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Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info).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.)Mar 20

@alice scribbling notes furiously

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

The Orange Theme Mar 20

@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.

Chris Mar 20

@theorangetheme @alice lol somebody has a toddler

Дими́трий Mar 20

@theorangetheme @alice

'and then?'

Nicky Donna Mar 20

@theorangetheme @alice always add “please” and “Thanks” it waste sooooo many tokens. Those words are usually in a different “space” that what you asked

Ighostrider Mar 20

@theorangetheme @alice haha!

I am Jack's Found 404 Mar 20

@theorangetheme @alice

Philosophy!

I am Jack's Found 404 Mar 21

@theorangetheme @alice

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

(see the hidden alt text :)

Extended Mind

xkcd

Stephan Druskat Mar 21

@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 Mar 20

@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 Mar 21

@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 Mar 20

@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 Mar 20

@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.

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

elle Mar 20

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..." 🩵

mike morris Mar 20

@alice "Fold your punch cards"! 😃

Bill Mar 20

@mikro2nd @alice

Bend, fold, mutilate, and spindle!

saucytina Mar 20

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

Lacking chads to insert, masking tape works.

@mikro2nd @alice

AJ Sadauskas Mar 20

@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 Mar 20

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

Amorpheus Mar 20

@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 Mar 20

@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 Mar 20

@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.

EndlessMason Mar 20

@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

Poul-Henning Kamp Mar 20

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.

Agnieszka R. Turczyńska Mar 20

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

Bill Mar 20

@agturcz @alice

Please enlighten me... What does that do?

Agnieszka R. Turczyńska Mar 20

@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.

Bill Mar 20

@agturcz @alice

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

Hippo 🍉Mar 20

@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"

Penguin Rebellion Mar 20

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

McCrankyface Mar 20

This is the way. I've been doing this since 1997.

"Mediocre Bunny" Evelyn Mar 20

@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?

Patrick Dersjant RCX Mar 20

@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.

Diego Martínez (Kaeza) 🇺🇾Mar 20

@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

Patrick Dersjant RCX Mar 21

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

Diego Martínez (Kaeza) 🇺🇾Mar 21

@patrick @Gorfram @alice

That's if the planet is not destroyed before 🥲

Patrick Dersjant RCX Mar 21

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

Raindrops and Roses Mar 20

@Gorfram @alice I don't get it but I'm not very smart.

RE: https://toot.community/@openculture/116259749175404044

swggrkllr3rd Mar 20

@alice https://mastodon.world/@openculture@toot.community/116259749462141780

Apriloq - Please Use Alt Text Mar 20

@alice got to show my ignorance here, but how do I find which brokers have my info?!

isol Mar 20

https://www.acma.gov.au/phone-numbers-use-tv-shows-films-and-creative-works

I've been using mobile phone numbers from the list of numbers reserved for creative works (in Australia), when a form requires me to enter a phone number.

DJ Toebeans Mar 20

@isol @alice

I often use 867-5309. Tell Jenny I said hi!

Chinga la migra! 🍉🌈Mar 20

@djtoebeans @isol @alice

I have gotten discounts on clothes (thanks Raj whoever you are) and I get 10% off store brands (because an employee used that as their alt id on their loyalty card) using the Jenny trick. I hope that I am paying it forward somehow through another loyalty program elsewhere

James S Mar 20

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...

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 Mar 20

@alice Use a different email address for friggin everything so aggregators can't use it as a primary key.

Mark ⛵️🏳️‍🌈Mar 20

@alan @alice I have 92 current, active, email addresses, not counting all the disposable ones I've used over the years - this is just one reason why I shall not be visiting the USA - the immigration paperwork would be a nightmare! 😂

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 Mar 20

@not_a_label @alice Sampling just one of my several domains, I count 330.

Tanguy ⧓ Herrmann Mar 21

@alan @not_a_label @alice it goes sooooo fast.
I'm at 800.
It's annoying at some point, but f them

Woozle Hypertwin Mar 20

@alan I do that anyway, as a way of (a) being able to block large amounts of spam with high reliability and (b) finding out who has leaky databases.

Alan Langford 🇨🇦🧤🧊摏 Mar 21

@woozle @alice Me too. I add a random sequence to the end, so when an address is compromised, I just keep the first part and tack on the random bit. I had someone say "well they could have guessed that address" when I reported an issue, so yeah the chances of that are now one in several hundred million. I guess it's not a leak, just a spammer who made a really lucky guess! LOL

Woozle Hypertwin Mar 21

@alan

I just do [abbreviation for company][year]@[one of my domains].

F3715H Mar 20

@alice always lie ton corpos unless doing so will get you jailed!

Ripp_

Mar 20

@alice given that the alternative approach is to complain to them that collecting my postcode violates GDPR as they don't need it, just to have them say they'll fix it then they don't

I think I'm going to keep entering ZZ9 2ZA for postcodes