At Motherboard, Jordan Pearson writes about Data Arbitrage, a new project by three NY-based programers designed to short circuit the economy of buying and selling people’s online data:
But what if the very idea of willingly turning the details of your shopping or entertainment habits into cash is untenable even if you get a cut?
Enter Data Arbitrage. The program automatically sells users’ social media data to brokers and then uses the resulting funds to buy fake accounts, which in turn provide more data to sell. A bot called “ArbiBot” lives on the user’s computer and generates posts from the fake accounts. The goal is to eventually generate so much noisy, fake data that the whole enterprise of data brokerage is rendered completely useless.
“So far we have it running on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook,” a Data Arbitrage spokesperson, who asked to remain anonymous for legal concerns (at least until the program is released to the public on August 4th), told me in an email. “We plan to branch out to other social media sites a such as Google+ and LinkedIn. We are also interested in diluting credit card information, which we are on track to accomplish in the coming months.”