161–170 of 361 posts
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someone probably googled “kayak” from your wifi?
Hmmm, I live alone and in a pretty remote area (on an island). I keep my wifi pretty secure, so, that seems pretty unlikely. But who knows, anything is possible I suppose. Maybe because I live on an island.
A kayak seems like a practical purchase if you live on an island.
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Why did they pick a swimming pool? Did they see people in their area installing pools? I think that's often people's best guess, is that the "random" thing people use to test this actually isn't random and subconsciously they already had this topic seeded to them.
I know my iPhone isn’t listening to me. And I know about my friend’s activity influencing the ads I get served, and my demographic, and location, and all of that. And my random idea for a test word being predictable in a shocking way. But, recently I started thinking about the average user, who will install anything and approve any permissions requested without reading it. And imperfect App Store reviews approving a…
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>We know from leaks, reverse-engineering, and personal experience that this spying is going on. No we don't. There isn't any of that. This is flat earthing for technophiles.
Except they've been literally boasting they can do it? https://www.404media.co/heres-the-pitch-deck-for-active-list...
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> Apple lost a lawsuit over Siri spying "inadvertently" very recently That's what my article is about: it's about how I'm certain people will use this settled-out-of-court lawsuit as "evidence" that Apple are spying and targeting ads, but it's very clear that's not what was happening here.
Apple settled because they knew they would lose. Winning is good PR since they (falsely) claim to be favorable for privacy. They are only superficially better than Google in that regard. I did skim your article and it's not as bad as I thought. I think you really mean it when you say these are just coincidences. But they're not. Another one I forgot to mention: Google explicitly tracks your location history unless yo…
The microphone thing is false. You can try the takeout feature (or equivalent) across multiple providers to confirm that.
They don't need to: they can read your mind. My proof? Yesterday I was driving home and I saw an old Toyota Previa minivan and thought to myself "Oh, a Previa, you don't see those very often these days." When I got home, I started scrolling through my Google News and it showed me an advert for the new Previa. I agree with Simon: you basically aren't going to convince someone that their phone doesn't listen to you and…
Many mobile apps use an adtech SDK which does on-device audio keyword spotting. The company making this SDK is super secretive, so not much information about it.
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Apple settled because they knew they would lose. Winning is good PR since they (falsely) claim to be favorable for privacy. They are only superficially better than Google in that regard. I did skim your article and it's not as bad as I thought. I think you really mean it when you say these are just coincidences. But they're not. Another one I forgot to mention: Google explicitly tracks your location history unless yo…
The Google track your location history thing is true. You can confirm by using Google takeout to extract your location history. The microphone thing is false. You can try the takeout feature (or equivalent) across multiple providers to confirm that.
I seriously don't trust anything on a very deep level. Like I said, I've seen too much evidence that these companies are run by snakes that can only be trusted in certain ways. You might not agree, and I'm not prepared to argue all that tonight (I keep hitting the comment rate limit anyway). Just try to remain skeptical both ways if you don't believe we're being spied on, ok?
One thing that is rarely discussed in relation to this urban myth is that it is widely believe and yet it doesn't actually effect the behavior of most believers. That is one of the major reasons why most companies and many governments don't care about privacy, the public doesn't really care about it either. People will of course choose privacy over no privacy with all else being equal, but privacy is the first thing…
Yeah but I don't care, I have nothing to hide, let them have my data.
It's a slap in the face of me, trying to meticulously remove all internet access of programs and devices that don't need it, and moving from all free and not-privacy-friendly services to mostly paid and private-friendly ones - probably "losing" a big chunk of my lifetime doing this. I feel paranoid sometimes, when I hear this argument.
Answer - you wouldn't.