!

made my day!

@Irenetherogue

Dopes The Frogman 5d ago

@alice @Irenetherogue Nightshade or Glaze every picture you have prior to posting online (I just posted several here if you'd like to share them.)

The Orange Theme 5d ago

@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 ha! thats so good.

@theorangetheme I'd love to make a bot that just hits all the big LLMs and corporate "help" bots, and simply shuffles their answers to each other randomly, then randomly up or downvotes the replies.

Emily_S 5d ago

@alice @theorangetheme I once built a fuzz testing tool that "randomly" shuffled input around and tested it against things. "does my input validation survive utterly batshit inputs?"

Feeding the inputs through something like that would make sure they can't cache answers.

Nicky Donna 5d ago

@alice @theorangetheme you can vibe the app, using their shit to create shit to fuck up shit

jz.tusk 5d ago

@alice @theorangetheme

Distant memories of hooking together two ELIZA instances...

Chris 5d ago

@theorangetheme @alice lol somebody has a toddler

Дими́трий 5d ago

@theorangetheme @alice

'and then?'

Nicky Donna 5d ago

@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

Ighostrider 5d ago

@theorangetheme @alice haha!

I am Jack's Found 404 5d ago

@theorangetheme @alice

Philosophy!

I am Jack's Found 404 4d ago

@theorangetheme @alice

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

(see the hidden alt text :)

Extended Mind

xkcd

Stephan Druskat 4d ago

@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?

Numerfolt 5d ago

@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

Tanguy ⧓ Herrmann 4d ago

@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.

Chip 5d ago

@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

pockets 5d ago

@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.

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¨)

elle 5d ago

@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.

skaphle 1d ago

@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.

🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)1d ago

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

@vantiss

skaphle 23h ago

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

🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)22h ago

@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

skaphle 21h ago

@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.

mike morris 5d ago

@alice "Fold your punch cards"! 😃

Bill 5d ago

@mikro2nd @alice

Bend, fold, mutilate, and spindle!

saucytina 5d ago

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

Lacking chads to insert, masking tape works.

@mikro2nd @alice

AJ Sadauskas 5d ago

@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

neoluddite 5d ago

@aj @alice "[object Object]" is great for giving their devs an aneurysm trying to track down javascript bugs...

Amorpheus 5d ago

@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.

Tzimisce Flesh 5d ago

@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.

Rabidchaos 5d ago

@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.

Alexa Devreux-Swift 5d ago

@alice

Hmm interesting. I have never heard of TERFs being referred to as Data before ... 🤔

quotequack 5d ago

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

Infrapink (he/his/him)5d ago

@q @alice

Why do you spell 'ðe' with a þ?

quotequack 5d ago

@Infrapink @alice
why not :>

Infrapink (he/his/him)5d ago

@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.

ShadSterling 5d ago

@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

quotequack 4d ago

@ShadSterling @Infrapink @alice
indeed! þe typewriter is mostly to blame for its deaþ

@q @ShadSterling @Infrapink @alice

quangobaud 4d ago

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

Dese comedie hab resultaten en Ich-mich totes getotenlaughen.

quotequack 4d ago

@miguelpergamon @ShadSterling @Infrapink @alice
your WHAT?

@q @ShadSterling @Infrapink @alice

quangobaud 4d ago

QuangoTranslate:
"This comedy caused me to die laughing."

quotequack 4d ago

@Infrapink @alice
historically þey were interchangable.
modern perception shifts þem to þose roles.
anyþing is good and fair game imo.
informative comment noneþeless þo!