* a product manager decides to include ads in some digital product. Their analytics show plenty of "engagement". The engagement is actually people accidentally clicking on the ad while hunting for the tiny "close" button, but even if the PM suspects it, they have no reason to volunteer that information. They keep getting their salary paid and even earn a promotion based on the engagement numbers.

* the developers are tasked with implementing the advertising infrastructure - they get paid while padding their resume about how they're building "scalable" systems.

* the "scalable" system runs on a cloud provider and earns them a ton of money. Cloud provider is happy.

* some marketing agency is given a budget to go and spend on ads. The person there maybe even knows that advertising in the aforementioned product is a bad idea because most of their clicks are fake... but if their client is tasking them with burning money, why would they refuse?

* a marketing person at a big company that doesn't actually need any more advertising to succeed is given a budget and spreads it across a few marketing agencies including the aforementioned one. They get paid, why should they refuse?

At every layer (and I haven't even listed them all), people get paid by skimming something off the top. It doesn't matter whether the advertising works, because nobody in the chain has any incentive to admit it while the status quo is so lucrative, so the rational thing to do for everyone is to not rock the boat.

By a percentage every year.

Compounding.

This was always an obvious outcome.

What the outcome actually happening is indicative of however is that consumers are very very very bad at their job (consuming the best products) and do not have enough rights.

If a customer was entitled to a working product without this kind of deficiency, and we had courts that actually applied punishments to large corporations (instead of unilaterally and without justification, significantly reducing fines to nothing) we wouldn't have this problem. It wouldn't be possible to profit off of this kind of advertising because you would be too busy signing court documents about how you suck at building stuff.

There's only so many human beings who can buy your fridge. There's only so cheap you can build your fridge. There's only so much you can charge for your fridge. But line must go up.

This is simply what it looks like when the people with money and resources decide that a stable and reliable profit is a Failed business.

If it was legal to kill for money they would do that too. In some ways that already occurs.

If your next question is "why do they need to keep making more money?", the answer is capitalism.

There's no way that this was ever /not/ going to happen under current laws (US).

Attention is the ultimate resource.

An executive can point to a profit stream and suggest that’s beneficial to the company while ignoring externalities that cost the company 5x as much. Nobody inside has complete knowledge if someone was a good idea or not so the appearance of benefit often replaces the search for actual benefit.

The execs will receive their bonuses in two years and then move to the next company to grift again, and again, until they retire.

HN loves them as the majority work or want to work for advertising firms.

* number of adults in the house hold (people who have access to the account)

* when you are home

* opening fridge/doing laundry/etc. I have no idea if their app has an excuse to ask for location- but app location tracking would be the most valuable data

* even if you don’t share location- these things are on your network and any regular and simple network scanning would show when certain devices are home and we they are not home and what schedules they follow

This isn’t even very imaginative, just the basics really. I would not be surprised if you could guess the household size solely based on the number of times a fridge is opened in a day. You could at least determine between a person without a family vs. family- that’s useful for ads. Are these the fridges that have cameras in them ‘so you can see what you have while at the grocery store’? Throw some image detection in there and you now know brand targeting and if they cook regularly or eat out. A goldmine of data really.

But that was a hard no for me. I just left all of that alone - we have a ISP set-top box that comes with FTTH tv and few services so I don't need to log in anywhere else.

Mother has a hearing aid and she wanted to try Bluetooth connection - devices paired without mobile app but she couldn't lower volume down on tv nor on her device, even with aid's own app.

It still wasn't as bad as expected. I read some of the experiences people had where they couldn't even get into the home screen of tv before agreeing for network connection or login to some cloud services.

Fiends got some 4k Samsung for their new house - it comes with some AI features because of course it does. They said that they couldn't easily find picture controls and every show was automatically adjusted on brightness, saturation etc., making anything pain to watch.

They also got washing machine/dryer combo from Samsung as well - weeks after someone posted on our discord server video from Polish store where bunch of guys "hacked" similar smart-enabled machine and launched... youtube with that dancing "6 grams" cow clip. What a time to be alive.