You know them, ads that haunt you on the whole Internet. You could see pair of shoes, newly arrived styles for dresses, and all other ads for sites where you surf. Advertisements are so ubiquitous in our everyday Internet lives that they’ve become a sort of background-radiation–and there’s numerous tools developed to thwart them from NoScript to ad blockers; but what if there was a more active, privacy-enhancing way to strike back at intrusive advertisements?

Rachel Law, a 25-year-old graduate student from Singapore, has created a browser plug-in-cum-game that could mean the end of the use of private data by the brands to offer customized products.

Her game creation, called “Vortex,” is an Internet browser extension available for Google Chrome and Firefox, which is partly set and on the other hand, a destroyer of private data subsequently used brands to sell their products. Through play, it allows players to swap cookies, change IPs and disguise their locations.

Users who install this tool on browser may confuse the digital ads provider and publishers that categorize web audiences impersonating another user profile completely different from the real. “It’s a way of masking your identity across networks,” said Ms. Law.

Vortex works differently than a traditional ad blocker. The classic way of blocking ads works like clicking and searching or goes to the web pages and keeps them out of sight. Vortex creates a lot of misinformation on which the ad technology has no reliable data. The plug-in creates a pool of information that has nothing to do with the actual behavior of the Internet in the network, thus deceiving the marks of users’ identity.

Law insists that the Vortex is intended to help people understand what cookies are and metadata and thus prevent Internet users from falling into the traps of advertisers that offer different prices, for example for flights, depending on the data available on the internet.

Part of the law’s goal is to prevent privacy by building a database of cookies gathered by ads players. She wants to educate people understanding what cookies and metadata are, how the ads technology targeting users for data driven targeting information. She insists this does not mean a death knell for online shopping or e-commerce industries.

“I think targeting is harmful when confidential information, such as your medical issues or criminal records, is used against you as a form of price discrimination. Retailers should not be able to discriminate based on health history, whether or not you’ve committed a crime before, your sexual preferences or history, etc., because this is private information pertaining to an individual,” she said.

“I like to imagine in the future targeted advertising becomes a targeted choice for both advertisers and users,” she said. “For instance, if a user decides to go shoe-shopping for summer, he or she could equip their browser with the cookies most associated and aligned with shopping, shoes and summer … users can choose what kind of advertisements they want to see.”

This nifty tool gets to misinform advertisers, but the Law has stated that she has nothing against advertising, “while private data are not used to discriminate. I would like the user could choose the type of advertising that will be exposed.”

For now, this tool is not available to the general public, so it is difficult to estimate the impact it would have if it come out to the masses, especially for advertisers and brands that use the segmentation of audiences as a form of marketing.

The author is not a trained programmer and realizes that in its current stage, the tool is not safe and secure and she needs assistance to make Vortex more secure. Currently the tool is a working prototype and licensed under creative commons and will be available on GitHub by the end of summer.