[ArsTechnica] After vote to kill privacy rules, users try to “pollute” their Web history

While the US government is giving ISPs free rein to track their customers’ Internet usage for purposes of serving personalized advertisements, some Internet users are determined to fill their browsing history with junk so ISPs can’t discover their real browsing habits. […]

Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Technologist Jeremy Gillula is skeptical but hopes he’s wrong. “I’d love to be proven wrong about this,” he told Ars. “I’d want to see solid research showing how well such a noise-creation system works on a large scale before I trust it. » […]

ISPs want to become bigger players in the online advertising market dominated by companies like Google and Facebook, which face less strict “opt-out” rules than the opt-in rule that would have applied to ISPs. […]

Smith agreed with Gillula that creating browser noise “isn’t a full solution, and that counters are possible,” but he remains optimistic that it can be an important tool for preserving user privacy alongside initiatives like HTTPS Everywhere and other privacy-protecting technologies. […]

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/after-vote-to-kill-privacy-rules-users-try-to-pollute-their-web-history/