If they were tracking what I was buying from the company I wouldn’t give a rats ass, in fact I’m quite sure that information is readily available to them.
I’m not a privacy nut, I’m usually poking fun at privacy first people, but I don’t put any app on my phone that I didn’t pay for, or that doesn’t have code I can’t understand (I can’t understand code at all, but there’s a “flashlight widget 'app '” that’s like 50 lines long.
To many people, not putting an app that you cant see the code of is being a privacy nut.
I worked at a place that used customer phone numbers for internal market research in a less-scummy way.
For instance, if the same customers (tracked by their phone number) purchased lots of X and Z, but not Y, we’d market X and Z together.
I’m the kind of guy who’d let McDonalds read my emails if it gave me a free burger. The only one I don’t want in my private space is my guvermint.
edit: damn, illegal to make jokes about privacy huh
You realize they don’t just read the data they collect right? They make money by selling that data. They sell it to anyone who pays them, even your guvermint.
My comment is a joke. This community isn’t about serious discussion.
FREE, BURGER
Not as farfetched as you might think. I literally have to watch what I say and where I go that might be playing a loud enough audio program, because all of it gets me relevant advertisements almost word for word on the subjects my phone has been in the vicinity of. Has happened way too often to be coincidence.
The funny thing is that the industry seems to float an even worse explanation than them actively listening: they already know what you’re going to be interested in based on usage patterns, and can figure out that you’ll be talking about those things approximately when you’re doing so. As such they show ads.
Not entirely true for me simply because of media saturation. For instance there is more sports programming on air and online of which I have no interest in yet the news aggregators that I read often are flooded with the stuff despite my consistent attempts at removing it from my feeds
Yeah I’m not saying that their explanation is entirely truthful. Just that it’s really fucking weird how they seem to believe that explanation to be less dystopian.
