this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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And yet we /still/ have people who assume that a corporation that routinely pulls shit like this, that has more or less complete control over your Android phone, default to tying everything on your phone to your Google account, and then also put an enormous amount of effort to making the default easiest option to log in to nearly any online service or app also be your Google account...
...we still have people that do not believe that the phones are always listening when seemingly any website or app you use gives you advertisements about what you were just talking about in the other room with the phone locked.
Its possible to go in and reset or delete your advertising id and use firefox and deny hardware access to every possible google process you can without breaking the OS to stop this, but 1) the capability to eavesdrop shouldnt even exist 2) it should be disclosed /plainly/ 3) it should be waaaaay easier to disable.
I actually saw a video once where the argument was that phones aren’t listening. Rather, Google (and Meta and the like) have so many other data points on you that they don’t need to listen. Listening to you would be far less efficient and far less insightful than relying on their vast network of other data they have on you. Even if you don’t use a single Google product, you’re still not safe.
Reminds me of the story where Target knew a customer was pregnant before she did. They started sending her ads for pregnancy/baby products before she even knew she was pregnant, all because they had so much data on her.
In my opinion, this is way more terrifying and problematic than if they were listening to us.
Exactly. This is what I try to explain to people when they bring up the listening.
Somehow it’s difficult for many to comprehend this. They find the listening easier to understand.
I described it to my dad like this: “They don’t need to listen to your conversations because they’re already able to simulate your thoughts.”
Kinda a stretch, but it worked for him.
Shhh shh shh, you can't just tell people that the vast majority of them are so predictable in so many ways that most of their life choices can be determined to reasonable degrees of accuracy such that they functionally /are/ NPCs to those with decent models and a huge training dataset.
It'll upset them.