41–50 of 257 posts
The cynical part of me thinks this is the real reason to get rid of the headphone jack -- to make it inconvenient to turn off bluetooth.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evpz7a/turn-off-wi-fi-and...
>Location marketing aims to understand “online-offline attribution.” If a Starbucks coffee ad is sent to your email, for example, marketers want to know if you actually went there and bought a coffee. The only way to know is to monitor your online and offline habits at all times. Make no mistake: the purpose of marketing is to maximize information asymmetry. The natural end point is totalitarian: they know everything…
At its best, marketing is a way to let people know the goods and services you have that can make their lives better.
This is marketing at its worst.
I really enjoy this explanation of why targeted advertising is such a horrible thing:
This is really big in the WiFi space. Aruba, Cisco, etc all market services to public places like malls where you throw in a huge public wifi network, and regardless of whether you connect or not, they can see phones looking for known network and track traffic patterns. Malls can then see which stores have highest foot traffic on what days, etc. It's actually one of the things that justifies the expense for huge, exp…
So... turn off Bluetooth and Wifi when you go into a store? Put subtle lines on your face with makeup to confuse their facial recognition systems? What else do we need to do now to go out in public?
A provocative thought experiment: are you more annoyed by retailers recommending a product you just purchased from them, or a retailer recommending a product you probably will need soon? In a world blanketed by advertising, I would rather see relevant advertisements than be bombarded by garbage. Maybe I will get a deal, maybe I will discover something I like, maybe I will ignore it... but the spray-and-pray untargete…
This is what the ad industry exploiting the fear of missing out [1] looks like when they tout the virtues of "relevant ads". You might draw a comparison with casino marketing to gambling addicts, alcohol to alcoholics, etc -- it's rather slimy.
>Location marketing aims to understand “online-offline attribution.” If a Starbucks coffee ad is sent to your email, for example, marketers want to know if you actually went there and bought a coffee. The only way to know is to monitor your online and offline habits at all times. Make no mistake: the purpose of marketing is to maximize information asymmetry. The natural end point is totalitarian: they know everything…
The cynical part of me thinks this is the real reason to get rid of the headphone jack -- to make it inconvenient to turn off bluetooth.
On the iPhone turning off Bluetooth using the control center doesn’t even turn it of fully, precisely so that these location services (and other features) are still available. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evpz7a/turn-off-wi-fi-and...
This is rage inducing. I went into this article thinking "ok as long as I don't have the Target or Ikea or whatever app installed on my phone, I'm fine." While that is a primary way, this needs to be outlawed: > These companies take their beacon tracking code and bundle it into a toolkit developers can use. The makers of many popular apps, such as those for news or weather updates, insert these toolkits into their ap…
Imagine if using an app on your iPhone was regarded as more safe than visiting a Web page produced by the same organization, because Apple protected you more than Web standards do. It's a definite technical possibility, and I suppose it might make business sense for Apple.
So... turn off Bluetooth and Wifi when you go into a store? Put subtle lines on your face with makeup to confuse their facial recognition systems? What else do we need to do now to go out in public?