Few artists are more committed to disrupting Facebook’s well-oiled data collection machine than Ben Grosser. The Champaign (Illinois) based artist has now released a plugin to obfuscate your emotional status from Facebook. Instead of handing over your emotional response to your newsfeed (for sentiment analysis and monetization) the plugin allows you to camouflage your true feelings. The project’s statement explains these motivations further:
Go Rando is a web browser extension that obfuscates your feelings on Facebook. Every time you click “Like”, Go Rando randomly chooses one of the six “reactions” for you. Over time, you appear to Facebook’s algorithms as someone whose feelings are emotionally “balanced” – as someone who feels Angry as much as Haha or Sad as much as Love. You can still choose a specific reaction if you want to, but even that choice will be obscured by an emotion profile increasingly filled with noise. In other words, Facebook won’t know if your reaction was genuine or not. Want to see what Facebook feels like when your emotions are obscured? Then go rando!