Privacy – Ad profile obfuscation
Explaining anonymity through obfuscation
Source: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf
Think of it like this - the tracking companies have some information about you – maybe you have a Facebook account, a store card, public records, some unblocked ads on your mobile device, the few trackers that made it past your blockers, etc.
That information is valuable - companies collect it into data products which they sell on the basis of having some predictive power.
Not giving them more information is what you're trying to do now. You can't get them to forget what they already know about you from various data markets and aggregators. These trade hugely diverse sources of information. Did you register to vote, do you live somewhere with high property values, did your smartphone pass a sensor on a trash can, when, etc.
Suppose you gave them a ton of useless information instead. Accurate data points about you are now drowned in noise. They can filter the noise, but the confidence interval goes down. The value of the data product is diminished. Maybe they also filter out some accurate thing they had gleaned about you.
You go from clicking two ads a year to thousands a day. Completely useless new data points every day which they have to store, clean, process, exclude, etc.
It would be cheaper to just exclude you from the data product, you bring the average accuracy of their profiles down and cause them work.
