I’m getting a bit sick of large corporations a) demanding excess data as a condition of doing business with me, b) allowing it to be stolen, and c) giving zero fucks about it.
What are some things that us netizens can do to make our displeasure known.
Extra points for funny ideas.
If a company is publicly traded, then all leaked individuals are given 50.1% controlling stock in the company, split among the victims with new stocks created for them, with unclaimed stocks held in a trust controlled by anyone that did respond to claim stocks. They can sell the stocks, or drive the company into the ground out of spite. Maybe even both.
Companies not publicly traded have 3 months to make all code used, trademarked material, and patents open source in perpetuity, and 1 year to convert their corporate structure into a non-profit.
Regardless of the size of the company, the CEO, CTO, and board must eat their weight in fried bugs. They get to pick the type of bug from a list of 5 options, and any seasoning they want. Live streams of the bug eating will be monetized and the proceeds given to orphans, under the title of “It’s not a bug, its a feature.”
Deny engagement and profit. It a takes a mind set change but a lot of shit can go avoided.
Streamimg can be replaced with Yarr
Use products you have longer until they break or not longer don’t fit use case
Start your shopping on the second market.
Generally Corpo’s and government are centralized and get benefits of that system, working class is decentralized naturally so we need to lean into that.
Absolutely.
Buy things used, repair and jailbreak what you can, and learn to make things for yourself.
We can’t, at least as individuals, divest from every exploitative system. But, we can remove ourselves from more than we think.
Often enough, you get a better experience out of the homemade and secondary market than whatever the new thing you’re being pushed can give.
OP said legal.
Well then OP can keep paying these money changers their profits.
Did You mean to tape *are or what’s the deal with the RSS Reader?
Use bots to apply for the open positions to waste time. Reject them all for not enough pay.
Post public info of the CEO class
Piracy
Give fake data when using all services.
Start and join boycott groups.
Use their social media against them. Eg post their dirty laundry as a comment on their post.
Do not use actual names, birthdays, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, etc. There’s no reason they need to know that info and I love/hate seeing physical mail and email show up with my made up info. Doesn’t work when paying for stuff though.
Report bugs that don’t actually exist. Keep reporting the same bug from different emails. Works especially well for apps.
Oh fuck you, buddy. Lol I find it infuriating the amout of product and software bugs that get ignored and passed to every sequential generation that follows and you wanna pile on fake bugs. You’re not my buddy, pal.
Don’t use their services.
I think the most effective method is to do some sort of organized boycott. We all know well enough how sheisty these companies are. Time to start encouraging each other to quit them en masse.
To bad that most participants give in and return shortly after leaving.
me explaining how evil Nestle is every time a family member buys a product, them agreeing that’s the most evil thing they’ve ever heard, and then doing it all over again next week …
Welcome to political organizing.
If anyone has one specifically for airlines, I’d love to hear it! Got plenty of time to read the comments with my cancelled flight
What we’re talking about can easily be devalued, among other things.
Explanation for illiterates?
It’s an SQL injection joke.
Basically, when dealing with databases, you can use SQL to search or modify the data in that database. By default, you can do this by polling the database with an SQL query. But this introduces a vulnerability called SQL injection. Basically, imagine if instead of filling in a name in the “Name” field, you filled in an SQL query. If the database admins haven’t protected themselves against it, then the database will happily run that query; You have just injected an SQL query into their database. Maybe you’re a malicious attacker, looking to get a virus onto the system, or looking to extract the data.
Protecting the database from injection is done with something called sanitizing. Basically, you set up filters to disallow SQL, so it can’t touch your database. In this comic, the database admins didn’t do that, so they were unprotected.
The actual SQL uses the student’s middle name to search for any tables named “Students” and permanently delete it. The joke is that when the school admin staff enters his name into their database, it will delete any tables named “Students” and wreck their database.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/327:_Exploits_of_a_Mom
SQL sanitization joke. Won’t affect most databases today.
As a security consultant who tests web applications on the regular: LOL
Still, any programmer worth their salt should filter their inputs. One group at work refuses to do it and they always get away with it and it’s infuriating
One group at work refuses to do it
Sounds like a huge liability to the company.
and they always get away with it
Until they don’t. All it would take is one malicious actor (competing company, spurned employee, data thief, etc) wrecking/stealing their entire database with an injection attack.
Their exact position would make it significantly less likely, since they aren’t working with databases, but software for individual products. That being said, it’s still shitty practice
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Ad-Nauseum is a nice way to inject a ton of garbage into the data corps collect.
I played around with this some time ago, until I thought more about it: using tools like this makes adtech money.
Adtech doesn’t care if you’re interested in X or Y, just that they can charge the advertiser for it. By injecting fake traffic, they’re getting more data to sell.
Send a copy of the receipt for your donation to the open source project that most closely aims to be their alternative. Explain why you’re angry in 3 sentences and do so like you are condescendingly speaking to a five year old.
Make the letter public, so other people know & get informed.
Make the letter public, so other people know & get informed.
Use AI to generate false info to feed into their database
I love putting wrong AI slop in every optional field or space I can get away with for profiles and accounts that don’t really matter.
If an extension exists for this I’ll use it
I’m skeptical that anything legal will work for very long because they will quickly work to make said legal action illegal.
But we can have some fun along the way, and it does change behaviour for a bit.
As others have said, the best instances of direct action are illegal.