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Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

noiszy.com

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Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#91

Post by bartkappenburg »

scotchio wrote: post #87

Somewhat related: A long time ago I tried to delete my Facebook and realized it only deactivates until next login. You have to specifically request that they permanently delete it or something. And, it's not even clear if FB still doesn't store your info or not after that whole process (little sketch to be fair...). So I came up with this idea that I'd make a service called socialfacewash.com that just completely tra…

Someone already created that: http://suicidemachine.org/

The even got a cease and desist letter from FB.

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#92

Post by marvinkennis »

I created something similar yesterday afternoon [0]. Instead of opening a new tab, it just requests pages through a hidden iFrame and drops the headers so the request goes through.

It doesn't click on anything, because it would be awkward if this by chance started sharing things on logged-in Facebook profiles etc. I plan on adding sequential requests over the weekend so the traffic is more realistic.

It's open source and on Github, so you can download, install and modify it from there if you wish [1].

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/decoy-requests/aeh...

[1] https://github.com/marvinkennis/Decoy-Requests

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#93

Post by snerbles »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #69
disiplus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so we need a plugin that creates a patterns. could we crowd siurce a patterns also. lets say i share my pattern with everybody and you share yours.

I bet the ML guys and gals would be able to suss out my pattern from a fake pattern.

Start an arms race, use ML to generate fake traffic.

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#96

Post by jehna1 »

Insanity wrote: post #84

Maybe I am being too naive, but could someone explain to me why just using a VPN would not be good enough to hide your traffic from these companies / governments? I understand that perhaps they _could_ ask the VPN provider to give logs (depending on the provider, if they keep logs or not). But that would not work for the algorithms used to target you as an individual. Could someone please explain that to me? :-)

VPN commonly only hides your IP for the time you're using it. There are many other factors that can be used to track you.

First is cookies. Say you log in to Facebook with your browser from your own IP address and a hour later you fire up VPN to browse the web. One of the websites you load has Facebook's tracking pixel and - unless you cleared your cookies - boom: Facebook knows you have visited that site.

Even if you clear your cookies, you may have some long-living stuff (like Flash cookies etc) that can be used to track your browser.

And even if you clear everything or use incognito, sites can use some clever heuristics (CPU power, enabled plugins, timezone, browser version, webrtc, etc.) to track your browsing and to match that it's you.

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#98

Post by _wmd »

_lqaf wrote: post #76
_wmd wrote: post #59

There 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…

Not quite what you're describing, but the venerable Squid cache can do distributed caching. Something, at least, to play with with your nerdy friends.

It needs to happen in-browser because of the modern prevalence of SSL. I think only Firefox has APIs powerful enough to intercept stuff on this level, and even those APIs are obsolete, so I think it really needs to be integrated straight into a browser fork. Chrome / Firefox WebExtensions have request interception, but I'm not sure it's powerful enough to do this kind of stuff

(Also, the mere fact such a scheme would have to jinx with the mechanics of a fundamental browser security mechanism should be enough to indicate how difficult it would be to implement safely!)

Re: Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data

#99

Post by akerro »

_lqaf wrote: post #76
_wmd wrote: post #59

There 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…

Not quite what you're describing, but the venerable Squid cache can do distributed caching. Something, at least, to play with with your nerdy friends.

Could you please tell more about it? How would that work? Do you have the config?
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