There are people that try to avoid as much as possible sending data to Google / Facebook / other. Using custom built Android, not using the google store or using it on dedicated phones (I know a guy who has a special phone just for the school's whatsapp group), etc.<p>I am not one of those people. However, I was thinking that instead of not sending data at all maybe I can send them some fake information about that will dilute the profile they have on me.<p>With Facebook, things seem easy, to like / visit some pages that are not in my interest.<p>With google / gmail / analytics however, this becomes pretty hard.<p>Thoughts?
On google, you can add completely random interests for your ad targeting in the privacy settings, which seems like what you want.<p>Honestly I think that just minimization by using other services is probably the best tactic since meaningfully polluting the data probably is more trouble than it's worth.<p>Sidenote: It took a lot of will power not to make a witty remark about the misspelling in the title haha
One tactic to consider is fragment your identity into multiple profiles representing different facets of your life.<p>Your "work self", with your company's email address has one google account. When you leave the company, discard the account and create a new one for your new job.<p>Your "social self" who keeps in touch with friends and family has a separate browser profile just for facebook. There may or may not be an extra google account to go with your personal email address.<p>Your "privacy-nerd self" uses a completely separate email address unknown to either colleagues, friends or family, and a separate browser profile again which is only used over a VPN.<p>With network namespaces, you can even simultaneously run multiple VPN sessions, one per browser profile ...<p>And since your identity is fragmented, it doesn't matter too much if you have to burn one. The risk of losing data is distributed over multiple accounts.
For ad profiles: There is Ad Nauseam, which tries to click every single ad that is shown to you in order to pollute your profile.
<a href="https://adnauseam.io/" rel="nofollow">https://adnauseam.io/</a>