Posted by bilsbie 2 days ago
The government already knows everything about us, and I mean everything. It is extremely naive to think they don't or that you are safe behind a VPN.
That’s minimal defense, but it’s worth remembering the difference between what it in theory knows and what its actually paying attention to.
In all these operations, anonymity is what drives it.
I was born and raised in the anonymous internet, and tasted its freedoms. I oppose censorship. But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do. At least to any action that feeds an algorithm or creates something someone else can see.
It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship -- and maybe anonymity should belong to the hackers and tinkers with the will and drive to hunt and craft for it.
I do not like holding this opinion, because it feels as though it is on the similar boat as that of those who 'pull up the ladder after themselves'. Increasingly, I see it as pulling shut the trapdoors to hell.
what do people think the billions of billions of pattern matching used in ads will be used for?
people think 'anonymous' credentialing will work here?
they've captured scroll patterns, typing patterns, language patterns, all sorts of fingerprinting.
the game unfortunately is basically already over.
Even at home I still get ads for music festivals, shoes and toothpaste, none of which are withing a thousand yards of my personal preference. The times I saw an ad for mechanical keyboards, interesting APIs, IDEs etc I can count on literally one hand and that's being online for decades.
iPhones' builtin autocomplete, Netflix and Spotify's recommendations all have robbed me of the illusion that smart people are actually working on this problem. If they are, it ain't working. The money printer works but not because of clever tech. YT's ad tech basically boils down to a geolocation of IP and I sometimes even question that.