Distributed spidering for a community-fed search engine index would provide comparable end-user benefits while being considerably more socially useful.
What an awesome idea!
Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
31–40 of 165 posts
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#32Will this not be counterproductive, i.e. distribute your personal data to even more websites? By the way, I once got blocked by Google after installing a plugin that did automatic random searches in the background.
Maybe install it in a different profile ?
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#33An interesting way to look at this, but wouldn't it be possible to pluck this pattern out from relevant data?
It most likely is because it is incredible hard to create realistic fake traffic. The moment you start using such a tool is probably very easy to detect due to a sudden jump in traffic. Then you can use prior data to figure out what you were actually doing - sites you visit, times you are active times, how you switch between sites, how long you stay on sites, and so on. Randomly following links will show very differe…
I was thinking the same thing, real sessions might be separable from fake.
This smells like an adversarial problem, where one AI makes fake traffic and one tries to detect it. Perhaps the fake session creation bot could mingle on the same sites as the real sessions to make it harder to distinguish.
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#34Using this will raise some flags (your online behaviour will be different from most).
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Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#35Distributed spidering for a community-fed search engine index would provide comparable end-user benefits while being considerably more socially useful.
You win buzzword bingo
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#36An interesting way to look at this, but wouldn't it be possible to pluck this pattern out from relevant data?
It most likely is because it is incredible hard to create realistic fake traffic. The moment you start using such a tool is probably very easy to detect due to a sudden jump in traffic. Then you can use prior data to figure out what you were actually doing - sites you visit, times you are active times, how you switch between sites, how long you stay on sites, and so on. Randomly following links will show very differe…
If I were writing this, I would try to get it into as many hands as possible, and do some sort of backfeeding of data to generate "real" profiles of user activities, then send back down suitably randomized profiles of other real users that you use for some period of time.
It's important to conceive of this as an arms race, and I think one of the underappreciated things about arms races is that if you successfully anticipate the next three things your opponent will do and counter them, you can end up discouraging them from even fighting in the arms race. I don't know how random the page visits are, but if they are random in, well, almost any sense, eventually they will be something the trackers can filter out. "Well, this person shows a really strong signal for football, and weak signals for anime, robotics, accounting, and a hundred other things. Show them the football ads." Even today that wouldn't necessarily pose much of a challenge.
By contrast, if you get profiles from volunteers that are real, and then start mixing them up so that everybody downloading this extension shows ten or fifty equally strong signals of interest, of which only one is real, that'll scramble the data being collected something fierce, and require the data collectors to jump straight to very sophisticated teasing out of what's really true, which initially won't even be worth it until a lot more people are using this stuff. There's a lot of elaborations you can think of from there (temporal correlations, i.e., college basketball interest should be spiking now, vs. football), etc.
I have no idea what this extension is doing, because I can't seem to find any data about what it is doing, so maybe it's doing some of this stuff, but I expect they'd be talking about at least the data they'll need to collect to make this really work if it was going to work this way, so I assume without proof that it is not this.
In general, it's worth pointing out that a lot of systems can't be fooled by uniformly random data, because all real-world systems already have to be able to filter that out because all real-world systems experience noise, of which at least a significant component is probably more-or-less uniformly random. If you really want to scramble a system you need to be more clever.
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#37Distributed spidering for a community-fed search engine index would provide comparable end-user benefits while being considerably more socially useful.
That is an awesome idea - a browser that is also a node in a search engine; it would be possible to build an experimental search engine then without a £40 million + investment to even get started.
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#38Distributed spidering for a community-fed search engine index would provide comparable end-user benefits while being considerably more socially useful.
Or maybe even a crawling project like Common Crawl.
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#39Turns out it's only for Chrome, and the front page doesn't even mention this. Could we at least change the HN title from "A browser plugin..." to "A Chrome plugin..."?
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#40I don't mean to be a curmudgeon, but why put out this kind of privacy-minded plugin for Chrome, one of the browsers I'd probably least trust to respect my privacy?
Why would you need it in a browser that you trust to respect your privacy?