"This would also increase your traffic ten or fifty fold in a first approximation."
I suspect if you worked at it you could mathematically prove that will be a necessary condition for any effective data collection scrambling technique, under an assumption that we can't use proxying to other nodes. And I do mean "mathematically" fully literally.
I'm eliminating the possibility of proxy, where you try to set up a situation where you create a P2P network and trade page views around, because I think that only works with a really abstract view of how the tracking works. In practice, as soon as you want to use a site in an authenticated fashion you're getting tracked via that authenticated account, so I think I can argue the only real possibility for scrambling the data is for it to source from the same network location as the real data you are generating.
On that note, it occurs to me this plugin probably ought to be automatically creating authenticated accounts on services you don't care about; the authenticated status of an account creates a shining signal that may be too bright to mask. Considering that a lot of the data you're trying to mask would be coming from Facebook, that would be a problem.
And now that I think of that, use of this plugin really ought to result in your Facebook profile getting pretty badly scrambled, too.
Man, this is a big challenge. There's a part of me that is actually quite sad I can't drop everything and start going to work on this right now for pay. This sounds wicked fun, but way bigger than I could ever dream to take on.
I suspect if you worked at it you could mathematically prove that will be a necessary condition for any effective data collection scrambling technique, under an assumption that we can't use proxying to other nodes. And I do mean "mathematically" fully literally.
I'm eliminating the possibility of proxy, where you try to set up a situation where you create a P2P network and trade page views around, because I think that only works with a really abstract view of how the tracking works. In practice, as soon as you want to use a site in an authenticated fashion you're getting tracked via that authenticated account, so I think I can argue the only real possibility for scrambling the data is for it to source from the same network location as the real data you are generating.
On that note, it occurs to me this plugin probably ought to be automatically creating authenticated accounts on services you don't care about; the authenticated status of an account creates a shining signal that may be too bright to mask. Considering that a lot of the data you're trying to mask would be coming from Facebook, that would be a problem.
And now that I think of that, use of this plugin really ought to result in your Facebook profile getting pretty badly scrambled, too.
Man, this is a big challenge. There's a part of me that is actually quite sad I can't drop everything and start going to work on this right now for pay. This sounds wicked fun, but way bigger than I could ever dream to take on.