Ok, got another one for ya based on some comments below. You have all the usual addons to block ads and such, but you create a sock-puppet identify, and use AI to “click” ads in the background (stolen from a comment) that align with that identity. You dont see the ads, but the traffic pattern supports the identity you are wearing.

So rather than random, its aligned with a fake identity.

This isn’t a very smart idea.

People trying to obfuscate their actions would suddenly have massive associated datasets of actions to sift through and it would be trivial to distinguish between the browsing behaviors of a person and a bot.

Someone else said this is like chaff or flare anti missile defense and that’s a good analog. Anti missile defenses like that are deployed when the target recognizes a danger and sees an opportunity to confuse that danger temporarily. They’re used in conjunction with maneuvering and other flight techniques to maximize the potential of avoiding certain death, not constantly once the operator comes in contact with an opponent.

On a more philosophical tip, the masters tools cannot be turned against him.

So, she is talking about an AI-war? Where those who don’t want us to be private, controls the weapons? Anyone else see a problem with that logic?

Thousands of “you” browsing different sites, will use an obscene amount of power and bandwidth. Imagine a million people doing that, not a billion… That’s just stupid in all kinds of ways.

I feel like I woke up in the stupidest timeline where climate change is about to kill us, we decide stupidly to 10x our power needs by shoving LLMs down everyone’s throats, and the only solution to stay private is to 10x our personal LLM usage by generating tons of noise about us just to stay private. So now we’re 100x ing everyone’s power usage and we’re going to die even sooner.

I think your idea is interesting – I was also thinking that same thing awhile back – but how tf did we get here.

I don’t know if there’s a clean way to do this right now, but I’d love to see a software project dedicated to doing this. Once a data set is poisoned it becomes very difficult to un-poison. The companies would probably implement some semi-effective but heavy-handed means of defending against it if it actually affected them, but I’m all for making them pay for that arms race.

I have been a longtime advocate of data poisoning. Especially in the case of surveillance pricing. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be many tools for this outside of AdNauseum.

Obscuration is what you’re thinking and it works with things like adnauseun (firefox add on that will click all ads in the background to obscure preference data). It’s a nice way to smear the data and probably better to do sooner (while the data collection is in infancy) rather than later (where the companies may be able to filter obscuration attempts).

I like it. I am really not a fan of being profiled, collected, and categorized. I agree with others, I hate this time line. It’s so uncanny.

First, Naomi and her team are doing a fantastic work in security for masses, easily top 5 worldwide!

AI is capable but we are still failing at program it properly, gosh, even well funded companies are still doing a poor job at it… (just look at the misplaced ads and ineffective we still get.)

What I want, and it is easy to do TODAY, is AI checking our FOSS… so many we use and just a tiny, tiny minority of it goes with some scrutiny. We need AI to go through the FOSS code looking for maliciousness now.

I did this with period trackers. I’m male and my wife and I would always chuckle when my period was about to start.

This is like chaff, and I think it would work. But you would have to deal with the fact that whatever patterns it was showing you were doing “you would be doing”.

I think there are other ways that AI can be used for privacy.

For example, did you know that you can be identified by how you type/speak online? what if you filtered everything you said through an LLM first, normalizing it. Takes away a fingerprinting option. Could use a pretty small local LLM model that could run on a modest local desktop…

In a different direction now is a good time to start looking at how local AI can liberate us from big tech.

It’s a good idea in theory, but it’s a challenging concept to have to explain to immigration officials at the airport.

You would be able to do this for a short while but unless you can make an agent that’s indistinguishable from you or you already have very bot-like traffic, they’d catch up pretty quickly. They aren’t going to just let a trillion dollar industry die out because some bots are generating traffic.

It’s an interesting concept, but I’m not sure the payoff justifies the effort.

Even with AI-generated noise, you’re still being tracked through logins, device fingerprints, and other signals. And in the process, you would probably end up degrading your own experience; getting irrelevant ads, broken recommendations, or tripping security systems.

There’s also the environmental cost to consider. If enough people ran decoy traffic 24/7, the energy use could become significant. All for a strategy that platforms would likely adapt to pretty quickly.

I get the appeal, but I wonder if the practical downsides outweigh the potential privacy gains.