In circa 2001 we were supposed to visit the website for channel 10, the broadcaster as part of an assignment. I can’t actually what assignment involved is going to this commercial broadcasters website but I think it was supposed to help learn internet research skills and they took us all up to the library so we could use their computers.

This took place in Australia. Everyone assumed the website was www.ten.com, but at the time it was www.ten.com.au. also at that time, www.ten.com was a porn site. Godamn that was funny and the librarians hurriedly telling everyone in the rows of computers not to visit that site so of course the few people who typed the correct site to begin with or found it through Google immediately went to www.ten.com to check it out because now if anyone saw them they could just claim to have gotten there via the same honest mistake as everyone else.

You don’t seem to understand, I’m not logged in here with you, you’re logged in here with me!

This along with much else that’s pointed out make the whole devices capturing audio to process keywords for ads all seem unlikely, but, one thing worth pointing out is that people do sell bad products that barely or even just plain old don’t do what they told their customers it would do. Someone could sell a listening to keywords to target ads solution to interested advertisers that just really sucks and is super shit at its job. From the device user’s standpoint it’d be a small comfort to know the device was listening to your conversations but also really sucked at it and often thought you were saying something totally different to what you said but I’d still be greatly dismayed that they were attempting, albeit poorly, to listen to my conversations.

I don’t know why, given recent impressive developments, but I’ve always met thie idea that this is really happening with heavy skepticism and I still do. This is definitely the most concrete thing I’ve ever heard and I definitely don’t doubt companies would do this, I just… I don’t know, it’s hard to believe they really are.

One reason is it just seems like they’d be absolutely overwhelmed by useless data, it’s not like AI is cheap to run, and it’d be so hard to link a conversation that’s captured to a genuine sentiment and then to an ad connecting to that person and then a purchasing decision to that ad. This is scary for sure but it feels like this is more marketing hype to marketeers than a real thing.

Will be watching closely. I feel like this might actually be that bridge too far that the mainstream of society will demand action be taken against if it gets widely adopted and widely known. Even if it technically works and is provably effective to advertisers I think you’d need Google or Amazon to be the ones pulling it off and to have done so silently so we all just kinda assume they’re doing it but don’t know. If a company “starts” offering this service in a way the public can latch on to it would likely cause a massive backlash that would hopefully scupper such plans.

I like to imagine a little escape pod coming out of the Reddit bubble and drifting in to the Lemmy dot representing my migration.

On an old coloured plastic iMac too.

I didn’t make it clear but I was referring really to all the bastards of the world, generally here, Apple included for doing this, but them and all the other bastards doing bastard things too.

Oh my god will the bastards never stop?

Why can’t I full screen it?