Scrambling the Radar

As has been noted here many times, it is not possible to do anything online (and often elsewhere) without being tracked.

Nothing is considered to be unquestionably private anymore. Artificial “intelligence” is making the situation worse. I strongly suspect that those who welcome our new computerized overlords will come to regret it.

Those who are not NPCs — non-player characters — in their own lives look for ways to defend ourselves from the endless intrusion of companies, government, and [other?] malevolent actors. It is not easy. Nor is it always effective.

Over the years I’ve mentioned several times that it may be that the most effective way to prevent our private activities from being made available to those who believe they are entitled to follow us is not so much to hide from the bad guys as to send them on wild goose chases.

If you follow the news, you’ll see that this kind of thing is coming into fashion in the field of warfare, with confounding of location data, the global positioning system itself so that people have no indea themselves where they are, and electronic communications. Privately, we’re using virtual private networks that let those who snoop come to think that we’re someplace other than where we are, both online and otherwise. (For example, there is one large company that recently confirmed that I am in St. John’s, Newfoundland and, when it needs to speak with me it phones me on my local phone number there. I should note that I set up this arrangement for no particular reason other than to find out if I could. I can.) This has all become easy.

What the military folks and others have learned is that it is harder to hide where you are than it is to impart the impression that you’re someplace else. If there are two of you on the radar, it will take twice as many expensive anti-aircraft rockets to shoot you down. If there are a dozen or a hundred — but only one of you in reality — the whole operation is too expensive to undertake unless you’re an extremely valuable target, which chances are you’re not.

That’s the kind of wild goose chase I’m talking about. I’ve written in the past that it may turn out that the best path to privacy and security may prove not to be carefully hiding yourself (which we should do anyway) but instead by sending out a lot of other information that pretends to be you but isn’t. If your correct information goes out tangled with a hundred or a thousand different, incorrect versions of your information, you make digging out your real information difficult and expensive., if it’s possible at all.

As I said, I’ve long thought that if we ever come up with an effective way to preserve our privacy, some version of that is probably how we’ll get there.

Imagine my happy surprise, then, when a few days ago I chanced upon a program called Fauxx.

Let it describe itself: “Fauxx is an open-source Android privacy tool that poisons data broker and ad-tech profiles by generating continuous, plausible, off-demographic synthetic activity from your device. The goal is simple: make your real behavioral signal statistically indistinguishable from noise.

“Every search you make, every link you click, every location you visit is collected by data brokers, ad networks, and analytics platforms. Over time, they build a detailed profile of who you are, what you want, and what you're likely to do next. That profile is sold, traded, and collated with other data and profiles to continue the process.

“Fauxx addresses this by injecting continuous, category-weighted synthetic activity that obscures your real interests under a statistical cloud. Your genuine signal becomes noise.”

Your fascination with the St. Louis Cardinals (which I guess is possible, but let’s be more plausible and choose the Nipponham Fighters instead) might cause the data scrapers to know they ought to aim ads at you based on that interest. But what if the scrapers are told about your interest in industrial quantities of disposable diapers. And used tires that can be ground into scrap. And of course — who isn’t? — a ready and economical supply of durian juice. Now your real interest is diluted by 75 percent.

Now, imagine that those people are told that your interests are anything except your actual interests. Then imagine them being informed of this spurious information constantly, when you’re looking at things that interest you but also when you’re out mowing the lawn.

That’s what Fauxx seeks to accomplish.

The bad news is that for now it is only available for the Android operating system for cellular telephones and tablets. But the source is open and free and I’m sure the developer wouldn’t mind you porting it to some other operating system, as long as you maintained and supported it yourself. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone did just that.

I downloaded it and installed it on one of my Android devices (actually running GrapheneOS, a version of Android that is designed to avoid giving away your information to begin with; in my estimation it is as close to a secure telephonic operating system as you’ll find).

While I have not proved that Fauxx works, if it does what it says it is doing then it is impressive, maybe even too impressive.

When you’ve downloaded and installed it and fire it up, it asks you a lot of questions about your interests and other demographic details. This, we’re told, is so it can leave those things out of the information it phonies up to send to the advertising people. It’s all fascinating to look at, but I’m not sure it is necessary: If it’s going to send a continuous compost pile to the bad guys, what does it matter if there’s an occasional fresh cherry tomato mixed in? I say it might be too impressive because if it is sending bad data all the time it might eat up more bandwidth than is necessary.

Nor do you have to provide any of that information. If you tell it nothing about yourself it still provides what it calls “uniform entropy,” which is to say a non-personalized stream of misinformation.

If you’re a belligerent sort of person, give up that Twitter/X account and use the “Layer 2: Adversarial Profile Scraping” feature of Fauxx instead. This finds out what Google and the other bad guys know about you and sets about changing their minds.

And finally there is a provision to create multiple profiles — “personae” — and rotate them from week to week.

But wait, there’s more.

It “executes synthetic search queries across Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. Queries are generated using a Markov-chain model trained on a bundled corpus—-they're natural-sounding and topically coherent, not random gibberish.” It also gives false information as to which ads were clicked upon.

Of practical significance, it offers fake GPS coordinates, making it impossible for you to be tracked, or your location predicted, by your phone.

It promises to rotate what is reported as your device’s software and configuration. The combination of things on your phone — right down to the wallpaper — can be used to uniquely identify your device. Fauxx sends out phony information here, too.

The list goes on.

The application is promising and useful. It is sad that there is a need for it.

All that having been said, I have no idea if it works. I have no reason to mistrust the developer or the application itself, but I also have no proof of its efficacy. In that respect it is not like a good VPN (their purposes overlap but are different), where you can readily determine where it is reporting you to be.

If enough people use Fauxx for it to become a problem, we can assume the big data companies will find a way to identify it and confound it.

And we are told that the burgeoning Artificial Intelligence, with or without the arrival of quantum computing, will soon make short work of things like Fauxx, as well as passwords and even highly complicated encryption. Which is to say the loss of privacy will get much worse, for all of us.

I’m glad to see that there are people hammering away to stay ahead of the encroachments into our lives. But even that requires our trust, and trust nowadays ought to be given only rarely and very carefully.