[HN Gopher] ICE knocks on ad tech's data door to see what it kno...
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ICE knocks on ad tech's data door to see what it knows about you
Author : cdrnsf
Score : 58 points
Date : 2026-02-09 17:19 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| cyanydeez wrote:
| So, someone should modify openclaw to generate fake personal
| data, and plug in a fuzzer that creates variants to confuse the
| AI tech you know these ignorant billionaire techlickers are using
| to aftempt to build the panopticon.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It isn't as easy as it sounds. It's a lot of fingerprinting,
| location, and metadata aggregation from an astounding variety
| of sources that is extremely difficult to fake - It can
| pinpoint you to an astounding degree. I have been working off
| and on the last 3 years in the privacy space (passion project)
| on a similar concept of adtech data obfuscation, and it's far
| more complex than just "put a fake birthday in a form"
| (although stuff like this can manifest in interesting ways).
| tracker1 wrote:
| "Phone Swap Collective" ... You keep an extra smart phone...
| then just swap phones with people who commute to different
| areas of your city each day. Keep social media accounts that
| are effectively "bots" on the collective and post real BS
| multiple times a day via AI bot interactions.
|
| Give a prepaid to homeless along with a month long bus
| pass... let 'em ride all over town.
| observationist wrote:
| Differential analysis is amazingly powerful. If you're in the
| US - 30 bits is all you need. And not all bits are equal -
| some come with implicit anchors, allowing you to segment and
| search efficiently.
|
| If you know the state, the median number of bits needed is
| 23. If you know the city, around 10 bits is all you need to
| identify you as a unique individual.
|
| A drunk raccoon with one eye and a missing paw can sieve out
| 10 bits of information about a particular person.
|
| You can do probabilistic assumptions and segment the
| population by fuzzy characteristics you get, like stylometry,
| assumptions about native language, interests, etc. For a
| giant database like the spies and agencies have, they can do
| probablistic ID with extreme accuracy based on a tiny number
| of leaked bits.
|
| If you snag a giant pile of readily available website data,
| then tag the person of interest based on that data, then any
| time you process new data, you can get a probability of that
| new data being associated with an already known person. Set a
| five nines threshold, or higher, and then assume those
| matches are legitimate, and you can chip away at all sorts of
| identity handles. From there, you can start doing contrastive
| searches, sieving out known quantities, improving the
| statistical accuracy of those fuzzy parameters.
|
| Deanonymization and such is borderline trivial, consumer
| compute is about 5 generations past the threshold where a
| global database would be considered particularly difficult or
| challenging.
|
| Fingerprinting is very easy, but obfuscating it is incredibly
| challenging, with all of the implicit, deliberately leaky
| data transactions that are imposed on us.
| yawgmoth wrote:
| Would you ever blog/talk about it? Sounds interesting.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I've made astoundingly little technical progress, not much
| to talk about. Mostly just observations and experiments,
| but then you look like a malicious user and I definitely
| ate a platform ban over it once and stopped that. My
| posting and submission favorites history probably indicate
| a bit where my interests lie. My most recent work is
| leveraging data broker removal services (and some letter
| writing sometimes) to get my address to disappear off the
| google front page on the barest search of my real name
| (which is very unique, and without asking google directly)
| - this is something I want to try to sell and is the most
| success I've had, but it's a total blackbox, doesn't even
| approach the scope of the real problem, and as a sibling
| comment gets at, the tech you are fighting is simply far
| too powerful and ubiquitous. You're better off at just
| looking "uninteresting" online, is what I'm slowly
| concluding, but what is uninteresting today can become
| _extremely_ interesting to governments of tomorrow.
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