Comment by neobrain
13 hours ago
> Google somehow got to know that I played Minecraft again after a decade. [...] I knew at that point already that probably all my PI is public information anyway
How are you jumping from Minecraft (probably one of the most watchtime-generating content types out there) being displayed on your main page to… your personal information being known to everyone?
It wasn't a jump. At that time (about a year ago), I already knew that almost all of my traditional PI is leaked (phone numbers, ID numbers, etc), so I tried to prevent to leak my thoughts further. Basically my last non-public PI. And I tried that for years. And I'm quite sure after my trials, that it's impossible without giving up the internet. My traditional PI would leak even if I don't use the internet at all, since for example one time they leaked from my employer at that time. That's a lost cause even with that sacrifice.
Your data is still out there, just compartmentalized so each outside party only has a bit. It turns out that's a losing strategy when each outside party decides to cooperate with every other and pool/share/sell that data uniquely attached to you.
Even porn ads are linked with your normal browsing
because it’s the same process of intermediaries accumulating, inferring and sharing data to each other
intermediaries that will be compromised
> because it’s the same process of intermediaries accumulating, inferring and sharing data to each other
Except that YouTube doesn't need any of that to recommend Minecraft videos to you. One mundane explanation that seems more likely is that it's the type of content that on average works best on people they don't yet have information on.
Reminds me a little of these "phones listen to everything we say, otherwise I wouldn't have been shown this ad" anecdotes that don't hold up against empiric evidence.
You saw the LG TV exposé? They do speech transcription on the TV and so have available for upload the logs for audio even when the TV is off.
Microsoft would definitely sell data on which IPs have Minecraft users, as would your DNS provider, cloudflare, or your ISP.
It could also be coincidence, though my experience is YouTube's suggestion algo is very tightly tracked to use data. (What I was fed on a guest account recently was a mix of fascist propaganda and AI nonsense masquerading as reportage.
> Reminds me a little of these "phones listen to everything we say, otherwise I wouldn't have been shown this ad" anecdotes that don't hold up against empiric evidence.
If phones weren't listening technology like audio beacons couldn't have been invented or useful (https://medium.com/@williamwais01/ultrasonic-beacons-the-sil...).
Surveillance capitalism has been so successful because it's so opaque. It would take a whistleblower for you to know when and how the data companies have is used against you, or how they got that data in the first place. Their tactics can be used in ways that are highly targeted and transient, especially for data collection companies like Google.
Even for something as basic as search results what I see when I search may not be what you see, and what I today might not be what I see when I take the same actions tomorrow.
This can make identifying what our phones are doing almost impossible. A possible explanation for the "phones listen to everything we say, otherwise I wouldn't have been shown this ad" phenomenon might be that a phone picked up an audio beacon being broadcast while something played on a TV, which sparked a related conversation in the person carrying the phone. The conversation wasn't recorded, but topic being discussed was successfully logged anyway. There are countless other data points available that could be used in the same way. In cases like that it would clearly not be coincidence that Google showed an ad when it did, but the spying involved was even more involved and invasive than just listening to what was being said.
There's nothing to stop Google from having small clusters of phones listening to everything for certain periods of time under certain circumstances. They wouldn't have to send all that audio data back to their servers to be effective, just monitor for a sample of specific words/phrases (processed on device) and send back a flag when something is overheard. That kind of behavior would be extremely hard for researchers to catch.
The truth is that we're not allowed to know how and when we're being surveilled, but we are being watched all the time, and that data is collected to be sold or used against us at every opportunity. It doesn't do any good to tell the person imprisoned in the panopticon that he's being paranoid and that it's all coincidental. Even when it happens to be, feeling watched is the natural response.
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