81–90 of 160 posts
Do they just scam people by compiling whatever is available on search engines? In one or two cases, I have seen them at least giving the house address or family member details right. So there seems to be more at play.
You see this a lot these days (though I suppose it's just more visible now). Another example is people selling political t-shirts (many offensive or obnoxious) to both sides of a partisan divide.
In the US, I feel like I only see one side buying merchandise. Especially offensive and obnoxious merchandise.
Guarantee someone's already selling some Jacked Up Joe merch already.
There's always someone selling merch though, a few years back a rather famous/infamous politician in NZ, Winston Peters, came out of left field to win a by-election in the electorate of Northland that the ruling National party government expected to win easy, the same party that had snubbed his offers to work together.
So people started selling "King in the North" t-shirts with ol Winnie photoshopped onto Jon Snow. I, being honest, nearly bought one, because you had to admire his schtick.
So yeah, there's always merch.
But, AFAIK, at least no-one is selling Joe Biden fan art NFTs yet. It's like a double grift.
And obviously Trump loves the merch far more because he gets a cut.
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Your data is sitting in an unencrypted excel spreadsheet somewhere as it moves between entities. Good luck. Your best bet is what the government minister mentioned elsewhere in this thread did. Generate noise. So much noise that none of your "PII" is even remotely accurate. You can't hide, but you can paint an incredibly inaccurate picture.
> You can't hide, but you can paint an incredibly inaccurate picture. How do you reasonably do this? You would have to spend an incredible amount of effort creating fake data everywhere, without having any clue if what you're doing is even working. With new AI tools and technologies it's likely that someone with enough resources and motivation would be able to filter out the signal from the noise anyway. I currently…
You answered your own question.
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A few seconds worth of work reveals how false this is. Perhaps it's just that you find one type of merchandise offensive but find the other type pleasant. Perhaps this open bias is coloring your perceptions?
I’m mid 30s, and I don’t recall anytime other than the last 7 years in which I saw people wearing stuff that came anywhere close to “Fuck ”. Or chanting it at random non political sporting events with families with children in attendance. And I don’t see the other party doing anything equivalent, from giant flags on pickup trucks, to roadside merchandise stalls, to pick up truck convoys that harass and bully other ca…
I guess the liberal equivalent is driving a Prius or something. Both sides, right..?
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> You can't hide, but you can paint an incredibly inaccurate picture. How do you reasonably do this? You would have to spend an incredible amount of effort creating fake data everywhere, without having any clue if what you're doing is even working. With new AI tools and technologies it's likely that someone with enough resources and motivation would be able to filter out the signal from the noise anyway. I currently…
>How do you reasonably do this? You would have to spend an incredible amount of effort creating fake data everywhere, without having any clue if what you're doing is even working. With new AI tools and technologies You answered your own question.
And even with AI, it would take a considerable amount of effort to flood all public channels with fake data. Do you do this via APIs for every service? Do you generate image and video as well? You would still have no idea whether your efforts are actually working.
Not to mention that using this approach contributes noise to an already noisy medium. Your fight with an imaginary enemy worsens the online experience for everyone else. We have enough junk on the internet as it is.
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this seems to fit the definition. In many cases, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it, but that fact may be concealed, with the intent to engender continual patronage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering
See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin
A not-so-secret dirty little secret is that many of the reputation management agencies also own many of the public records websites that publish mug shots, court records, and so on. When you hire them to remove that information from the internet it puts you into a cycle of being removed from one or two of their website and added to something else. You end up in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Complete with month…