Fauxx is an open-source Android privacy tool that poisons data broker and ad-tech profiles by generating continuous, plausible, off-demographic synthetic activity from your device. The goal is simple: make your real behavioral signal statistically indistinguishable from noise.
Not my project, but though this is really cool and worth sharing.
This method wouldn’t combat device fingerprinting, so it would be trivial for everyone but the aggregate data brokers to filter out as noise.
For a strategy like this to work, your legitimate traffic needs to be indistinguishable from the random traffic.
So basically it has to be running while you’re using it, and on the device your primarily use?
not necessarily. if ‘you’ are sending traffic, i (someone interested in your data) don’t really care where it comes from. Em is correct that it’s trivial to filter out, but it’s also another data point that is interesting and potentially relevant for them, so in practice they won’t.
tracking has gotten to the point where they can infer connections based off of users that have no interaction but otherwise share a location for a period of time (think coffee shop wifi, work). you have things in common with those people. maybe not a lot, but enough to be relevant in someone’s dataset somewhere.
so no, it doesn’t have to be running on your primary device to be relevant. i’d argue that it simply being on your home network would be enough.