Comment by xg15
1 year ago
The post's arguments can basically be summed up in three categories:
1) "Doing this wouldn't be technically feasible or would require a technical effort wildly out of proportion"
2) "There are lots of psychological biases that lead people to believe something like this happened even if it didn't actually happen"
3) "Apple is such a nice and honest company, they would never do such a thing..."
As for 1), there is enough technical discussion in this thread to disprove that point. But just as a reminder: Google build an always-on song recognition service into android, free of charge, without any obvious monetization, just because they can. OpenAI released Whisper last year as open source, a highly precise audio transcription model. By now lots of variants for on-device use exist.
All that tech doesn't just exist, it's not even seen as a moat. It's already being commodified.
As for 2), yes of course cognitive biases are always a thing. The problem is that you cannot use them to disprove something. They constitute an absence of evidence, not evidence of absence.
As for 3), yeah no comment here. Except maybe, remember Snowden. "No one would do such a thing" has already been spectacularly wrong in the past.
Did that tech exist prior to 2017 when this conspiracy theory was already widely circulating?
I honestly couldn't care less if that tech existed back then or not, I care about what's possible today.
Between 2017 and today, there were massive changes, both in technological development but also in mindset: Surveillance capitalism became much more normalized and generally accepted as a standard part of business.
So if you argue that it was a baseless conspiracy theory back then, therefore it automatically must still be a baseless conspiracy theory today, that argument is flawed.
It's true that it is worth considering that things are possible now that were not possible 7 years ago.
The reason I keep on bringing up 2017 is that it helps demonstrate the psychological angle here. People are absolutely convinced this is happening today. Many of those people were equally convinced back when this was clearly impossible, convinced based on the exact same reasoning (their own personal anecdotal experiences).
So the 2017 thing helps illustrate the lack of credibility of those personal anecdotes, independently of the issue of how possible this might be today compared with the past.