Camdat [none/use name]

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: November 14th, 2021

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  • For example in my podunk town we got something called a "makerspace". On the surface level it seems harmless enough but I can't help but not like it, perhaps of what it represents?

    A place that allows people to share expensive resources for their collective good? An environment for people to learn without investing hundreds into equipment? How is that a bad thing lol







  • I think people greatly underestimate (or misunderstand) the pervasiveness of ad tracking pixels.

    Basically any website that has ads or tries to sell you something has a tracking pixel. These pixels create profiles of devices and track almost everything you do while interacting with those sites.

    These pixels don't require any actual "information" about you, they're only interested in what you (via the device you're browsing on) will buy. They also don't use cookies anymore, it's usually a combination of user agent, IP address, and coarse location. As you said, companies will generally share these profiles.


  • This is maybe my biggest pet peeve. These companies are not listening to you in any meaningful way.

    You can trivially confirm this by hooking up your home network to Wireshark and filtering packets.

    Other reasons:

    1. They can get all of this information elsewhere: searches, ad pixels, location capturing etc.
    2. Processing audio data is basically impossible on-device in a useful way, and the network infrastructure to support mass transcriptions on the cloud would be on the order of billions.
    3. It would be a massive endeavor to cover up the millions of hours of audio data that would need to be analyzed by the lowest paid and most unhappy workers in the industry (content labelers and moderators)

    Now I'm sure this is some marketers wet dream, but the logistical and PR nightmare this would create dissuades all but the dumbest ad agencies. This is mostly just terrible tech journalism.