Privacy Tech - an article about ad data aggregation

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To continue the ongoing discussions about privacy and data collection here is an interesting article about what is happening behind the scenes..

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As someone who has only read the headline and bi-line... this is a perfect example of why monopolies and duopolies can be good, they put systems like this to work without any real benefit... :grin:

In Aus if you have "normal" teeth there is essentially one brand marketing multiple products, or if you have sensitive teeth, there is another brand...

So does this mean we all need to be mentioning Hubitat around the phones and speakers of our friends and family....?

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Interesting, thanks for sharing.

I thought the quotes from the guy at NordVPN weren’t very helpful though. Is it just me, or did he essentially validate the unproven claim that Alexa is listening at all times (true enough, unless the mute button on an echo is pushed) and using that data to serve personalized ads (not proven, AFAIK)?

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Sounds like it doesn't it? :thinking:

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Also I'm not sure why I should care that 43% of respondents in a consumer reports survey believe their phones are listening to them.

Shall we take a look for some other surveys that demonstrate a significant %age of the American public believes things that are demonstrably untrue?

It shouldn't take long to find a few.

Edit: he's probably more interested in selling NordVPN subscriptions than anything else.

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Good thing we have wireguard! :slightly_smiling_face:

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To be fair, that is making similar assumptions about the writer to those assumptions made about the "speaker" in any tapped conversations. That doesn't "excuse" having tapped any private conversations...

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:rofl: :+1:

Fair enough. I think anyone that represents a for-profit company should be assumed to be looking out for the financial interests of that company in any discussion, but that certainly doesn't mean they're all being deliberately deceitful or ignoring all other considerations either.

Edit: in this guy's case, I think he cited a kinda useless statistic, and then conflated one real privacy issue with another that may or may not even exist. So I'm not that impressed with what he has to say overall...

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That is true, the assumption is not entirely comparable... And I can't comment too accurately, given I haven't read the article...

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