[sjwright]

Perhaps one solution might be to poison the data and have your router/device make spurious random DNS lookups and HTTPS connections. Ensure the list of random websites includes the top few hundred companies likely to be in the market for usage data. If enough people did this it would make the data useless.

[FridgeSeal]

Data poisoning is a fantastic approach: flood the captures with so much, and with so much trash that it becomes an increasingly large amount of work to just sort out the 'real' traffic (even before any advertiser analysis of what that real traffic contains).

There's a couple of things that do this actually: the AdNauseum plugin will hide ads for you, but will also click through on them often as well which helps pollute advertiser data capture. It won't of course be able to replicate you browsing on the page, but it'll go a long way to frustrating the efforts of 3rd parties who won't have access to the landing page metrics anyways.

There was also a post on /r/InternetIsBeautiful that was supposed to do something similar: essentially destroy your browsing habits by performing additional searches and following links in the background, but I think that relied upon a hardcoded list of searches, so it's ongoing functionality was somewhat limited.

A big challenge to making something that continually obfuscates your browsing habits is making sure it doesn't accidentally end up going throw actually sketchy or illegal stuff (i.e. sites/etc that could get you on lists/attention) and making it work in a way that isn't easily detectable/filterable as 'machine traffic'. I guess that means you'd have to build in functionality to replicate following pages several links deep, not making successive requests immediately (sleeping execution/simulating scrolling), simulating some kind of 'natural' interaction: mouse movement + hovering over things + other things that users might do?

I'm sure most of that stuff is totally possible, probably even easy, might make for a fun personal project...

[wizardforhire]

How would one go about doing this? More importantly... Is there a simple cross platform application I could have my friends and family install that takes little to no effort on their part?

[walterbell]

https://adnauseam.io on Firefox.

[Bartweiss]

I think data poisoning is going to become increasingly influential, simply because data restriction is so damn hard. Blocking every possible fingerprinting scheme is all but impossible, and any slip-up permanently releases information.

But data poisoning is relatively easy and offers an "additive" solution. Every use decreases the value of all the information you spill, which is way more appealing than demanding flawless defense at every turn.