It's kind of funny their website includes TypeKit, SquareSpace, and Google Tag Manager scripts - all of which can (and probably are) tracking various things. They may not be connected to "you", may be anonymized, may be unique number representing you.
Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
51–60 of 165 posts
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ant…
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 [...]
This would also increase your traffic ten or fifty fold in a first approximation. You would make a single household look like a family with several people sharing the Internet connection. Netflix for example can separate several people using the same account, I read about that during the Netflix Prize [1].
But overall I agree with your point, you probably can throw a wrench into the machinery maybe even to the point that it is not worth to pursue tracking any longer. But it certainly is not easy and randomly clicking on links will definitely not do the trick.
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#53Not to sound pessimistic, but as more and more people get forced into metered bandwidth, how is using a plugin that generates extra random traffic "sticking it to the 'man'"? Edit: Yes, I know this is supposed to mask your actual viewing habits. But security through obscurity has never really panned out for anyone in the end.
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Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#54What exactly is the point? If the FBI suspects you in a case of the international heist of carrots and your search history includes "consealed carrot transportation" and "circumventing carrot museum security", it doesn't matter what else you googled. It only matters that this is included in it.
Edit: it was a 24-carrot job.
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#55> Read and change all your data on the websites you visit
While I applaud the authors for trying to solve a problem, I will not install this plugin unless its open source. There is no way I'm going to grant the above permission to some random plugin just because they tell a compelling story.
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#56Is this plugin available for Firefox?
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#57So, it's going to be noise among a patterned world. How will they not be able to filter this out?
People are creatures of habit. Example: I read HN with my coffee every morning. Interjecting meaningless data doesn't prevent them from finding my patterns.
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#58What exactly is the point? If the FBI suspects you in a case of the international heist of carrots and your search history includes "consealed carrot transportation" and "circumventing carrot museum security", it doesn't matter what else you googled. It only matters that this is included in it. Edit: it was a 24-carrot job.
I don't think it's about hiding from FBI inquiries but obscuring the value of data that ISPs, Google, Facebook, et al are collecting and selling without your consent.
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#59There have been a few of these plugins floating around recently, and really everything that needs said about them appears in the comments already. Fake traffic is wasteful, hard to make look authentic, and only serves to create more records of the end user around the web rather than less (e.g. your laptop IP was generating fake traffic? That probably means you had the lid open and were doing something with it at that time)
I'd much rather see a browser with some kind of built-in distributed cache, something along the lines of FreeNet, but trading perfect anonymity for performance. Given a large chunk of disk space, and a handful of browsers talking to each other in a local area (e.g. same ISP), it should be viable to concoct a scheme where after a handful of browsers request a particular page, the remaining browsers are confident enough that the data cached in their local group is representative of the data sourced from the origin network.
There are a million issues to iron out with a scheme like that, e.g. bad actors injecting crap into the cache, handling staleness, interactions with dynamic content and API endpoints etc., but I think something like this would have a much greater privacy benefit by denying at least some traffic to the origin networks, or simply by keeping some of that traffic within the boundary of the local ISP's network (and if the local ISP is evil, requests between the nodes could be encrypted as in FreeNet).
Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ant…
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 [...] This would also increase your traffic ten or fifty fold in a first approximation. You would make a single household look like a family…
"This would also increase your traffic ten or fifty fold in a first approximation."
I suspect if you worked at it you could mathematically prove that will be a necessary condition for any effective data collection scrambling technique, under an assumption that we can't use proxying to other nodes. And I do mean "mathematically" fully literally.
I'm eliminating the possibility of proxy, where you try to set up a situation where you create a P2P network and trade page views around, because I think that only works with a really abstract view of how the tracking works. In practice, as soon as you want to use a site in an authenticated fashion you're getting tracked via that authenticated account, so I think I can argue the only real possibility for scrambling the data is for it to source from the same network location as the real data you are generating.
On that note, it occurs to me this plugin probably ought to be automatically creating authenticated accounts on services you don't care about; the authenticated status of an account creates a shining signal that may be too bright to mask. Considering that a lot of the data you're trying to mask would be coming from Facebook, that would be a problem.
And now that I think of that, use of this plugin really ought to result in your Facebook profile getting pretty badly scrambled, too.
Man, this is a big challenge. There's a part of me that is actually quite sad I can't drop everything and start going to work on this right now for pay. This sounds wicked fun, but way bigger than I could ever dream to take on.