The esteemed Mr. Johnson believes we should all quit Facebook.
While that would certainly prevent them from monitoring my likes and interests, it would also cut off my contact with numerous friends and acquaintances, eliminate options for promoting my work, reduce my exposure to interesting news stories, and drastically limit my supply of really bad jokes. And, in the end, would accomplish nothing.
While Facebook may be the latest, and perhaps most heinous, example, everyone is watching you. Welcome to the internet.
Google not only knows what you’re searching for, it knows what results you find interesting. A tiny bit of code measures how long you pause at an item in your scrolldown and rates that pause on an “interest” scale, whether or not you click on the link. It can tell whether you actually paused to read the link description or were interrupted by the phone or spilling coffee in your lap. Twitter similarly analyzes your tastes. Your local ISP knows you’re reading a Crashing Vor diary on DailyKos right now (waving to your ISP).
This is the world now. Others may not be as extreme as Facebook, but “harvesting” your brains like zombies is how all this works. Facebook is “free and always will be,” yet is worth tens of billions of dollars. Navy blue and Helvetica Neue aren’t all that unique or valuable. Where did all the money come from?
You. Your yummy num num brains.
Back in the mists of time, when phreaks roamed the earth and hackers were largely unknown to the public, Roger Macbride Allen wrote a clever short story for Analog Science Fact and Fiction about a phreakcop, an inspector for Chesapeake and Potomac Bell, who’s tipped off to an amazing new BBS, the
FRIENDLY NEIGHBORS ELECTRONIC BULLETIN BOARD SERVICE
(Back in the mists of time, everything was in all caps. And green.)
“Your Friendly Neighbors” offered, well, everything. Every video game, even games not yet released. Countless databases, many classified. Open source and copyrighted software of every description. Basically the entirety of the internet. Free.
The bulletin board’s sysop had only one request: for every service accessed, you had to tell the sysop one interesting fact. The sysop would reject untruths and opinions, but just about any actual fact that you declared “interesting” would access a service.
(Analog stories are not available from the magazine online, but you can read a pirated copy of the story here. I do not know the host site, nor do I vouch for their security or what they might find interesting about you.)
The internet, as we know it today, is the Friendly Neighbors BBS. It offers just about everything you could desire, for free, in exchange for you letting it know what you find “interesting.”
If you’re not comfortable with the deal, you should probably just get off the tubes.
Or, if you’re the playful type, there is a way to at least fudge the deal a little: make your psychographic data pointless.
Like everything. Click everything. Join everything. Use a browser of which you never delete cookies.
Sure, you can visit and like DailyKos on Facebook. You can also visit and like “Mid Century Modern Kitchenware,” “Medieval Castles,” “Cheese Lovers” or any of the three groups dedicated to pictures of dental equipment.
Google products you’d never use and, when Twitter flashes a tweet from a manufacturer of one of them, click on it, then google an era of history about which you know and care nothing. Then google a nonsense word (you’ll find there aren’t any, as almost anything remotely like a word means something in some language).
To make this zombie-targeted, one-person DDS attack work, you have to be consistent. And random. And creative.
To be sure, you won’t defeat the Cambridge Analyticas of the world, but you’ll make their job much more difficult and their product much less valuable. And, bonus for you, you’ll learn a lot of insane stuff you never imagined existed.
Did you know “yerk” is a real word?
Update: Can you imagine the server space required for the psychographic profile of an omniscient?