Techbros really went full police state just to deliver ads I wouldn’t click on straight into my adblocker
You’d be surprised how many people raw dog the internet.
Even people you’d really expect to use adblockers. A good example is right here on Lemmy, people here are generally pretty tech-savvy yet you get threads with lots of people complaining about ads. This has been a weird lesson as I get older, seeing that most people somehow don’t even think about lifting a finger to fix things they see as problems, they really just complain and then do absolutely nothing to help themselves. It’s the same with if someone mentions something they don’t know what it is, instead of taking 5 seconds to just look it up they comment to ask about it and then never reply to people answering their question. I’m certain that it’s very common to have some weird need to make others do work for you, they don’t actually care about finding out what something is or how to do something to fix a problem, they just care about making others spend any kind of effort for them.
They’re called help vampires in the programming world.
if someone is like, half of the described vampire i don’t mind. Honestly it feels strange to have our ancient way of finding things out (asking your friends if they know) be somehow seen as wrong nowadays. I want to learn from other human being, not disembodied pieces of information oftentimes tied to ads for driver updating software
I encountered a user a week or two ago who was confused by the inaccurate output of an LLM, didn’t/couldn’t understand that it’s more or less just fancy autocomplete, who then tried to interact with the post replies as if the users were also an LLM. I had a great time calling that out. It was kinda hilarious, tbh.
Dude. Paragraphs.
I work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Even software engineers and UX designers using the internet that way. Talented ones. Many of them - maybe the majority. It takes me a second to get over my astonishment when they share their screens. Not only astonishment at how overboard ads have gotten w/o an adblocker, but also that this particular person doesn’t use an adblocker.
So many people aren’t well-informed about what ad networks or doing, or how different the web experience could be.
I have a friend that pays Google a YouTube tax every month… He tells me he wants to support the creators.
I’m just kind of sad for him… I tried to explain direct donations were a million times more effective, but he clearly just doesn’t want to learn how to use an adblocker.
This guy is like 30 years old.
It’s about to be a lot more with the chrome manifest update. I got my dad into chrome some 15 years ago and explaining why he should switch to Firefox is completely confusing for him. He thinks his own business listing on Google won’t work if he’s not using Chrome.
I’ve had people that refuse to use an adblocker because “the creators deserve to get paid”. Well, your funeral if you get malvertising…
They really need to name-and-shame beyond “Facebook Partner” considering we’re talking about fucking Cox Media Group.
Fuckers got my entire complex’s Internet shut down (I am a renter not the owner)
Dildos, lots of dildos! I’m just gonna repeat that while I’m driving to see if I start getting Google ads for dildos.
Keep us updated!
Hold on, I just tripped on another goddamn dildo, you don’t wanna know where I fell.
I tried that. Didn’t work. There may be some filters so they don’t serve inappropriate ads to people with families or some such.
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Wouldn’t want to be mean to Facebook users, but the vast majority of them probably has micophone access enabled for Messenger at least, if not Facebook.
At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:
The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:
The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.
The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.
Yeah it’s great, same thing on the Google Pixel. The mic/camera thing brings peace of mind
I know you mean well, but you are making assumptions that the software is not lying to you. You can’t trust a UI element.
Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.
Ever use voice in messenger? If so FB has the permissions it needs to open your mic.
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What’s the last “bombshell scandal that would ruin a company” that actually ruined a company?
Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.
Slice like… the pizza website?
That’s what I assumed too but it appears to be a package tracking website
I am so numb to outrage that this just seems… Meh. What happened to me.
It’s the world we live in. It’s very much intentionally designed to make you complacent.
Normative nihilism is going to get us all.
This is such a strange reality to live in. All of the futuristic, dystopian fiction I have consumed has the same premise that people living in the dystopia know it and know it’s bad. Somehow reality is worse.
This is why I don’t like the push of everything needing an app. I sure do wish people in congress cared about this type of privacy issues the way they did Tiktok.
It remains funny to me that futurism.com became mostly about covering the dystopia we live in.
The future is going to be amazing! Well, it has the potential to be amazing if we use tech the right way. No I mean, like in an ethical way. Without exploiting people. No not like that, in a way that helps people. Well yes, billionaires are people, but I meant… at least it should be in legal ways. Or at least policed. Not hostile to average people. Not an openly criminal endeavour. Maybe just dont criminalise resistance to it? … oh, actually the future is going to be a techno-monopolistic dark age, I see. We can pivot to covering that.
Yeah that’s a shame, electronics seems to have reached a level where most people just don’t need or dream of a better something (PC, phone, etc) and other tech is hard to grasp like biotech.
Not, like, “haha” funny…
These companies absolutely do use your microphone to listen.
My wife and I have tested this and you can too.
Have a conversation near your phones about purchasing something offbeat. We used a kitchen garbage disposal in our test. Talk about them for a few minutes, about needing to buy one, different brands, etc.
Almost immediately you’ll be served garbage disposal adds.
I’ve tested this many times and never saw it happen.
There were whole threads of people saying this stuff doesn’t happen. They would say it just didn’t make sense that companies would do this, it’s not worth it to them. That all the ads I was seeing at convenient times were just a coincidence.
I have my camera and microphone deactivated on the OS level because Youtube and Spotify would show me things workmates mentioned way too often.
I didn’t notice it since.
Could still be a major coincidence though, the biggest of them.
And they are right. This company is full of shit. Show me any proof the tech from the deleted advert actually existed.
The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?
A market agency claiming they do something of the sort isn’t proof that conversations are being monitored en masse. Security researchers can and probably have tested for this and found no clear, verifiable evidence, otherwise we would have known. Also, this stuff can be blocked at the OS level and I find it hard to imagine (esp. without solid proof) that Google or Apple would jeopardize their reputations to this extent by enabling such unauthorized listening in on users’ conversations.
Of course it’s good to keep watching this space but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
goes close to a smartphone “BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY! BLOODY MARY!” gets advertisements from local pubs and restaurants serving Bloody Mary at a discount
I am not against this.
Android only solution, I think. Admittedly I don’t know I iPhone very well.
Anecdotally, it’s not even a solution. I’ve run into “coincidental” ads without having the FB app installed (visiting FB via browser).
At this point it doesn’t even matter if it’s real or not, after Snowden no sane person believes big tech since they were all in on PRISM.
Isn’t this an old article?
