this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Privacy

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Is there something that can generate random Internet usage to make the real sites I go to a bit obfuscated?

I'm thinking something that runs on my server, and simply visits a random website. It probably shouldn't actually be random, and some sort of tweaking would be great. Like the ability to have it visit every news site there is. That way the ISP will have a harder time telling my political bias.

The threat model for this is below using a VPN for normal usage, although getting a dedicated VPN IP address is a project for one day.

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[–] gibson@sopuli.xyz 6 points 8 months ago

It usually isn't super hard to tell apart randomized junk like this from real human patterns. That is why Tor Browser for example tries its best to make everyone look the same instead of randomizing everything.

That said, for the mere purpose of throwing off the ISPs profiling algorithms, you could make a relatively simple python program to solve this. A naive solution would just do an http GET to each site, but a better solution would mimic human web browsing:

If you have no programming capability this will be rough. If you have at least a little you can follow tutorials and use an LLM to help you.

The main issue with this goal is that it isn't possible to tell how advanced your ISP's profiling is, so you have no way to know if your solution is effective.

Feel free to DM me if you go this route.