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Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info).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

@diegomartinez @Gorfram @alice Yeah I know ;). I hope to be pensioned by then but the government is trying to prevent that ;).

@patrick @Gorfram @alice

That's if the planet is not destroyed before 🥲

@diegomartinez @Gorfram @alice Oh, the planet will still be there, possibly without mankind… (hypergalactic bywayconstruction excluded from scenario’s).