It doesn’t matter. This information has a half-life. What I “liked” diminishes in value over time. What advertisers care what I clicked on 1, 5, 10 years ago?
Imagine that at different points in time, the confidence in your persona can be quantified. Say at some point in time last year they were 89% confident of the type of person you were, but today after months of using a ton of random fake likes and clicks they are only 16% sure.
They could choose to ignore low confidence measurements and still assume you are the same person from that point in time last year. Given that they can measure the standard rate of change in people’s interests (per interest even), and how quickly interests fall out of style, they can then extrapolate how relevant certain ads might be for you today based on your old data.
Imagine that. They don’t just own your data today, they own all the forecasts of your data for years to come. Go home and sleep on it.
What if the person who gleefully shared everything on social media, and the person who hides their trail actually are different? People change their beliefs and spending habits all the time. It why we look back on our own writing from years ago and cringe.
Agreed, if you don’t want them to have data on you the best case is to never use anything FB owned, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
If you already use FB services, stop using them and don’t give anymore data. They will still know about you, but at least you won’t give them any new information.
Unless you are mentally disabled in some way, anyone can be successfully marketed. People like to believe they are special snowflakes that can rise above the influence of marketing, but hit them with the right marketing message and you got them.
> People like to believe they are special snowflakes that can rise above the influence of marketing, but hit them with the right marketing message and you got them.
Maybe so, but the success of marketing has different probabilities for different individuals. So, if you're Facebook, it wouldn't make sense to invest in de-poisoning poisoned tracking data if they'd have a low chance of success with their marketing messages. Also, I'm doubtful any de-poisoning technique is perfect, so the resulting profile is probably worse for targeted marketing, all else being equal, as well.
Sure, for forensics, but how would FB's AI know that your new data is garbage?
Isn't that like NP-hard or something?
Furthermore, would they care? Realistically, you're padding their numbers. Things can be popular simply because they're liked (whether it's synthetic or not).
If you do it all at once it’s trivially easy. They know a person doesn’t just become a new person overnight.
If you commit to creating an elaborate fake personality by doing things your fake self would do, it can be harder, but not impossible. Certainly not a problem for some of the greatest minds in Silicon Valley.
Meh...the whole "Silicon Valley genius" trope is another myth that needs to die. Being able to code a depth first search doesn't make anyone a 'genius' and there are limits to what AI can do even with bushel baskets full of data.
For many years Facebook thought I was Jewish and was spamming me with ads to become a rabbi and move to Israel, but I am the least Jewish person you'd ever meet. And that could easily be determined by publicly searchable data about myself.
I've faked my phone number for about two weeks on Android when I installed their app to try it. 3 years after, they still ask me if my number is some random Italian number, I'm not sure they have that many checks in place.
