Sending intentional gibberish to thwart data collection and/or render it useless #6837
MrMomentum
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Dear Developers of mitmproxy :)
First of all - this app is awesome stuff. A while back I realized that my hosts file in Windows had become so enormous that it took my Dual Xeon with 96GB DDR4 RAM the better part of two minutes just to load it all and give me access to the Internet (after coming back from sleep, say) and I realized a New Way must be devised to ignore/disarm the onslaught of Internet data that's not part of the "What I Want"-category... e.g. 90% of traffic on a good day, I suspect)
My thoughts were going in the direction of a clever proxy server which (unlike the rather Medieval and archaic "hosts"-file...) can work with wildcards and templates so I may accomplish with a few well-defined rules what takes thousands of entries into said hosts file.
Enter MITMProxy! :D I can already tell this will be doing All Those Things and quite likely many more.
But! Why am I am writing to you? Well - having been interested in all things surveillance capitalism for a few years now, the other day I figured... what if one were to construct a solid, reliable and trusted proxy server expansion whose sole job is to mangle, change or otherwise make useless all the data my computer is constantly sending out to dozens of assorted 48yftgy48y843.google.com or 2098544y3985.facebook.com domains, containing... God knows what and then some.
Wouldn't it be lovely if this data is not "merely" garbage, but sophisticated, well-crafted nonsense that will frustrate, confuse and mislead those who are collecting it in "useful" ways. Not data that one can just dismiss as corrupted... but data that does, actually, seem to make sense.. has the right format and details, yet comes with the effect of seriously distorting and degrading analysis efforts, a gentle, innocuous but corrosive subterfuge. Of course - to make a dent it would need to be used by many thousands of users, and ideally be undetectable as coming from [not its assumed app/source/system]. But, surely, this should be possible.
Am I correct in believing MITMProxy is the optimal and perfect "substrate" upon which to build & create such a tool? Does it not already come with most utilities and features to make this possible? I am sure you are familiar with the Android app "Blokada" which does a great job of... elucidating the mind-boggling quantity of destinations one's data is siphoned off into... I'd very much want to take this one step further and create a killer Mangler In the Middle app that might bring an end to this, or force such companies to pay for [the right to use] certified, known and actually valuable data :)
So my first enquiry would be:
To what degree can one use MITMProxy (or any "interjected" proxy/system at all) to grab/detect/store the data payload that is about to be sent, categorize/typify it, apply some set of rules/algorithms to change its contents and send the altered payload on its way, while the recipient is none the wiser about its altered source and nature?
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