Italian version
.hacktivism
12.10.04 Bugmenot, tricking free registration sites.
The legacy of the golden era of new economy are here to stay. Among them is the myth of being able to define any user with his data and personal preferences to seduce him with hyper-targeted advertisements. The bait of restricted content has systematically been exploited to obtain these precious data through a 'free' registration. In fact, there's nothing free in selling one's own privacy to people who'll sell these informations to marketers. The mechanism of automatic form filling, implemented in the most popular browsers, makes the process even easier and faster. To protect their own privacy, many fill these forms with false informations, but the long registration processes often force the user to accept anyway some kind of tracing mechanism, usually a browser cookie. Bugmenot is an online tool to fill in the registration forms of the most famous online services with fake informations, allowing free access to them without being continuously spied and traced. Of course, this shortcut doesn't work for pay sites, and some countermeasures have been taken to avoid the emergence of commercial sites based on this policy, such as not publishing the database and the invulnerability to scripts. Refusing to be 'profiled' is an important opposition to a practice unconsciously accepted by millions of users and, at the same time, is a slap in the face of 'personal data capitalists' who think they can steal everyone's personal choices.