“every time you want to actually use google”

i think you’re lost, buddy.

lol

These programs are a waste of your time and resources. It is useless network spam who’s only outcome is to accelerate web-admins to move towards stricter filters to protect their computer resources from such spam.

The concept is wildly broken, because its perception of surveillance is incorrect. It puts too large an emphasis on web-traffic. This isn’t the 90s anymore.

I genuinely want to know what is going on in the author’s head. This is a program for Google’s Android–Google’s Android. It is their operating-system and where a lot of signals are captured. Google sees that you’ve downloaded Fauxx, even if you install it from a third-party (i.e. not from Google’s PlayStore™). They know what time your alarms are set for. They intercept every text message, every phone-call, every e-mail, every notification. If you have Bluetooth™ or other wireless protocols enabled they know what other wireless-signals are around you. They know when you’re driving, when you’re idle, when you’re at work and when you’re asleep.

Clicking on random links isn’t fooling anybody. Sophisticated algorithms look for trends, not one offs ‘hey, this user clicked on an ad for a product sold by Y’. Regardless of how much you think you’re spamming the network Google has access to millions of controls: people the same age, gender, ethnicity and whatever else, to compare against. People who are diligently populating databases with correct data.

I read the f-droid page–before anyone points to the spoofing of location data as some kind of protection–let me put real emphasis on: this isn’t the 90s. This is sophisticated mass-surveillance in 2026 that only increases in sophistication as time goes on. Users purchase increasingly sophisticated mobile-computers that are awake 24/7/365 scanning for an increasing list of wireless protocols which means more data for Google. More sophisticated patterns and algorithms to work alongside and with their national-defense contractors.

Google thinks you’re you’re in the population that might commit political-violence. The NSA, CIA, FBI et al have been notified and now there’s human-eyes on you too, not just the surveillance of unthinking machines. Good fun.

Google doesn’t need a GPS signal to know where you are, where you live and where you work. They have access to a live map of global wifi-access points, cell-towers, Bluetooth™ beacons and a host of other signals. That map is updated daily by all the drones who go though life using their Google Android mobile-computer. Try as one might, this is a collective problem. On one hand it is Google’s mass-surveillance program, but they can only do what they do because everyone else is a snitch for them. A willing snitch. A snitch that believes there is no other way, but to be a snitch. Just try and convince someone not to use Google’s products.

Regardless, for privacy this is a pointless piece of software. You’ll just make Google richer. Those websites and ads clicked on were already paid for. Whether they represent your actual interests or not is besides the point. The transaction already happened and you just made Google minusculely richer. The correct thing to do is to block ad-networks from your network so they never even get loaded.

If you want to protect yourself from Google’s mass-surveillance systems don’t use Google. Use a GNU/Linux mobile-computer or GrapheneOS. To combat the effects of mass-surveillance (that is, the surveillance of you by the masses who do use Google’s products) get political. It seems absurd and a threat to national security that the domestic economy is held ransom by Google and Apple.

I’ll preempt the criticism of GrapheneOS by juveniles who barely have two brain-cells. GrapheneOS only works on Google branded mobile-computers. Ergo buying a Google product would make Google even richer than randomly clicking on Google’s ads, which go for what? $0.0006c USD?

Google’s product isn’t the hardware. It’s subsidized and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was sold near cost (anyone who actually has information about this I’d be genuinely interested in reading). It’s not even made by Google. It’s made by the same factories that makes Apple’s mobile-computers and a host of other retailers’ devices. Don’t get hung up on the branding. Turning off a spigot for Google’s mass-surveillance system is infinitely more powerful than continuing to contribute to it, but with additional ‘noise’ that doesn’t even register.

Outside the domain of privacy I don’t like this idea of spamming networks or loading completely random garbage. At the most benign-end of the spectrum you’re just wasting whatever data-allowance you’re paying for. At the malicious-end you could be contacting malicious-servers (ad-networks are obtusely not in this category, but should be).

I use TOR for everything. Google can eat my shit and gargle my piss.

Wish this was available for Linux. There’s noisy but it seems pretty rudimentary in comparison.

Screenshots show it has “wifi only” setting. Maybe it could do with a “Only when charging” setting too.

Your post is a great example of the conditioned expectation that American technology-companies have created. I don’t use this app. I don’t see any ads.

But then the ads become more useless to advertisers if engagement does not lead to increased revenue

As someone working in adjacent spaces: that’s a lot of work and a specialized skillset you’d need to hire for, plus a ton of dev time. Sure, google might work on that, but smaller sites are extremely unlikely to be doing so

As the author alludes to, the majority of this traffic will be easily discarded. It’s the 1-2% that they can’t be totally sure about which will cause them to either keep a bit of bogus data about you, or accidentally discard a bit of real data about you

To take an analogy from image processing

Say you have a perfect, crisp image of yourself. That’s analogous to (company) having a totally pristine dataset about your activities.

Now, say, you introduce some uniform random noise to the image (this is the base level functionality of the Fauxx app without any of the other layers on).

Image denoising algorithms are pretty darn good at getting a bunch of it out, but you have to decide on how aggressively you want to denoise. Denoise too little, and some noise remains but you can be fairly sure you’re not also losing some of the original image. Denoise too much, and you can be more sure that you’ve removed all the noise, but you risk losing data in the actual image.

So, this app on its own isn’t going to take the average Joe’s public footprint and make them disappear behind a cloud of random bullshit, its effect would probably be more akin to a pane of very lightly frosted glass, once (company) is done discarding the obvious noise.

As part of your overall privacy approach I think its valuable, and once its running in the background you’ll basically not notice it’s there. But nobody should be considering this as a magic bullet privacy solution.

Re: them being able to detect and remove noise based on your existing data they already have by training on it - they totally could, and depending how much data they already have, they might have excellent results in doing so. However, performing that process is costly on resources and time (not for one user, but generally). It is likely more efficient for them to take rather dumb approaches to removing noise that are not as effective but cost less and run faster.

app says it usea personas to make it harder to filter. It makes the noise more consistent by like making the niise or whatevs in base of the persona’s interest and then switches after like a week.

You have izzyondroid repo? Think it needs that