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.
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.
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.
I read “if you’re An android”, and was very confused for a second.
“fight back against surveillance capitalism and malicious advertisers by watching this youtube video”
Get a load of this! Can’t make this stuff up…
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?
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. 🤔
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 :/
