You've been given rice because you're the sushi.

When you sign up for free services like Facebook, or using Google's suites of software, you aren't just getting some neat package of tools to keep up with your friends, customers and business associates. You are in essence selling yourself: what you're interested in, what you talk about, who you associate with. The picture which these companies have of who you are can in some ways be quite unpleasant. There are numerous articles about how invasive these services can be and what they ultimately collect of you; I'm not going to bore you with the details.

I'm sure that many of you have used these services, and are still using these services in daily life. Some of them, like Google Maps can even feel practically indispensable. Some of you, after careful research, also want to make the switch out. However, it's very likely that these services already know a lot about you, and it's safe to assume that you have de facto lost all sovereignty to any data that you have provided to them.

Merely deleting your account, or even deleting/scrambling all your extant data, will sure as hell not save you; your data is more than likely backed up, and suddenly melting down and burning your profile in a day is not exactly a difficult thing to check for. Things that you intentionally delete might in fact be a thing that these companies are interested in tracking.

If you don't want to have these corporations knowing actual facts about you, you have to instead outwardly change the person you represent yourself as upon the service in question. You have to build a new set of data which turns the carefully built profile of you into a massive pile of hot garbage that is impossible to derive meaningful information from. Of course, you need to do this deliberately, and over a longer period of time. Otherwise your strange face turn will trip up the collectors.

Recipe for Hot Garbage Soup

Let's give an example. On paper, it feels like it's very trivial turn your Facebook profile into a zesty brown stew. In fact it's probably one of the easiest example, because it has an explicit profile managed by you, and costs absolutely nothing but time to sabotage your profile.

Firstly, you need to start by slowly cutting off using all their mobile products (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, etc), taking some time to do some common precautionary things like disabling Javascript, adding adblockers, etc. Only use Facebook from the web. Stop using any applications that require you to use a Facebook sign on. This is to prevent them from further engaging with you in an uncontrolled manner where you might be talking to real people.

And change your privacy settings to only ever allow friends to see your posts, because it just gets weirder from here.

Very slowly stir in some of the following ingredients, setting aside like 10 minutes each day at a time of your choosing (preferrably something like lunch, or just after work):

• Begin liking/following pages, and engaging with those pages more than any page that actually interests you. Like very common/popular businesses, sports teams, and celebrities. To countersink the possibility of Facebook paying more attention to less popular niches rather than more popular pages like more obscure groups that have no relation to you.
• Be interested in local events you don't actually care about. Check in to them.
• Add friends. Just keep adding them. All of them. Doesn't matter who they are, or where they are. Like their posts, even if they are total garbage. Randomly comment on them with inane crap.
• Slowly delete old friends and talk with them only through uncontrolled channels of communication.
• Slowly unlike pages that relate to your actual interests, preserving only those that are wholly fabricated or are so diluted and popular that they are effectively meaningless.
• Slowly adjust your reported religion, employment status, relationship status, and political party. Like things which support your enthusiastic and purportedly life-changing adjustment. Choose the most mild and uninteresting ones for your area (so that you aren't pinned as a crazy by a future employer or perhaps a more authoritarian future government that seeks to abuse these data structures).
• Change your name in order to prevent your real friends from tagging you in pictures. Perhaps, link this to a fake relationship change, or a change of gender, or religion to further cement that this was a "real" experience.
• Post inanity. Paraphrase random statuses from the 1000 people you added. Upload other people's pictures but digitally edit them in minor ways in order to make them appear slightly different. Post a picture of a burrito every day.
• Talk to people over messenger sometimes on the computer, using mostly small talk and answer deeper questions using your new fake persona.
• Upload new profile pictures which feature a human face, but don't feature you. Inappropriately tag yourself to other people's faces. Preferably, you might want to do it to a similar but still wrong face and do it consistently.
• Start to only visit Facebook from unorthodox locations, and checking into them.

With some luck, you'll start to notice advertisements, suggestions, and other things drifting off from your real interests and moving onto your fabricated ones. When you no longer see any of your actual interests, friends, or anything, in your profile's suggestions and advertisements for a week or two, don't delete your profile; it's pointless, and they'll know what's up. Instead, scramble your password to nonsense, log off and never return. Now cut it off completely:

• Block Facebook on your routers to disallow even your guests from browsing it.
• Keep maintaining a strict security regimen that involves not allowing the use of any applications or websites that require Facebook or require a Facebook application to use. Block all web widgets that directly interface with Facebook, and don't use the share media buttons.
• If you absolutely, positively need to use Facebook for some reason, you need to create a burner profile. It has to be completely siloed; it absolutely cannot contain any of your actual information nor can it contain your hot garbage profile information. Accessing the application, it can't ever touch a device you use or use internet connections which you used Facebook with previously unless you can somehow route everything through Tor.

With these things in place, we can hope that your analytic information has been rendered completely useless, and that your actual life is mostly free of attempts to catalog it by a single company.

Your hot garbage soup might not just benefit you, but will in some way benefit people around you and are like you, as correlations and interests that were you previously derived for them via your bundled data are damaged and degraded.

The Harder Stews

But what do you do when you have to destroy your Google footprint? Your Google footprint is likely significantly worse than any other purely informational online footprint that you have. Through searches, navigation, and cloud stored documents, people effectively confide their secrets to Google. If they were completely ethically bankrupt, or coerced by someone of greater power that was more ethically bankrupt, the damage that they could theoretically do through their centralized and massive analytics capabilities is disturbing. And Amazon in some senses is even worse than Google, because their profile on you is tied to actual monetarily purchased goods; to spoil your monetary consumption analytics isn't just time consuming but also straight up expensive. I suspect that that genie is never going back in the bottle.

And honestly, I do not have a comprehensive or meaningful answer for this; the reach of their tentacles is far longer and in some cases free or privacy conscious solutions simply do not compete. How the hell do you replace YouTube, or meaningfully trash your YouTube profile? To break their profile of you, you would likely need to do a significant amount more.

But if we, as I suspect, cannot trust the majority to break free of these systems of information collection and control, we need to at least ensure that they do not have and cannot collect any meaningful information about ourselves before we leave these ecosystems. Or at least, that we may minimize the amount of potential real and useful information that can be derived through these profiles. Even seemingly innocuous data – like the movies or foods that you like – can ultimately result in the creation of clever but dreadful statistical correlations down the line. If we want to build a world that is truly free, and fully and collectively support a certain freedom of press and idea, we must be proactive in our efforts to safeguard our privacy (and that of our like-minded or conscientious friends) and not allow even information that they already have to be useful.