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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

#81

Post by voidmain0001 »

literallycancer wrote: post #67
gingerbread-man wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has actually blocked similar "noise generation" apps from the Chrome Store in the past. As I recall, there were a few extensions out there that would 'click' on every ad displayed. Obviously that would have created serious problems for Google, so they nixed it.

https://adnauseam.io/ I wasn't convinced it was very useful and thought it would only take some easy heuristics to filter out when I first saw it, but if Google removed it from the store, it must have been a pain to deal with. Maybe I'll even end up using it.

As an Ad-nauseaum user my beef with it is that certain web pages will peg the CPU at close to 90%. Otherwise it seems to be good at juggling system resources.

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

#82

Post by tyingq »

bognition wrote: post #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.

It doesn't imply any particular licensing, but it is trivial to view the source of a chrome extension.

You can do it with curl or similar to download it, but there's a chrome extension that does the work for you: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-extension-s...

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

#83

Post by always_good »

literallycancer wrote: post #67
gingerbread-man wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has actually blocked similar "noise generation" apps from the Chrome Store in the past. As I recall, there were a few extensions out there that would 'click' on every ad displayed. Obviously that would have created serious problems for Google, so they nixed it.

https://adnauseam.io/ I wasn't convinced it was very useful and thought it would only take some easy heuristics to filter out when I first saw it, but if Google removed it from the store, it must have been a pain to deal with. Maybe I'll even end up using it.

This website reminds me of the KenM post where he suggests that he's getting back at Papa Johns by not tipping the pizza delivery driver.

Generating click fraud on your favorite web comic's website or other small websites you may be visiting is pretty sad. Adsense bans for life.

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

#84

Post by Insanity »

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? :-)

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

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? :-)

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by always_good »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #57

So, 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.

Reminds me of a comment I once saw on HN where someone suggested they avoided timing attacks by adding a random sleep.

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

#87

Post by scotchio »

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 trashes your digital profile (liking random things, changing your info, and just basically obfuscating what FB thinks they know about you).

I never built it though, but I kind of wish I did. Still own domain if someone wants it.

Trend seems to be that we're not going to have protections over our own digital privacy/data for a very long time. Maybe a service that could at least mask, lie, trash, obscure our footprint for everyone else would be nice to have.

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

#88

Post by r721 »

cryptarch wrote: post #78
r721 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exists: http://yacy.net/en/index.html

It's a distributed search engine deamon with a nice search + management web frontend but not a browser too?

I didn't install it myself, but I thought it's possible to interact with that daemon from common browser? Also it's possible to start custom web crawls?

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

#89

Post by onychomys »

supergreg wrote: post #40
codydh wrote: post #9

I 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?

Because it's designed to frustrate your ISP. The problem with running it in Chrome is that google is probably already grabbing everything you do in the browser, so who cares if Comcast is too?

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

#90

Post by throwaway2048 »

TjWallas wrote: post #75
bognition wrote: post #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.

Same here with a tiny twist: opensource and has a SHA512 mentioned somewhere in the repo that could be verified against whatever comes from the chrome appstore.

Would be meaningless because the chrome store auto-updates addons.
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