Making the data inaccurate absolutely makes it worthless; it’s worth is in its accuracy.

Data brokers do not care about how accurate their data is. At all. Not even a little. It's highly valuable to them no matter how inaccurate it is, and that data will be used against you even if it's entirely inaccurate.

Can you elaborate about what you define as "used against you" even if it is entirely inaccurate? What is the use case of inaccurate data with which you are concerned?

> Can you elaborate about what you define as "used against you" even if it is entirely inaccurate?

Hypothetical: $company you're trying to use needs to "verify" you using $inaccurateData from $vendor.

You're absolutely screwed if the verification questions you're asked are relying on the "polluted" answers

Similar vein: if the "polluted" data indicates you might be gay or replublican or musilim or into some seriously unhealthy lifestyle choices like smoking and $someCompany decides that you're a smoker and therefore your too risky to insure.

no data >>> polluted data.

Serious question: Who is using browser data for verification?! It's alarming to me that this is even a hypothetical scenario. All identity verification systems I have ever used in the US have been through a credit agency or something similar. I can't imagine any use case that would use your browser history or ad data for these purposes. Do you have a real-world example?

Or, if state level actors are looking at your data they are buying from companies, the appearance of intentionally corrupted data could invite more scrutiny.

If state-level actors are looking into your data with any amount of individual scrutiny you are already fucked, this is a ridiculous reason to not use ad nauseum.

You're looking at this backwards...

Imagine being in China where they tend to watch you and make profiles on you. Then suddenly the profile of who you are goes completely random. Is it possible this gets the attention of state-level actors where you had none before?

> You're looking at this backwards...

Exactly.

Any argument that boils down to "but the profile is basically useless" will always be inferior to "there is no profile"

Poisoned data would be useful in the fight but yeah, "garbage data looks like someone else's" is certainly superior to "garbage data looks like it's yours".

I guess in the long term it depends how good the profile builders get at anomaly detection, and at which scale we're talking about.

While many states in the US have laws against it now, for awhile there companies were basing if they would hire you based on your social media profile. Having no profile at all may exclude you from getting a job. Or, when I went to get credit for my the first time in my later 30's. I had always been a cash buyer before then, and proof of my existence beyond my ID was sparse, the guy on the other end of the line was like "Did you even exist before yesterday?"

Isn’t the alternative in the verification case just that you don’t get your account because they can’t verify you?

Verification questions are based on credit history - addresses, vehicles, family members, etc - not browsing history so this is a non-issue.

See using clicking rate or browser signature to deny you service?

See Aliexpress accounts becoming unusable based on ... well, who knows what?

See Google accounts becoming unusable based on ... well, who knows what?

Not the same as identity verification but a significant problem for your account still. Often fatal. It is an issue.

Another example that I think captures the spirit of autoexec’s point is credit fraud.

Are you the one taking out credit cards and potentially tanking your credit score? No.

Does it still negatively impact your life? Yes, because the information landlords/banks receive from credit unions only shows the low credit score.

Do the banks/landlords care about the fact that it’s fraud? No.

It’s ultimately YOU who has to do all the leg work to report the fraud, make sure that your credit history is fixed, and that your credit is frozen as a deterrent to for future fraud issues.

It's in the comment they linked to. Good points, to be fair.

> The last time I pulled up my Google profile, it said I was a 18-99yo, both male and female, and was interested in EVERY topic they listed.

So you see how data-brokers having this data on you is equal to not having any data on you if their data is garbage?

Depends. Is your goal to not show up on lists, or to show up on lists above and beyond the ones that are "true"?

Asking for a list of smokers? You'll pop up. Ask for a list of pregnant women? There you are. Likely gun owners? You're on that list too.

None of the people requesting these lists are checking the rest of that person's profile to look for conflicts. They just feed all the profiles into the data machine and run everything en masse.

So does this prevent the data brokers from having an accurate profile on you? Sure. But it is absolutely not equal to them having no data on you.

If we all non-smokers show up on a smokers list - There is zero downside for me, but someone is going to waste money targeting me as a smoker.

Will it narrow down if someone is trying to track me? Probably.

> If we all non-smokers show up on a smokers list - There is zero downside for me

Except for when your health insurance company sees that and starts charging you more because of it, or your life insurance rates go up because of it, or your homeowners insurance goes up because of it, or your employer forces you into a smoking cessation program because they made you sign some kind of "smoke free pledge" for their own insurance reasons and now they think you're lying, or when someone decides not to date you because the background check they ran on you made them think you lied in your online dating profile when you said you didn't smoke, or when society gets real weird in the future and smoking goes from being "unacceptable in public" to "child abuse" and now CPS is wanting to investigate you, or who the hell knows what other thing could come and bite you in the ass now that you've got "smoker" in your permanent record and everybody feels entitled to dig into your personal business whenever they think it might give them some advantage.

That's the world we live in. Anybody willing to pay gets to look into the most intimate parts of your life that are none of their business and that ends up affecting your life in ways you'll never see coming and you'll probably not even know why or when it's happening. The more data you put out there for people to find, they more they'll find ways to screw you over with it.

Then I'm probably going to get 50 bucks from a class action against that insurance company in a few years.

Data brokers rarely collect from ad companies. They buy in bulk from the states who are all too happy to sell them driver licensing data, plus property records and other public sources.

They get data from anywhere and everywhere they can. They also get ad data from your internet history which most ISPs are happy to sell to them.

Their customers do care about this accuracy. Highly so. That is the entire thing they pay for. Random garbage is costly to their customers, and not in a good way. Poisoning is a valid direction.

To be sure it used to be more costly in the times of paper advertising and US human employees. But some records are very expensive at brokers, so still matters.