- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.ca
Hey wiretap, I was hitting on my wife’s friend in the elevator, I have issues with my wife anyways about that 2k she spent from my account last week if you remember, am I the asshole?
Hey validation machine, can you tell me I am right?
You’re absolutely right!
The scariest part is when you just think about pancakes and then start seeing ads for flour and maple syrup 10 minutes later. They don’t even need the wiretap anymore.
Yeah because they know you like pancakes and can serve you ads to start that train of thought so when you are served the pancake ad you feel like it ‘got you’ instead of the real fact that you were manipulated into thinking about pancakes so the pancake ad has more possibility of getting engagement from you. This is why you should have ad block on everything you interact with.
yeah people don’t realize just how insidious advertisement really is.
your phone isn’t “reading your mind,” advertisers have such a comprehensive model of you that they’re able to predict your thoughts with an incredibly high degree of accuracy before you even have them. There’s also obviously a bit of confirmation bias in play, you only remember the times they got it right as opposed to the times they guessed wrong.
I suddenly feel a sharp craving for some ad-block software…
it IS a wonder. i’m actually pretty curious how they accomplished this.
like i know how they harvest our data to figure us out, but i’m a computer guy. the psychology of brainwashing that sophisticated must be crazy.
Truly amazing how many breaches of privacy people are willing to put up with if the propaganda says that questioning the tracking means you’re hiding something and deserve to be tracked.
Or to protect the children! Child abuse is the trojan horse, also age restrictions a trojan sheep they have several on offer, to surrender to Tech. Social scores by half baked ai deciding everything secretly, in a way no one can know and challenge. The entire west is trying to surrender their citizens to Tech giants last year for a cut of the info and personal exemptions for politicians and security services.
Past generations would tar and feather these assholes something is wrong.
This is the dawn of technofeudalism. First our data is sold to the CorpoLords, then our lives, then our souls.
It really is.
In the late roman empire the rulers fucked up so much, no one could pay their taxes, government wouldn’t even accept it’s own watered down currency for taxes but demanded gold or silver or services and goods in kind. It got so bad people were walking off of their jobs en masse after those jobs didn’t provide for life anymore.
The empire responded by binding people to their jobs for life, and their kids. Many city people remained free but country folk were enslaved. The big latifundia factory farms turned their estates into castles and became lords. All while the barbarian invasions came sweeping through, and the people welcomed their government getting crushed.
One could see how that will play out again.
We need another secession of the plebians. Let these tech bros try and carry on without their main profit vector
That is a great idea. I think we should re-establish the Tribunate. With the veto on government actions and the rest, ability to offer sanctuary, being sacrosanct. Peoples’ tribunate. 500 bc and 350 bc the plebs did a general strike and got that and other concessions and expanded it, simply by decamping to a large hill and refusing to do anything until demands were met. I think they got written laws from that too, the 12 tables, before that the rich just made shit up as they went.
My hypothesis is that it’s a frog in a pot of water scenario. Western Union started the first charge account in 1914, so we’ve had a long time to get used to the water heating up. It probably did start with honest intentions to make things work a little smoother, but I remember the early days of digitizing records, and there was a LOT of loose data just there for the taking.
I remember that I used to work at RadioShack in the late '00s, and I had to escalate up to district because we discovered a treasure trove of old paper store credit applications that had been cached somewhere in the backrooms, and my manager wanted to just throw them in the normal garbage and not risk the cost of the extra shredding coming out of her bonus.
These things had SO MUCH INFO, handwritten out onto a paper form; name, birthday, SSN, mailing address, street address, then all that info of the spouse/cosigner that wanted to be on the account too. I could have made so much money on the black market, looking back.
Something us fundamently wrong with people, prior generations would never surrender their right without realizin or caring in prior generation. The entire west is going dull 1984.
1984 seems based on Orwell’s experiences working for the British government at the time, so in a very real sense the west has been that way for a while
He got disillusioned volunteering with the socialists in the spanish civil war. Hemimgway too.
“Got disillusioned” is a very mild term for turning into an MI6 stooge and reporting communists to intelligence agencies, the fucking prick!
I didn’t know that part. I think everyone involved in the spanish civil war came away jaded though. Which communists did he inform on then, in the UK? Do you recall the years he started?
He didn’t seem to be much of a fan of british intelligence when he was writing his books anyway, he didn’t pull any punches.
Wikipedia article on Orwell’s list
Could you elaborate on the “coming away jaded” after the Spanish civil war? I’m interested on an outsider’s opinion (assuming you’re not a Spaniard like me)
a big part of it was people seeing first hand the Soviet’s sabotaging the CNT-FAI’s efforts, which I imagine was part of what turned Orwell against communists later in his life.
I still contend that if the Soviet’s supported the Syndicalists as much as the Nazis supported the Nationalists, CNT-FAI would have won the war.
How big of a part was it the Soviets sabotaging the CNT-FAI? Can you point to the extent of sabotage and the main avenues through which it happened? It’s an accusation I hear thrown around a lot, but when I ask about the actual sabotage and what it consisted of and its extent, I rarely receive an answer
No I’m an American with limited knowledge of the spanish civil war, I should know more but I don’t. I read half of for whom the bells toll, by Hemingway, didn’t particularly like the book either not that much of a hemingway fan, I hate him because he hunted big game animals too.
Just everyone you heard about that fought in the Spanish Civil war for the socialists, and I think it was fairly common for idealists to come to spain to fight with them just like europeans did in the American revolution, they all seemed to have lost their idealism and became pessimistic, like Orwell.
Yeah, that’s a common sentiment by idealists facing real, material revolutions. Kropotkin and Babushka Breshko-Breshkovskaya had similar fallouts with the Bolsheviks after 1917.

Google search chatgpts work the same way dear computer guys
How many people are carrying cell phones around?
I think you will find that most “computer guys” on Lemmy do not use google or LLMs unless forced to for work.
Alexa Home Microphone. They mis-named it as a “home speaker” but actual home speakers have been around for 100+ years. They originally looked like this:

When phones were still tied to a cable, people were freer.
Your phone is probably worse. Yes, even with GrapheneOS.
Please explain?! Is GrapheneOS a honeypot in your opinion?
I think it can give a false sense of security, because all of the security and privacy feature can be individually bypassed by the user.
if you try to use it the same way as a regular android phone you end up giving all the apps the same level of control as they would in stock android eventually.
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Greese
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what the other guy said, plus, speaking entirely about a graphene phone vs a voice assistant, even the sandboxed telemetry is going to give more telemetry because you carry your phone around and use multiple apps, but a voice assistant is a static location and most people use it for music, recipes and weather, whereas more people are more likely to use their phone for banking, shopping, maps, messaging, photos and looking at adult content.
Obviously if you have a phone you’ve just turned on for the first time and you like to tell Alexa when you’re shopping for expensive jewelry every day it’d be reversed - I’m just talking generally
Edit to say: people get tunneled into “Alexa is a microphone, a phone is a computer” when they are both both those things.
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How many of you are responding to this post from your cell phone?
Has there actually been evidence of Alexa or Google homes being used for government surveillance?
Shhhh, the pitchforks are out, who needs evidence. In all reality, if you were to be wiretapped, an Alexa wouldn’t be the best option. Most people already have an internet connected microphone they carry around with them everywhere. And it has multiple cameras too, which are regularly brought into the bathroom with them.
They got caught sending info to their data banks they said they would not, and listening all the time even when they said they would not.
All of these smart devices do. If it is connected to the internet, presume it is spying and will sneak the information back.
The feds in the us buy data broker info, all of it, the cia buys and steals foreigners’ too, and distribute it to agencies all the way down to notes, not attributed to source, in the local police’s lien, law enforcement information network. Their dossiers on everyone. No warrants or judges, blessed by the supreme court for some time this is not new.
An end run around privacy laws and the bill of rights. Just like 5 eyes end runs spy agencies not being allowed to spy on their countries. They let their ally do it, lead it on paper at least, then share it with them.
All a result of being ruled by lawyers working for plutocrats.
Ring, also owned by Amazon, shares their video surveillance with Flock, which contracts with local LE agencies who share it with the feds.
0 warrants required, and ICE is actively using the data against people.
Ring doorbells now give their footage to Flock, which can give/sell it to anyone. No warrant necessary. Not exactly what you’re asking about, but along the same lines.
And police departments have absolutely bought that information, especially given their notoriously inflated budgets (at least in many cities).
An autistic teenage hacker banned from having a computer used a fire stick in a hotel room to hack Rockstar games. I think any given 14 year old war driver can hack these devices and listen to your conversations. If the government will work their butts off to install a tap on a landline, how can they not use an Alexa.
At the very least, there’s a teenager in your neighborhood listening to every damn thing you say. If you have cameras in your home, they’re watching you.
Authoritarians learned that 1984-style totalitarian control doesn’t work anymore; so they tried Brave New World’s control through psychological pleasure, and it is more successful than ever imagined.
Really it’s a mixture of both. Brave New World to keep the masses sedated, 1984 for the people who start to question the system.
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With so many methods for global communications in the average persons hands it not a wonder at all. People are not even one iota security conscious until they get tagged and by then its too late
This was so obviously a bad idea from day one, I was shocked at how widely adopted these were right away. In retrospect I shouldnt have been surprised but somehow I just always expect people to be smarter.
a person is smart. people are dumb stupid animals, and you know it!
I might need you to cite a source on people being generally smart at the individual level. Current politics feels like it disagrees with that assessment…
All you have to do is not tell any of the customers that it continually listens, by the time the ones who didn’t know find out, it’s already in their homes, they’ve already got the app installed, and they’ve said “I dreamt about something and then saw an ad for it the next day” more than once.
people are lazy and sold a solution to a problem that didn’t even exist. like standing up…









