Fake_contacts: Android app to create fake phone contacts, to do data-poisoning
Data-poisoning is an attractive approach (and one I've considered and occasionally practiced) but it does relatively little as a practical matter.  @cyberlab posted some good links here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26286686" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26286686</a><p>Cory Doctorow also addressed this in a recent Reddit AMA:  <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/j444u4/how_to_destroy_surveillance_capitalism_an_ama/g7jf6sf/?context=3" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/j444u4/how_to_dest...</a><p>From the harvesters' perspective, a long list of pattern-matching identifiers with no visible history anywhere else online ... will tend to get junked fairly readily.  A small increase in undeliverable addresses from a swipe ... won't increase costs much.<p>Creating wholesale online personas (effectively:  bots and troll farms writ large) <i>might</i> start posing a challenge, but those would still likely give off a strong signal of falseness due to lack of correlation with other identifiers, most notably devices of their own, credit cards or other payments data, other data-linked services (transit or toll passes, etc.).<p>Ultimately the question is <i>why</i> are you doing this and <i>what</i> do you hope to accomplish?<p>(Though I've salivated a few times contemplating a system that would stream endless bits as responses to cookie or similar requests, just for shins and grits.)