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Don’t set your date only to 1970-01-01. Set it wildly wrong every time, lie about your gender, etc
Setting a different date every time sets a (probably unique) pattern. Everyone using the same date every time makes it useless.
But what if I was born on New Year’s Day in 1970?
If everyone’s using it, then it’s still beneficial in obscuring your actual data. Even better since they can’t just discard the date outright as it is a viable birthdate.
Realistically it won’t be that many people in their networks of data that use the same date, 01-01-1970 in this case, and they might even use that trend of date when possible to infer that you like technology or are in certain circles.
Random dates sound safer to me. I don’t see how using random ones could end up in some unique-to-you pattern.
Xkcd illustrates the issue nicely: https://xkcd.com/1105/
I already do much of this. One issue recently for me is when filling out info for email and phone number it has now become a requirement to add correctly (most of the time) because these cunts are going to send me email verification codes and text me at my number ending in 1337 for the 2fa to get into an acct that does NOT need that yet forces it. And I can’t even use my flipper as a u2f without using Chrome since Firefox considers serial passthrough “insecure,” that’s why I can’t use it to update my meshtastic nodes either. Pisses me off tbh. I can use a semi-retired email, and do, but still.
SMS 2FA has been extremely insecure for like a decade now. Anyone still using it is either an idiot or keeping it as an excuse to “require” your phone number. It actually makes your account less secure.
They use it because its a unique identifier that links to the rest of your personal data.
Sure, but unless I’m the CEO of those places (and in case there was any question, I’m not) I can’t do shit about it if I need to use whatever service it is. I can email all I want to, I’m not like a respected security researcher or anything I’m just some dickhead with an account.
I didn’t expect you to do anything about it. Was just emphasizing that 2FA is not a legitimate reason to require a phone number, that’s all.
edit: I think I might have been a bit ambiguous: people who use as in “implement it into their authentication procedures” are the idiots, not the people those idiots are forcing to give up their phone number.
I agree for sure. Especially after having so many sent to my old phone number lmao. I have one government thing I can’t even sign up for because “they don’t have a record of me at (current number)” and what am I supposed to do, text my old number “hey bro this used to be my number can you text me the verification code you just received real quick?” It’s madness!
I’ve solved the email part of this equation by using an email forwarding service (eg SimpleLogin, AnonAddy, etc).
Phone numbers are a harder problem, I usually end up using one number for everything that truly requires it (sadly), but then have another for personal stuff.
Commoners: “She’s a witch! She’s speaking in tongues!”
tis why the best you can do for normies, is just to opt out. Shit’s more complicated than cereal bowl’s escape puzzle.
The AdNauseam thing is neat. I didn’t know about that one.
It does have its flaws though. For example, if you use uBlock Origin, your browser’s requests to the ad networks’ servers never make it.
If you use AdNauseam, the requests do make it. This means the ad networks will get your IP address, what page you were on, browser fingerprints, etc.
Essentially, you spam click ads, but at the cost of… giving them all the data they’d normally get if you didn’t have an ad blocker and spam clicked ads.
Most of these networks can filter out obvious bot behavior like just clicking every single ad repeatedly, so at the end of the day it’s unlikely to do much harm to them, but it sure as hell will give them a lot of trackable data about your browsing history.
I do believe it’s more effective when the extension is set to only click ads somewhat occasionally though. Enough to drain extra money, while still just looking like a person that tends to click ads more frequently than others, instead of clicking every single one.
it sounds great, sure. but it’s entirely pointless. at best you’re wasting fractions of a penny of the advertisers money. you’re not “poisoning” your data. if you click on every ad they show you, it becomes obvious what you’re attempting and they just start showing you generic ads based on your gender and demographic.
many of these advertisers brag about having thousands of data points on every person. they won’t be fooled by tricks like these.
It does seem like an idea that could be improved on, I would love a poisoning the well extension or even browser mode.
the problem is, corporations like Google or Apple, depending on which mobile phone you use, already know everything about you. they know your age, your preferred gender identity, and where you live. that alone is enough for them to make very good guesses at the kinds of things you would be interested in. but the information they have on you goes much further than that.
trying to poison the well just through a single browser extension doesn’t do anything to change the data they have on you. especially since you can’t poison all the data they’re collecting on you. that extension might not even work on mobile, and even if it does, most of the information they collect doesn’t come through your browsing habits, it comes from the things you do in the apps you use.
It is just using clock cycles and bandwidth on your side. Online advertising hasn’t worked like that in well over a decade.
Neither did I. Just installed it
The guerrilla warfare the fascist megacorp overlords forced us into.
I just avoid most of that shit. This may be a hot take, it may be impractical to people who are younger than me, or live different lives, have different needs, but for me, I just avoid it. I think it’s a generational thing. Generation X, we were fine with forums, and AOL/AIM, and ICQ, and all that good stuff, but when these sites started asking for our real names, I think a lot of us just said no. Some of us stayed on with Twitter for a while, some of us went to Reddit until that went tits up (I mean it’s still there but it sucks now), and I’m sure some of us did cave and start using the real-name services, maybe to reconnect with old flames or whatever. But for me, and others like me, we just said no.
I don’t use Facebook. I don’t use Twitter. I had a MySpace for a while, but ditched it. So I’m not completely pure. I also used Windows through the first couple (major) versions of Windows 11 before switching to Macintosh (well, Mac — the full name hasn’t been formally used in a long time). So Apple does have some of the same bullshit as Windows, you need an account, there’s an App Store (similar to the Windows Store, and just as useless), and there’s technically AI, if Siri counts (we — Mac users, I mean, basically never use it, it’s always been useless), but if you just wanna say “fuck the system” while still using something with commercial support, Mac’s a solid choice. (Of course, Linux is better, especially if you already have a Windows computer and you’re looking to break away, but also, a majority of Linux users consider Windows their safety net, or backup plan. Having actual Macs means no, I don’t have a backup plan, I can’t just fall back to Windows, unless Windows for ARM becomes viable and supports Macs. I’m all in getting TF away from Windows and Copilot.
Of course, I do a lot of the things the image suggests. I invert my birthday. MM-DD to DD-MM and, for the year, ABCD to ABDC. For a while, this didn’t work to make me appear to be over 18, so I’d just add or remove 5 or something like that, but now, my “ABDC” year is over 21, so it’s fine. It’s also easy to remember, if I need to recall my “birthdate,” I do the math in my head and there it is. It’s not random and it doesn’t look random.
Linux user chiming in as we do: Windows isn’t my back up plan, I’m forced to use it sparingly at work, and rarely vendor lock in forces me to borrow a friend’s pc to update my garmin maps (for example), but it’s not my “plan” and I’m pissed about it. My plan is that vendors develop at least passable linux options for updating shit like that other than “fuck you, use windows loser.”
“fuck the system” system" while still using something with commercial support, Mac’s a solid choice.
I was with you until that. Apple is no different and in many ways worse than Microsoft.
You need support? Run Ubuntu.
Apple sucks balls. The way they intentionally make their products incompatible with non-Apple products so you have to buy through them, or get a “dongle”. Dongles suck balls.
you hit the nail on the head. and Remember when we used stuff like IRC, ICQ, AOLIM, forums, etc it was CONSTANTLY drilled into our heads to NEVER share our real names, hell even posting an actual photo of yourself was seen as extremely risky. It wasn’t until Myspace that I felt comfortable doing so. The only social media I use now is piefed. that’s it. I don’t even use Mastodon much anymore. it’s easy for me to just ditch that stuff on whim. I ditched facebook easily a good 10 years ago, I just don’t think about it.
I was born in 83 so not quite gen x but I think people my age have a similar mindset. we’re just kind on the cusp of it all. I think unlike Gen X who just said “nah i’m good” many millennials rather were like “meh, ok, ill give it a shot for a bit” before saying no.
I’m not that much older than you. Funny how the generation lines are drawn. And we’re both over 40, so it doesn’t matter anyway. Once you’re over the hill, it’s a moot point which decade you were born in… for a while.
I have a Piefed, I thought it would be so much different from Lemmy, but it’s just an older (looking/feeling) interface to the same communities. But I’m on RetroFed which tries to focus on retro computing/gaming. I rarely use it because it’s not that different an experience and I generally don’t like being two people on the same network/federation, it just feels disingenuous. If they don’t delete it for inactivity, I can use it if anything happens to this account.
I think there‘s a bunch of different groups. There‘s Gen X that got taught not to share their personal info, the current generation is growing up being taught this as well, a lot of all gens gave sites everything because clueless or indifferent, and then the groups that deliberately shared info trying for internet fame.
There‘s plenty of Gen X that are clueless about privacy and computers.
Knowledge about avoiding tracking, obfuscating your identity, blocking ads, etc. requires constant effort ad knowledge. We‘re on lemmy, and that‘s a bit of an echo chamber because people here as a whole tend to be more knowledgeable about computers, and people here seem to forget that like 90% of the population are clueless about them.
Dmant this is is some “minimize your carbon footprint” bullshit.
Do something real if you actually care.
imagine if every terminally online leftist in america put this effort into taking control of government…
