Comment by clouddrover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clouddrover | Hacker News Reader

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> It was a faustian bargain we all made.

I didn't make that bargain, but I think the real problem these days is that it doesn't matter if you made it or not. All it takes is one weak link in the chain and suddenly you're under surveillance from a company you had no intention of being involved with.

I don't, for example, use GMail but if I communicate with people who do then my mail falls under Google surveillance. I don't use Google Drive but if I do business with a company that does then some of my data has been forked over to Google and I'm unlikely to ever know about it. I don't use Facebook but if I appear in a photo that someone else uploads and annotates then Facebook has a photo ID of me without my say-so.

It's difficult to stay clear of surveillance companies when you're constantly being undermined by the unintentional (or, perhaps more precisely, unthinking) actions of even just a few people. My data's being bought and sold every day and there is no way I can control that, opt out of it, or even get a list of companies who have my information or what they're doing with it.

If this is the information age and if information has value, then my information is my asset and I want control of it. Without the ability for a person to assert sovereignty over their own data, how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data?

Spot on. Opting out of the weaponized, automated surveillance machine is not really possible.

I do block FB, Google and a bunch of others at the IP level. There are fallbacks, but I do end up leaking when they stand up new IP blocks, and the smaller surveillance shops are impossible to keep up with.

I also pee in their datasets sometimes, but that's a more experimental/entertainment activity. And I'm playing with some other ideas not ready for prime time.

> how can there be a balance of power between the individual and large organizations seeking to exploit everyone's data?

Regulation. That's what you do with antisocial behavior, negative externalities and worse. The transnational nature of the net adds complications and freeholds, but the big boys absolutely could be brought to heel, if people wanted to. Politically, the winds seem to be blowing in the other direction in the US, and the GDPR has been argued to death here.

But that's how the situation improves. (It will never be "fixed", absent an event that destroys the ability to run networks.)

Any more info (eg. tools + source) on how to pee in their datasets?

I shouldn't overstate what I'm doing - this is largely an exercise in reversing what they're doing. And when I figure it out I might have a little fun by way of verifying I figured something out.

Tools - I use Charles Proxy and perl with WWW::Mechanize (substitute your recreational language of choice). Sometimes JMeter is helpful, but that's kind of a rathole if you haven't had reason to subject yourself to it before.

I think a very effective way is to get much better control over your cookies, when you allow them to be set, under which conditions, on which sites.

I use a combination of CookieBro and Umatrix on Firefox for this. Cookies are only allowed for sites I actively want to log into. For sites that require cookies to function, periodic auto-deletion via CookieBro handles those.

     > ... it doesn't matter if you made it or not.

Yep, like in the film "Rosemary's Baby". It was Rosemary's husband that made the deal with the devil but it was she who ended up carrying the child of Satan.

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