this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Theres a huge network of private surveillance cameras, microphones, and other sensors constantly collecting everyone's information and selling it to whomever can pay, or just straight up giving the feds access to the data.
I legitimately believe this.
Amazon's Ring cameras do give this information over. Businesses use beacons whoch ping mobile devices to count foot traffic. If you look at your phones "key locations" setting you'll find your phone has been logging all your for traffic for years, and your ISP will be doing the same. Even the Tim Hortons app was logging and selling user's detailed location history. That's something a lot of apps are definitely doing at smaller scale (or via SDKs where the app may not even know they're sending that info -- segment is almost definitely doing this type of thing).
I did the math once on the "my phone listens and sends ads for what I say" conspiracy and it's squarely feasible to build even years ago.
Mobile OSes have gotten better permissions, but you could use low quality speech to text algorithms and a bloom filter to select ad categories without much memory or battery hit. You would be able to generate a list of "definitely haven't used" terms and "maybe used" terms, which is good enough to target ads.
Phone have crazy good microphones too, and you can never know when they're on or off.
Mostly I think people thinking this was happening were vastly underestimating how much Google and FB know about them -- nearly every website sends your info to them. Even if you use a VPN your weather app can leak your IP, or any other app running in the background of your phone like your email client checking Gmail for new messages. All that data can be loaded into an identity graph, which correlates that data with known instances of your activity and assigns a probability of an action being you each hop out in the event*feature network. That's how FB shadow profiles worked years ago.
I sound like a conspiracy theorist but practically anything you do online can and will be traced back to you. VPNs only protect you from your ISP. Always assume you're being watched and what you do will be used against you in the future, even if it's all legal.
Always remember Ken Bone who people loved but then the media ripped on over his commenting on a pregnancy porn subreddit.
I don't doubt anything you said, except for the last paragraph.
Ken Bone did an AMA on the same account that he commented on porn subs with - that was not a result of surveillance programs.
Yes, I guess my point there is if there's something people can use against you they will