would it be legal to use a botnet though? unless you propose some sort of volunteer botnet people could join, but what if somebody gets control of that for nefarious purposes? Also who decides how the botnet should behave? To have an impact on statistics being gathered for any particular purpose, seems to me you would need to target the activities of the botnet towards that activity.
I’m sure a mathematical model could be programmed to see how effective the botnet would be, setting percentages of the total net traffic for the botnet output and traffic pertaining to any particular subject or subjects as input parameters to vary. It would not need to be very sophisticated to show whether such a scheme would be viable and if it would, what size would it have to be and how limited would it be in what it could realistically target.
After all that, if the botnet is viable and you get enough volunteers, how do you decide what it does? If you start targetting particular sets of statistics to spam, would there be unintended consequences? Who would choose the target areas? Who would oversee the design of that spamming to ensure that the action taken would in fact result in the desired outcome? Who would decide what the desired outcome was? What would be the impact on legitimate uses of “big data” by researchers in various fields?
I’m inclined to think that while such a botnet might be legal, the ethics of it would be a bit shakey. Does the end really justify the means? Would it not be better if people took care to ensure their own privacy and keep themselves informed? We need more truth, not less!
Straight off, I can see an issue where say someone with a vested interest in a particular area of business for example, manages to steer the activities of your volunteer botnet to spam some piece of information. If they were aware of the design and implementation of that spamming, and the amount of it as a percentage of the total traffic related to that information, they would have an advantage over their competition proportional to the effectiveness of the botnet…