297
New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
297 points (99.3% liked)
Privacy
39021 readers
758 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I’m not a privacy expert.
And I know that, sadly, they probably have a lot more data on me than I’d like. Even though I don’t have traditional social media anymore, and I use VPNs to access Lemmy, that’s just normie precaution stuff. Anyway I do have a Google, Apple, accounts and the like.
My question is this: what do you / y’all think about the prospect of “poisoning the well”?
Meaning: you set up multiple traditional social media accounts, generate fake profile photos for them, give them the same real name as you and part of the country as you live in, and have AI chatbots fill ‘em up with generated posts matching a particular “personality profile”?
Would that be an effective countermeasure against this sort of data collection? Increase the noise-to-signal ratio?
Just thinking out loud here.
The problem with trying to increase the signal to noise ratio is that you don't know all of the datapoints that are being collected and some of those datapoints could be used to filter the real from the fake.
Like, in your example, if you made all of these account from the same browser then they could be linked together. If they were made on the same IP, they could be linked together. If you were using the same phone, they could be linked together. Those are just the datapoints that we know to try to protect, it's the datapoints that you don't know that get you.
Like, maybe your phone or desktop is screenshotting itself every 5 seconds ("for AI purposes") or maybe the app that you're trying to fool also secretly sends your GPS location during account creation or maybe the adversary has malware running on your PC which is keylogging you.
IF you knew all of the ways that they were collecting data on you, then you could take countermeasures. Since you don't, you have to assume that any of your identities can be linked to your person unless you take unusual measures such, not using Microsoft/Google/Meta/Amazon/etc products at a minimum. Depending on your security needs this could also mean things like using burner hardware, non-commercial VPNs, physically disabling sensors/radios/ports, traffic/network monitoring, etc.