First off, mods please move this if I have posted in the wrong topic.
I am currently degoogling myself. All I have left is to get off gmail and download my docs from Docs and shut that down. I think. There may be other stuff.
In the mean time, I have found “this is not a real person”. (Auto correct won’t let me put it as one world). Any ideas on if there are ways to use fake data and posting it to google or Facebook or whatever to do active obfuscation of my likeness. There are not many photos of me online, but there are a few, and I would like to confuse google or other big data about who I am.
Just a thought I had. It might not be a readable thing.
I have heard about a guy going on road trips and creating fake Facebook profiles with photos of himself in each town visited. Some used their real name and some used fake names.
The theory was that Facebook would lose the ability to accurately use facial recognition and fail to have accurate location data. I have no idea how well that worked. And of course you’d have to remove the app from your real phone.
The road trip bit was to avoid Facebook figuring out that the profiles were fake via IP location data. Since he used a real local WiFi access in each town the geolocation should have matched up. Plus he was going on a road trip anyway.
After doing that you could probably figure out a slick way to run a VM (either multiple VMs or temporary snapshot VMs to avoid Javascript, cookie, cache hackery) connected to a VPN to automate updates for each identity. You could post various cat pictures with faked EXIF date and location information, for example.)
His theory, as I remember it, is that Facebook uses the timing of profile creation and IP address geolocation as part of their algorithms for determining if a profile is a fake. Or in some cases a duplicate, such as someone who forgot their password and created a new profile.
I do like road trips. And that sounds like a way to at least have some static in the algo about my identity.
For my work, people like taking their picture with me, and I have even started declining that, as it isn’t part of my actual job. And the few times I can’t decline, I at least ask them to not tag me. Some fake data on what my face looks like might help.
I dontb in any way think I can scrub myself completely, but I would like to minimize what is in big data. Or at least make it less valuable to them.
The point is to bury yourself within mountains of garbage data for OSInt. If you google yourself and see yourself in page 30 or more, then its a win. You are a needle within a haystack.
As far as Facebook goes, ensure that you have a way to turn off WebRTC on sites that you don’t need it on. It able to collect hardware identifiers that can be used for tracking purposes.
This I did do. Haven’t had a FB app on my phone for 2 years. Recently got a new used phone, new phone number, and installed lineage OS on it. No more google apps now also. Waiting for pine phone or librem5.
Started downloading my docs off of google to prep for shutting down that also.
Why?
What is your goal, and what is your reason for doing this?
The reason i ask is we’ve had a number of people with this idea, and in a lot of cases the thought behind it hasn’t been fully considered, or even worth the effort.
Certainly, if your goal it just to use less google services because you don’t like google that much as a company, then just stop using all their stuff, but don’t go out of your way to make your life difficult.
Dont delete that Google yet. You may need a Google account to remove some of your traces that may pop up in the future. Also, if you delete your Google account, there is no proof that they wont keep a “shadow copy” of your data. Remeber data storage is extremely cheap these days.