Why do this? Because surveillance capitalism wants you to be less free. It wants you to be glued to the screen. It wants you to buy whatever advertisers want you to buy. But you can fight back by deliberately poisoning your data.
There’s no reason to over complicate this. Set boundaries with yourself. Set a budget, cut up your credit cards, try the envelope system, set limits to how much time you spend on social media.
I agree that doing less can achieve certain goals.
I guess it depends on what your goal is.
If you want to avoid getting glued to the screen and being influenced by advertisements, your recommendations are spot on.
However, if you want to make it costlier for surveillance capitalism to entrance everyone, then other options might make more sense.
I wonder if you could make a self-hostable data poisoning automation utility. Put in a bunch of credentials for various social media sites, and it creates unintelligible usage patterns associated with your online identities. Not so much for poisoning training of generative AI, but for destroying any internal profiles any party might attempt to build on you by correlating your online behaviour.
Sounds like that alternative to Ublock that I can’t think of the name of right now that not only blocks ads but also gives a click-through input to every single one, poisoning any ad metrics for the ads as well as any targeted ad profiling on you.
I think the add-on is : adnauseam
That’s the one, thanks.
It somehow works less well than ublock, especially like delayed ads or more dynamic ones. Never a problem block any kinds of ads with UBO.
I’ve never used it myself, I use UBO as well, but I’ve heard about it before and brought it up because it sounds like it does what the OP was talking about but for ads instead of social media.
I ran this for a while. It generated some interesting ad choices for me.
Do you mean by that that it changed what ads were shown to you over time? As in it changed your profile? Curious as to the impact it has :)
Random things I never saw on the page. Some of the ads I did see were foreign. It had a effect but it also at the time loaded the browser up enough I finally got rid of it.
janeway: “get on it”
She’s saying that when you use social media, only like, read, etc., stuff that you want to learn from or you like listening to. Scroll past the flight or flight stuff, that’s the story they want for you. Your feed will quickly be a nice place to hang out and it will poison their data.
Data poisoning can go a lot further than this. There are fascinating (and hilarious) videos by people who poison their music with inaudible (to humans) noise which, when it’s stolen by an AI company and used to train a model, will cause the model to output unintelligible garbage. Images can also be manipulated this way so that the model sees a completely different image than the human. Then there are the Nepenthes traps for AI data trawlers which trap the trawlers in an inescapable web of nested webpages of nonsense. The future is bright.
How does it poison their data to share your honest preferences with them? Doesn’t that give them the most accurate dossier possible so they can hit you with ads that micro-target your interests?
yeah this is not what poison means to me. to me poisoning is giving them false information when they ask you for it.
That’s not poison. Thats helping them profile you. 🤔
I’m an amateur photographer and I post my work online sometimes. How can I use this on my photo? Can you share any links to tools and tutorials?
I’m not sure if this is still working or not. They also mention glaze. https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html
I’m pretty sure both glaze and Nightshade has been beaten by now :/
They apply Gaussian blur followed by edge enhancement to get rid of the poison, and it works, but it does leave them with ab poorer quality image. So, still better than nothing, but nowhere near as effective.
That’s really cool, I gotta give it a try.
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Bro is asking how to poison his work for ai himself to protect his creative work and help combating corpo ai.
What else could he possibly mean?
Yes. That is totally what I meant. Thanks for clarifying.
Probably referring to this section.
Images can also be manipulated this way so that the model sees a completely different image than the human.
This sounds like steganography.
I’ve gotten a lot out of YouTube by leafing through the recommendations on videos that I liked and saving any promising ones to ‘watch later’ playlists by topic. I have a couple dozen of such playlists, each with multiple dozens of videos. Could live off these for a year at least.
Of course, as mentioned, this is the opposite of poisoning the data.
We used to call the email equivalent of a nepenthes trap a teergrube.
an inescapable web of nested webpages of nonsense
Like the most annoying webpage from the old Internet?
https://web.archive.org/web/20030402051520/http://www.mostannoyingwebpage.com/v1/
Thank you so much
Nope. It just started another arms race.
What’s the tl;dr for people that don’t want to navigate to YouTube?
But the video has boobies… /s
Don’t engage with algorithms, especially ones trying to sell things, like major corporate social media.
Pretend to be something you’re not, especially vulnerable targeted populations. This lowers their ability easily target minorities.
Pretend to be something you’re not
In my life, I was Noel Gruber who worked at Taco Bell in Uranium City, Saskatchewan. But in my dreams I played a different role. I was Monique Gibeau in post-war France! A hooker, with a heart of black charcoal.
So the fact that I occasionally get ads in Spanish, despite being a native English speaker in a mainly English-speaking country, means I’m doing something right?
I would say so. You can also intermittently make a new profile, and seed it initially with wildly different personal info and interests.
It is a good practice to restart independent accounts and not reuse them on multiple devices.
You can also silo types of information, like location, personal stats, email, browsing history, web searches, chat services, calls, etc.
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If you’re on android, you can use an app like NewPipe to view YouTube content without actually going to YouTube. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe
On a browser, you can use an invidious instance like https://yewtu.be/. That also lets you view YouTube content ad free without signing in.
I read “if you’re An android”, and was very confused for a second.
Doesn’t work when using a vpn
Pipepipe supersedes newpipe doesn’t it? That’s what I’m using anyhow.
Pipepipe is a hard fork of newpipe. I prefer it myself because of sponsorblock and the danmaku comments.
Those are niconicodouga style comments across the video.
Niconicodouga is a Japanese video sharing platform similar to YouTube in function and age. I think it’s older even.
That’s what that’s called? I remember being so annoyed by that and forgetting how I solved it lol.
Ya from what I recall newpipe was broken for a good amount of time and someone forked to pipepipe and it seems updated more frequently.
Never heard of it. I’ll check it out though!
invidious instances never work for me, but with this one i could get further than ever, but when trying to play a video i get this error: “The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.”
what could this be?
YouTube is actively blocking Invidious and other proxies and bots for the past couple years or so. Additionally, for some reason some Invidious instances consistently don’t work for me, while other ones consistently do, which probably indicates connectivity issues between me and them.
Frankly, if YouTube works for you directly, I’m gonna advise using it via NewPipe and various desktop apps, as Invidious instances could be easily overwhelmed, what with them being hosted by individual volunteers. Video traffic is heavy.
thank you object and slempt for your feedback. so investigating yewtu.be does work on desktop without any problems, but on my iphone it depends on which browser and dns blocker i use. can anyone recommend a good newpipe substitute for iOS?
Try looking through those listed on Alternative To. Not all of them are really YouTube players, though.
sorry, i didn’t find the alternative list, can you send me a link please?
It’s linked in my comment to which you replied. Scroll down on there.
I get that sometimes too. Here are some other instances to try if you haven’t already:
https://inv.nadeko.net/feed/popular
This firefox extension will automatically redirect you to alternative frontends for a few different services:
I second this. If you get a response can you please let me know?
A response is in! :)
Thanks OP.
Best I can do is AI generated transcript: https://pastes.io/if-i-told-
“fight back against surveillance capitalism and malicious advertisers by watching this youtube video”
Get a load of this! Can’t make this stuff up…
You gotta meet the people where they’re at to get them informed. If this information was hidden away in some privacy/security-centered blog, a fraction as many people would see it.
I know, I was just pointing out the irony that youtube is one of the primary offenders of surveillance capitalism
I agree with you! There’s a layer of irony.
I wish the fediverse would get a wider user base, like loops and peertube. The more people use it, the more viable it will be as an alternative.
YouTube keeps showing me ads for surrogacy (as in, being a surrogate), which could not be more the opposite of what I want to do in life. Obviously they know I am a woman of childbearing age, but somewhere the algorithm got me very wrong. I just let the ads play though, to let them think the idea doesn’t repulse me beyond anything I can imagine.
You guys are watching ads?
yeah it kinda makes me happy when the ads are wrong and I sure don’t want to correct my profile.
Lol the algorithms are lost on me. I don’t even do much to avoid it, I’m just weird as fuck!
The irony in this being a youtube link though
No one knows other video sharing sites exist
People using YouTube need this info more than people using PeerTube.
True, just thought it was funny.
It’s ok though. Using MPV to watch YouTube is a good way to stick it to the man
