[FlaceBook]

I have around 10 gmail accounts, each of which only receives random junk from various sites and mailing lists. I create compressed, encrypted archives that contain only random data, and use them to fill my "drive".

Google is welcome to analyze as much of that as they want.

[copsarebastards]

That's just slacktivism.

Google is quite capable of detecting and ignoring chaff, and they wouldn't be giving away free space if they couldn't afford to host a small number of people doing stuff like you're doing.

Further, if you think that behavior doesn't contain any data about you, you're wrong. They can extrapolate from that behavior that you're interested in privacy and have some technical understanding of the problems with corporate surveillance. You've almost certainly received targeted ads for computer products, particularly stuff like Lenovo or Yubikeys, which are popular in security-conscious crowds. You may have ad-blocked these ads, but you've probably been tracked anyway, even if you used something to block trackers.

Right now you're totally ineffectual. If you want to actually do something, you should write your senators and stop using Google products entirely.

[FlaceBook]

You make many assumptions.

[copsarebastards]

That's not a very convincing counterargument if you don't say what assumptions you think I'm making.

[madez]

That behaviour is damaging. What is your reasoning and justification for it?

[FlaceBook]

Because it upsets people like you.

It's also the way I personally choose to protest the corporate and government surveillance state we're living in.

[cherry_su]

Why is it damaging?

[Beltiras]

It actually isn't. Sometimes data has too much purity. Noise can actually help.

[pdkl95]

db poisoning can help, but just having an account (10 is even worse) inflates their numbers and strengthens the perception that people should use gmail.

A long time ago, before the PC, market share perceptions lead to the idea that "Nobody got fired for buying IBM". It was a very effective trump card a salesman could use with managers to scare them away from the competition. In the PC era, "Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft" was abused in the same way.

This is really just a consequence of Metcalfe's Law-style network effects, which is why it is usually a bad idea to use anything that is known to be a problem; even if you use it maliciously, just the fact that someone gets to legitimately claims they have a larger clientèle becomes an additional barrier in the path of any competitor.

[dorgo]

Is there one program which can create such archives? Or do I need one for generating, one for encryption and one for compression?