05/04/2017 12:50:15 ¶ ●

## After vote to kill privacy rules, users try to “pollute” their Web history

beemill:

> > Steve Smith of Cambridge, Massachusetts contacted Ars and Gillula after our recent article about how the US Senate vote to eliminate ISP privacy rules affects users and what Internet users can do to hide their browsing history. He’s a subscriber to this new browser pollution approach.

> > “Perhaps more constructively than using a VPN or Tor, fill up your monthly bandwidth allotment with data pollution,” Smith wrote to us. “You’re already paying for the bandwidth, so use it all if your ISP is going to sell your private data. This has the dual benefits of obscuring your actual browsing habits, and, if enough people adopt this practice, discouraging ISPs from selling private data.

> > “I’ve written a Python class to do this for my household—it crawls for links it finds using random word searches—and have shared the code,” he continued. Smith’s code is available on GitHub. Internet users often have to worry about data caps, but Smith set the default rate to use 50GB a month, or about five percent of a 1TB data cap.

> > Smith’s “ISP Data Pollution” project isn’t the only such effort. For instance, there’s a project called “RuinMyHistory” that opens a popup window that cycles through different websites and a browser plugin called Noiszy designed to “create meaningless Web data” by visiting various websites. […]