I made the mistake of providing my date of birth as being 1/1/1900 on multiple websites, and have been receiving marketing material from the AARP in the mail for many years.

My "birthdate" is the same as yours. It was fine when I started using it in the late 90s, but has become increasingly awkward over the past few years - lots of sites seem to assume a maximum age of 120.

If I ever turn uBO off, the ads I get are mostly for funeral plans or incontinence products, with a smattering of "126 year old mom lost 30 lbs of belly fat - click to see how!" (yeah, decomposition's a bitch...)

> If I ever turn uBO off, the ads I get are mostly for funeral plans or incontinence products, with a smattering of "126 year old mom lost 30 lbs of belly fat - click to see how!" (yeah, decomposition's a bitch...)

And, for the record, it's way better to get ads for BS like that than stuff that may actually influence you.

That's not a mistake. You'd be getting spam marketing anyway, why not make sure it's something obvious? I always pick the oldest possible age when asked, just to mess with their data, because they shouldn't fucking care.

Don't limit, notify.

Has worked for TV (and movies to an extent, though theaters do limit somewhat, must have been some litigation around that...) pretty much forever.

Giving fake info feeds the machine. It means you still consume, and a bad actor profits.

I disagree. Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism, makes it useless. Ultimately I'm inclined to believe that privacy through noise generation is a solution.

If I ever find some idle time, I'd like to make an agent that surfs the web under my identity and several fake ones, but randomly according to several fake personality traits I program. Then, after some testing and analysis of the generated patterns of crawl, release it as freeware to allow anyone to participate in the obfuscation of individuals' behaviors.

You might want to take a look at differential privacy. It takes an unintuitive amount of noise to make the system useless.

You also need to account for how "easy" it is to de-anonymize a profile.

(Sorry I don't have links to sources handy.)

> You might want to take a look at differential privacy

Differential privacy is just a bait to make surveillance more socially acceptable and to have arguments to silence critics ("no need to worry about the dangers - we have differential privacy"). :-(

Sounds a bit like AdNauseam Firefox extension.

In my vision, it's the opposite of ad blocker, it's something that generates non existent traffic and views beyond what I would have done.

I believe that is what adnauseum does. Fake clicking ads and things like that

And just like AdNauseam using it would be dangerous and pointless.

> I disagree. Giving fake info adds noise to the mechanism, makes it useless.

There's no such thing as useless info. Companies will sell it, buy it, and act on it regardless of how true it is. Nobody cares if the data is accurate. Nobody is checking to see if it is. Filling your dossier with false information about yourself won't stop companies from using that data. It can still cost you a job. It can still be used as justification to increase what companies charge you. It can still influence which policies they apply to you or what services they offer/deny you. It can still get you arrested or investigated by police. It can still get you targeted by scammers or extremists.

Any and all of the data you give them will eventually be used against you somehow, no matter how false or misleading it is. Stuffing your dossier with more data does nothing but hand them more ammo to hit you with.

Last century my dad would give our pets names out with our real phone #(oddly or by mistake). The pets did start getting phone calls.

If the info becomes bad, it becomes much less useful and valuable.

I’m in the us and we o need some rights to privacy.