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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.

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[-] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[-] paraphrand@lemmy.world 11 points 2 months ago

That’s not poison. Thats helping them profile you. 🤔

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

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?

[-] HubertManne@piefed.social 3 points 2 months ago

yeah this is not what poison means to me. to me poisoning is giving them false information when they ask you for it.

[-] slemptastrophe@piefed.social 4 points 2 months ago

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? 

[-] pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago

I'm not sure if this is still working or not. They also mention glaze. https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

[-] Anarki_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago

I'm pretty sure both glaze and Nightshade has been beaten by now :/

[-] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] Zacryon@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

Nope. It just started another arms race.

[-] yermaw@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

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/

[-] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] CreepingAberration@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

What's the tl;dr for people that don't want to navigate to YouTube?

[-] bear@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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?

[-] slemptastrophe@piefed.social 2 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago

Pipepipe supersedes newpipe doesn't it? That's what I'm using anyhow.

[-] slemptastrophe@piefed.social 1 points 2 months ago

Never heard of it. I'll check it out though!

[-] quick_snail@feddit.nl 1 points 2 months ago

Doesn't work when using a vpn

[-] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago

I read "if you're An android", and was very confused for a second.

[-] e8CArkcAuLE@piefed.social 0 points 2 months ago

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?

[-] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[-] slemptastrophe@piefed.social 1 points 2 months ago

I get that sometimes too. Here are some other instances to try if you haven't already:

https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/

https://inv.nadeko.net/feed/popular

This firefox extension will automatically redirect you to alternative frontends for a few different services:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/

[-] ZiggyTheZygote@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 months ago

I second this. If you get a response can you please let me know?

[-] snek_boi@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago
[-] ZiggyTheZygote@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago
[-] amio@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

The irony in this being a youtube link though

[-] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 months ago

"fight back against surveillance capitalism and malicious advertisers by watching this youtube video"

Get a load of this! Can't make this stuff up...

[-] Hazor@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] EaterOfLentils@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 2 months ago

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.

[-] bobbbu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago

I think the add-on is : adnauseam

[-] aceshigh@lemmy.world -1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
50 points (100.0% liked)

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