Throwing some sand in the gears
October 26, 2015 11:51 AM   Subscribe

Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest

Technologist Finn Brunton and philosopher Helen Nissenbaum, both of New York University [...] aim to start a “big little revolution” in the data-mining and surveillance business, by “throwing some sand in the gears, kicking up dust and making some noise”. Specifically, the authors champion the titular term, obfuscation, or “the addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects”. The objective of such measures is to thwart profiling, “to buy time, gain cover, and hide in a crowd of signals”.
posted by not_the_water (10 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
“the addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects”
That's exactly my purpose here at MetaFilter. Isn't everybody's?
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:59 PM on October 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


>>“the addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects”
>That's exactly my purpose here at MetaFilter. Isn't everybody's?
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:59 PM on October 26 [2 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]


*whistles innocently*.

in other news, for people looking for very fine and meaningless grains of sand, the phone number 425-425-4255 works as an alternate id for customer loyalty cards at most grocery stores and drugstores on the west coast. If you find one that doesn't take that as an alternate id, feel free to start a new account using that number.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:22 PM on October 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


I'd like to say that this is primarily a measure against corporate/government surveillance, but really it's just that I hate carrying around customer loyalty cards and find this method of getting discounts simpler and easier.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:24 PM on October 26, 2015


Remember, it is your moral obligation to lie to computers whenever and wherever possible.
posted by Mrs. Davros at 2:09 PM on October 26, 2015 [14 favorites]


It would be a fun project to get hands-on with a retailer's data for any or all *-867-5309 customer loyalty data and explore methodology to distinguish identities. I imagine that probably time-of-day would take care of a good chunk, then moving on to grouping by recurrent item clusters might get us a good part of the rest of the way to seeing all the individuals in the set.

How many identities might we be able to separate from the mass? My intuition says it's probably more than I would expect.

If the data includes method of payment, whether the user used a self-check line or other data this helps. Certain items are quite likely high-value tells, i.e. tobacco users typically buy the same brand of cigarettes or chew (or at least habitually choose whatever is cheapest) and they do it on a particular rhythm, same for heavy drinkers and their beverages of choice and the rest of us probably buy the same brand and quantity of toilet paper repeatedly.

Any sort of chaff behavior needs to be automated. Humans are fairly terrible at behaving inconsistently.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 2:16 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


duh of course 867-5309 works everywhere. can't believe I didn't think of that.

Ha ha! I am free of the shackles of customer loyalty cards forever! Take that, The Man!
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 6:24 PM on October 26, 2015


UK fake phone numbers with a valid form.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 11:18 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I just got pissed and uninstalled facebook and messenger from my phone because it stopped honoring my offline setting after a app update. Like, I'm pretty sure it showed when I was just active on my phone, even when not in those apps. Thoroughly disgusted at the lack of privacy, so this post is great timing.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 12:22 AM on October 27, 2015 [1 favorite]


Anyone here using AdNauseam? What's your take on it? Is this a good, bad, or indifferent tool?
posted by bryon at 12:29 AM on October 27, 2015


Just installed it.

My web proxy logs show that it's requesting a hell of a lot of advertising-related URLs, but so far its own inbuilt logger is showing me zero ads clicked. Can't yet say whether there's something wrong with its logger or whether my little pixel server is working better than I thought.
posted by flabdablet at 1:45 AM on October 27, 2015


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