Controlling myself

Lots of people seem to worry about being profiled by their use of the ‘net. ‘Big data’ is coming to analyse your every click, tweet and post for someone else’s benefit. This is captured in the ‘if you are not paying, you are the product’ soundbite that reverberates around the internet.

Some people obviously go to great extremes to maintain their anonymity online – but it seems pretty hard to do this without losing some value. (I am not going to get a huge amount of value from Facebook if I don’t have an account – and log in occasionally.) 

So if we must leave a trail of data behind us on the internet I wonder if it is possible to leave a trail that is so full of noise that it is essentially useless for profiling? In engineer-speak – can enough artificial ‘noise’ be added to my online activities so as to make the signal difficult for these algorithms to extract. In the case of Google Search for example, would a computer issuing fake queries on a massive range of topics be able to limit Google’s ability to identify the ‘real’ queries. 

Probably just hair-brained idea with no practicality – but it is sort of interesting to imagine what would happen. This thinking has been inspired by the recent Twitter vs app.net dichotomy that has already had too much said about it… The choice that is being portrayed is between an organisation that will make decisions in the best interests of advertisers, vs an organised that has promised to do it differently. But if I always retained control of my data – then I would not have to rely on promises…