With ISP profiling for advertising companies, as well as other ways that the ISP’s can work out a profile of who you are, there are some likely ways that you can pollute the results just to make some poor advertising executives day, and your ISP’s day just a tad bit more annoying.
This is akin to going to the grocery store, using your grocery tracking card and buying beer, diapers, and ice cream, when you never bought diapers before. This is very effective when you don’t have kids, as you will get advertising for diapers, which people pay for, that has no chance of getting you to make a purchase for diapers ever again.
Earlier on ITToolbox I wrote about AntiPhorumLite, a way to automate your browsing habits as a back end never to be seen process that can pollute the results of phorum which is being used in the UK for the same concerns, ISP’s monitoring your surfing habits, all to make a profile, sell better advertising, and make money off your habits.
Lets be realistic as well, when Google is showing that the number four most searched for thing today (the 18th of May 2008) is “Asian Lady Boys”, this might be something you don’t want to have known about yourself, or your porno selections late at night when the rest of the family is asleep.
Thinking on this line, the use of AntiPhorumLite might be a way for everyone else to have an automated system to alter and make the results of ISP monitoring useless to marketing folks.
The idea is to let the program run and do its thing in the background to make it look like you are into things that are totally bogus about you. This will get advertising to be bogus because the profile and the majority of the data about you is bogus as well.
Here is the thought:
ISP spends money on monitoring equipment to track where you go via the Web
ISP sells that tracking to a marketing company thinking the data is accurate
Marketing company spends money to market you high end gorilla suits which you will never buy
Marketing company starts wondering why they are not selling more stuff
Doubt is raised as to the accuracy of the ISP profiles
ISP can’t sell profiles because the data is bogus
ISP is out money on the monitoring equipment that they bought
Marketing company is out money for the profiles and the advertising they bought
You still get to do your thing. In other words, pollute the data stream with crap, and make the data bogus. This might work out really well, because odds are likely that these systems are going to become more and more prevalent over time as ISP’s look for ways to monetize better. If we can’t get anyone to help people not be monitored, then the only way around it is to pollute the data stream, and call into question the data itself.
Tags: bogus, data, isp monitoring, marketing, profiles, users, phorum, antiphorumlite, trends
1 comment so far ↓
I’ve considered this idea before, but unless a large majority of people use this or something similar, I doubt there would be much effect. However, this shouldn’t stop anyone who is concerned about their privacy from using it. I’d be interested to see if you can tweak the settings so that it doesn’t drag on your pipe too much.
P.S. Typo in the link to your other article about AntiPhormLite.
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