this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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You Should Know

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Why do this? Because surveillance capitalism wants you to be less free. It wants you to be glued to the screen. It wants you to buy whatever advertisers want you to buy. But you can fight back by deliberately poisoning your data.

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[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 18 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] bobbbu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

I think the add-on is : adnauseam

That's the one, thanks.

[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

I ran this for a while. It generated some interesting ad choices for me.

[–] SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago

janeway: "get on it"

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

"fight back against surveillance capitalism and malicious advertisers by watching this youtube video"

Get a load of this! Can't make this stuff up...

[–] Hazor@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 hours ago

I know, I was just pointing out the irony that youtube is one of the primary offenders of surveillance capitalism

[–] snek_boi@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

I agree with you! There's a layer of irony.

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 points 8 hours ago

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.

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 86 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

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.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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?

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 7 points 16 hours ago

yeah this is not what poison means to me. to me poisoning is giving them false information when they ask you for it.

[–] paraphrand@lemmy.world 42 points 1 day ago

That’s not poison. Thats helping them profile you. 🤔

[–] prex@aussie.zone 2 points 21 hours ago

We used to call the email equivalent of a nepenthes trap a teergrube.

[–] slemptastrophe@piefed.social 15 points 1 day ago (6 children)

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? 

[–] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'm not sure if this is still working or not. They also mention glaze. https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

[–] Anarki_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure both glaze and Nightshade has been beaten by now :/

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 3 points 18 hours ago

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.

[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

That's really cool, I gotta give it a try.

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[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] yermaw@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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/

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[–] CreepingAberration@lemmy.world 59 points 1 day ago (4 children)

What's the tl;dr for people that don't want to navigate to YouTube?

[–] bear@lemmy.blahaj.zone 58 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 11 points 21 hours ago

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.

[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] bear@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 22 hours ago

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.

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[–] slemptastrophe@piefed.social 10 points 1 day ago (8 children)

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.

[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 2 points 16 hours ago

Doesn't work when using a vpn

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 2 points 16 hours ago

I read "if you're An android", and was very confused for a second.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Pipepipe supersedes newpipe doesn't it? That's what I'm using anyhow.

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[–] ZiggyTheZygote@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I second this. If you get a response can you please let me know?

[–] snek_boi@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)
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[–] EaterOfLentils@programming.dev 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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?

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

yeah it kinda makes me happy when the ads are wrong and I sure don't want to correct my profile.

[–] fishy@lemmy.today 1 points 11 hours ago

Lol the algorithms are lost on me. I don't even do much to avoid it, I'm just weird as fuck!

[–] amio@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The irony in this being a youtube link though

[–] Battle_Masker@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 11 hours ago

No one knows other video sharing sites exist

[–] renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

People using YouTube need this info more than people using PeerTube.

[–] amio@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

True, just thought it was funny.

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