Most of the things you interact with online are tracking your location, your device type, and your digital footprint to predict exactly how desperate you are to buy something. If the algorithm thinks you have money, or simply lack options, it alters the price in real-time.
To prove how widespread “surveillance pricing” has become, I decided to see if I could outsmart it. This involved exploiting corporate registry loopholes to create a fake corporate entity, hiring an improv actor off Craigslist to establish a completely separate digital identity, and strapping a burner phone to a drone to make purchases from the airspace above the wealthiest gated community in Minnesota.
Anecdotal, but I’ve been using Fauxx for a month or two and have noticed that ads I see (those few that manage to get through my blockers) are more generic, don’t apply to my demographic, or are even in a language I don’t speak.
I do practice basic data privacy, but I think that data poisoning also has a positive impact in obscuring your digital footprint. There will always be data from when I was less privacy-minded, so I feel it’ll be more effective to both create a vacuum and fill that void with junk data.
Very interesting app, thanks for sharing!
I’m wondering if there is something similar for a pi hole so I could poison the data from my entire home.
Looks like there is Fauxx-Desktop that you could probably run on your pi-hole machine.