Comment by cynicalpeace
1 year ago
I've argued ad nauseum with HN'ers that tech companies are actually listening to us, and about 95% of the time I get a response that such a thing would be a massive conspiracy theory, require too much throughput, and actually it's the search history they're keeping track of, yada yada.
Yet the technology is indeed entirely there, and while this settlement does not admit wrongdoing, it certainly doesn't detract from my point that they are actually listening to us and selling it to advertisers.
Meta got in trouble for reading private messages and using it for ad targeting a couple years ago.
> while this settlement does not admit wrongdoing
Settlements basically never admit wrongdoing, that is a big motivation to doing them. It is safe to assume that companies that are willing to settle are doing so because if they go to court they will be found guilty and the facts will be on record. To avoid that, companies pay money to make the problem go away. We should be calling these bribes, but the legal system calls them settlements.
Isn’t it also possible Apple doesn’t want other information out in discovery?
I agree, I was just anticipating "no wrongdoing" rebuttals
HN, being a gathering place of the engineers and types who actually do the work for systems like this, is heavily targetted for manipulation and influence by nation state and above actors to prevent too much truth in the narrative, which must be controlled from their perspective.
In this pursuit, consensus cracking is the most effective method based on how much it is the method used. (others are often at play, such as manual forum sliding)