Ad and JavaScript blocking is not enough to thwart privacy invasions by the likes of Facebook: more active countermeasures are needed.

The internet ought to "route around" known privacy abusers, shifting from passive blocking of cookies, host names, and scripts to a more active deception model. Just like enterprises and other large organizations set up honeypots and decoys to misdirect hackers' attention, browsers and similar software should lure website operators into tar pits of useless and false personal information.

That's according to Chad Loder, chief executive of Californian security awareness training biz habitu8, and Rapid7 founder.

“In information security, we're content to block nuisances, but with active adversaries, we take a more forward-leaning stance," Loder said. "If we classify the Facebooks of the world as active adversaries, you're going to see active countermeasures being incorporated into browsers."

Isolate and bamboozle

Loder advocates the use of “active deception” in throwing off websites and ad networks that track people around the 'net. These measures would include the automatic creation of fake profiles and identities to “isolate and bamboozle abusive sites,” effectively flooding their databases with garbage.

“We've been passive in this arms race so far, content to smugly proclaim ‘I don't use Facebook’ – but the tide is about to change,” said Loder.

“If bots can be used to spread propaganda, bots can also be used to create an immune system-like response to isolate and envelop these abusive sites while they starve for resources. If bots can be used to spread disinformation, they can also be used to create a crowd within which to hide and stay anonymous.

"Most importantly, it’s much harder for the next Cambridge Analytica to abuse data that’s riddled with synthetic but plausible garbage."

“It's not impossible to have a browser plugin that creates ephemeral and synthetic identities, flooding known privacy ghettos with bad throwaway data while preserving your anonymity,” he added on Twitter. “If we can tar-pit spammers, we can tar-pit Facebook and Google from the browser.”

Stalked everywhere we go

The harvesting of personal data from millions of people's Facebook profiles by Cambridge Analytica through its associates led to the trending #deleteFacebook campaign online.

However, deleting your FB account may not be enough. Third-party Facebook applications have gathered vast amounts of personal information from people's accounts simply by inviting users to sign up for quizzes and games. Thousands of app owners and developers still have personal data slurped from millions of users, and it is not clear how and when they will use it, or if they have since deleted the records.

Meanwhile, internet users are tracked in multiple ways all day long: by search engines, advertisers, phone apps, and similar platforms, as well as crafty ISPs. You don't need an account with a website to be stalked, and have ads targeted at you; various site operators build so-called shadow profiles of people as they click around the web, gathering databases of intelligence on folks.

“Any online platform that we use collects information about our behavior, location and so on,” said Marty Kamden, chief marketing officer of NordVPN. “Apps and platforms use cross-device tracking, where they build a consumer’s profile based on their activity throughout devices.

“Browsing history may be combined with physical location, retail purchases with watched TV programs, commute to work and so on."

There are various tools to protect one's privacy online, as Reg readers know. For example, there's Disconnect Private Browsing: it blocks third-party cookies and prevents organizations such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter from tracking you around the internet against your wishes. Another option is Privacy Badger by the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And the freshly released Facebook Container add-on helps Firefox users shield their web activity from Facebook.

Block and tackle

For Loder, this sandboxing of identities is a step in the right direction, although it doesn’t go far enough, in his opinion. He advocated the development of a browser plugin that not only blocks access to people's real identities, but also automatically torpedoes badly behaved sites by feeding them garbage personal information.

Websites to be misled by the plugin would be selected from a crowd-sourced list. Loder batted away criticism that this mob-decided hit list could be gamed to swamp legit sites with fake data.

“There are plenty of cases where imperfect solutions provide the ‘greatest good for the greatest number’ – technically, Google's Safe Browsing database can be abused, but the value far outweighs the potential for abuse,” he argued.

The greater good would be served by going after privacy abusers, Loder maintained.

“This is where the arms race starts to heat up: infosec starts treating abusers as more than a nuisance – they start treating them as an active adversary. The stance shifts from ‘block’ to ‘actively contain, deceive, and interdict’,” Loder concluded. ®