I wonder if you could make a self-hostable data poisoning automation utility. Put in a bunch of credentials for various social media sites, and it creates unintelligible usage patterns associated with your online identities. Not so much for poisoning training of generative AI, but for destroying any internal profiles any party might attempt to build on you by correlating your online behaviour.
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Sounds like that alternative to Ublock that I can't think of the name of right now that not only blocks ads but also gives a click-through input to every single one, poisoning any ad metrics for the ads as well as any targeted ad profiling on you.
I think the add-on is : adnauseam
That's the one, thanks.
I ran this for a while. It generated some interesting ad choices for me.
janeway: "get on it"
"fight back against surveillance capitalism and malicious advertisers by watching this youtube video"
Get a load of this! Can't make this stuff up...
You gotta meet the people where they're at to get them informed. If this information was hidden away in some privacy/security-centered blog, a fraction as many people would see it.
I know, I was just pointing out the irony that youtube is one of the primary offenders of surveillance capitalism
I agree with you! There's a layer of irony.
I wish the fediverse would get a wider user base, like loops and peertube. The more people use it, the more viable it will be as an alternative.
She's saying that when you use social media, only like, read, etc., stuff that you want to learn from or you like listening to. Scroll past the flight or flight stuff, that's the story they want for you. Your feed will quickly be a nice place to hang out and it will poison their data.
Data poisoning can go a lot further than this. There are fascinating (and hilarious) videos by people who poison their music with inaudible (to humans) noise which, when it’s stolen by an AI company and used to train a model, will cause the model to output unintelligible garbage. Images can also be manipulated this way so that the model sees a completely different image than the human. Then there are the Nepenthes traps for AI data trawlers which trap the trawlers in an inescapable web of nested webpages of nonsense. The future is bright.
How does it poison their data to share your honest preferences with them? Doesn’t that give them the most accurate dossier possible so they can hit you with ads that micro-target your interests?
yeah this is not what poison means to me. to me poisoning is giving them false information when they ask you for it.
That’s not poison. Thats helping them profile you. 🤔
We used to call the email equivalent of a nepenthes trap a teergrube.
I'm an amateur photographer and I post my work online sometimes. How can I use this on my photo? Can you share any links to tools and tutorials?
I'm not sure if this is still working or not. They also mention glaze. https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
I'm pretty sure both glaze and Nightshade has been beaten by now :/
They apply Gaussian blur followed by edge enhancement to get rid of the poison, and it works, but it does leave them with ab poorer quality image. So, still better than nothing, but nowhere near as effective.
That's really cool, I gotta give it a try.
I've gotten a lot out of YouTube by leafing through the recommendations on videos that I liked and saving any promising ones to ‘watch later’ playlists by topic. I have a couple dozen of such playlists, each with multiple dozens of videos. Could live off these for a year at least.
Of course, as mentioned, this is the opposite of poisoning the data.
an inescapable web of nested webpages of nonsense
Like the most annoying webpage from the old Internet?
https://web.archive.org/web/20030402051520/http://www.mostannoyingwebpage.com/v1/
What's the tl;dr for people that don't want to navigate to YouTube?
Don't engage with algorithms, especially ones trying to sell things, like major corporate social media.
Pretend to be something you're not, especially vulnerable targeted populations. This lowers their ability easily target minorities.
Pretend to be something you’re not
In my life, I was Noel Gruber who worked at Taco Bell in Uranium City, Saskatchewan. But in my dreams I played a different role. I was Monique Gibeau in post-war France! A hooker, with a heart of black charcoal.
So the fact that I occasionally get ads in Spanish, despite being a native English speaker in a mainly English-speaking country, means I'm doing something right?
I would say so. You can also intermittently make a new profile, and seed it initially with wildly different personal info and interests.
It is a good practice to restart independent accounts and not reuse them on multiple devices.
You can also silo types of information, like location, personal stats, email, browsing history, web searches, chat services, calls, etc.
If you're on android, you can use an app like NewPipe to view YouTube content without actually going to YouTube. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe
On a browser, you can use an invidious instance like https://yewtu.be/. That also lets you view YouTube content ad free without signing in.
Doesn't work when using a vpn
I read "if you're An android", and was very confused for a second.
Pipepipe supersedes newpipe doesn't it? That's what I'm using anyhow.
I second this. If you get a response can you please let me know?
YouTube keeps showing me ads for surrogacy (as in, being a surrogate), which could not be more the opposite of what I want to do in life. Obviously they know I am a woman of childbearing age, but somewhere the algorithm got me very wrong. I just let the ads play though, to let them think the idea doesn't repulse me beyond anything I can imagine.
You guys are watching ads?

yeah it kinda makes me happy when the ads are wrong and I sure don't want to correct my profile.
Lol the algorithms are lost on me. I don't even do much to avoid it, I'm just weird as fuck!
The irony in this being a youtube link though
No one knows other video sharing sites exist
People using YouTube need this info more than people using PeerTube.
True, just thought it was funny.