And I mean not just the “Homer Oddity” video, though that is definitely fantastic, too. I love the idea of throwing random monkey wrenches into the gears of AI. The intellectual property theft these scumbags have perpetrated over the past few years is one of the biggest crimes of this crime-infested era.
I’ve been practicing my own small version of this off and on for years, giving out fake information whenever possible, using a zillion different email addresses and names for online accounts, etc.
There’s a good book on the subject of evasion and deception to disrupt surveillance (a slightly different, but allied endeavor) that came out 10 years ago, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest (by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, MIT Press). Here’s one of the many excellent passages in this book:
”Bayesian Flooding” and “unselling” the value of online identity”
In 2012, Kevin Ludlow, a developer and an entrepreneur, addressed a familiar obfuscation problem: What is the best way to hide data from Facebook?? The short answer is that there is no good way to remove data, and wholesale withdrawal from social networks isn't a realistic possibility for many users.
Ludlow's answer is by now a familiar one.
"Rather than trying to hide information from Facebook," Ludlow wrote," it may be possible simply to overwhelm it with too much information." Ludlow's experiment (which he called "Bayesian flooding," after a form of statistical analysis) entailed entering hundreds of life events into his Facebook Timeline over the course of months--events that added up to a life worthy of a three-volume novel. He got married and divorced, fought cancer (twice), broke numerous bones, fathered children, lived all over the world, explored a dozen religions, and fought for a slew of foreign militaries.
Ludlow didn't expect anyone to fall for these stories; rather, he aimed to produce a less targeted personal experience of Facebook through the inaccurate guesses to which the advertising now responds, and as an act of protest against the manipulation and "coercive psychological tricks" embedded both in the advertising itself and in the site mechanisms that provoke or sway users to enter more information than they may intend to enter. In fact, the sheer implausibility of Ludlow's Timeline life as a globe-trotting, caddish mystic-mercenary with incredibly bad luck acts as a kind of filter: no human reader, and certainly no friend or acquaintance of Ludlow's, would assume that all of it was true, but the analysis that drives the advertising has no way of making such distinctions.
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