by GX01 » Fri Dec 11, 2015 10:30 pm

Don't get me wrong, blocking trackers is good, but it is a defensive strategy (which is always a losing game in the end) and their is a better way to fight tracking.

Coming from a background of managing databases and big data I can tell you the one thing worse than no data is BAD DATA. And when you can't tell what is good and what is bad, it's all junk. So based on that, consider a different approach to tracking software.



1. Their entire business model is based on selling (or using) their data. If you corrupt 10 or 15% of it, you decrease it's value. If you corrupt 50% of it, you threaten the ability to sell any of it. If you corrupt more than 50%, goodbye customers. No one wants it.



So how do you corrupt their data? It's really easy. They grab it from your computer all the time. Just provide some junk data, let them collect it, and wait until it becomes wide spread knowledge that their data is junk.



There are a number of ways to provide junk data, below is just one possibility



Write random browsing software. Hook it into the screen saver so it turns on when ever the screen saver turns on.

Give it a dictionary to randomly pick words and phrases from and have it use search engines to get pages

have it visit those pages.

Consider an algorithm to pick additional links off of those pages to visit (maybe the most repeated, or bold terms, etc.)

Set a depth to go from the first page. maybe 3 or 5 or 10 or let the user set it.

Then go back to search engine and follow another link from the original search etc.



At some point make sure their is a facebook, twitter, and gmail login so all these cookies get picked up

Then clear all the cookies and start again.

By hooking into the screen saver, this will run every time the user is inactive.

if this runs overnight, it will generate far more cookies than the real user activity (maybe 5x 10x or 50x more cookies), and no one can tell the difference between real visits and random visits.



This is essentially send spam back to the tracking companies. When their customers find out 90% of their data is garbage, their business model fails.



Consider throttling the activity, say loading 1-5 pages at a time

Consider filtering porn sites.

A extra option would be to block image downloads to reduce bandwith use and speed up the process. Just get the html page and cookies etc. no one is looking at them.



Of course their are lots of way to go about it. The basic premise is bad data is far more effective than no data. Play with that idea for a while and a whole new generation of fighting trackers will be born.