Technological advances and the loss of privacy

Big Data = Cognitive Capitalism

  On 9/29/2019 at 7:05 AM, prdctvsm said:

Big Data = Cognitive Capitalism

Psychology modelling to target ads and content at people = mind control, trying to control their finger to click the ad

It's quite literally that way

Even more frightening in context of BCI 

yeah, completely correct, BCI is a nightmare really.  never will I ever take part in such a thing, and I think it's everyone's duty to start moving towards more ethical forms of technologies, from social technology to medical technologies.  Why are we letting Elon Musk build Neuralink when we know that this is a topic that requires the utmost care, regulation, and longterm ethical analysis?  It's just capitalism putting core aspects of humanity's future into the hands of people who are merely rich enough to hire others.  It's very strange.

  On 9/28/2019 at 11:34 AM, Candiru said:

Foreign spies are watching you poop through your phone. Act accordingly. 

This definitely doesn't get enough coverage

  On 9/28/2019 at 4:52 AM, ambergonk said:

It's probably a capitalism thing. Pretty sure companies are tracking us via our phones to find out what our actual interests are and adapt their marketing accordingly. Not as much of a 1984 thing I reckon, unless you live in mainland China.

lol

  On 9/29/2019 at 4:20 AM, luke viia said:

the thing that really creeps me out is when i get ads for things I've never looked up, but that have come up in conversation. as an example, one of my old neighbors came over one night, drunk, talking about his plans to go to a police auction the next day. i chatted with him, feigning interest, then he left. the next day an article in my google news feed appeared, regarding an upcoming local police auction. fuck. off. 

Sometimes I can't tell if I'm just being paranoid or what, but something like this happened to me today and I think it's really fucking creepy.

Earlier today I had lunch with my boss and I mentioned in passing how I would suck at doing sales, since I don't like getting up in front of people and doing presentations, public speaking, etc. I didn't have my personal phone with me, but had my work phone (iphone) in my pocket, which the account is synced with my work apple profile and work email. Later this afternoon, I had a conversation on my personal phone (iphone was sitting on the desk) with a friend about taking CBD to reduce anxiety. Then about an hour ago, I get an email sent to my work email that is some stupid spam junk email about improving public speaking skills and reducing anxiety....how the fuck does that happen?

stumbled upon a really good article about this phenomena for the technically inclined.  In summary, the nature of attempts to scale computing is that they inevitably centralize into mainframes consisting of many connected nodes owned by organizations who eventually become rent-seekers atop both their computing power, and your data, and that offline computing on individual nodes will always be a niche use-case that might even tend to face the brundt of both state and corporate backlash when practitioners and advocates make a fuss, because only nerdy fucks do it

http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Eternal_Mainframe.html

  Quote

In the computer industry, the Wheel of Reincarnation is a pattern whereby specialized hardware gets spun out from the “main” system, becomes more powerful, then gets folded back into the main system. As the linked Jargon File entry points out, several generations of this effect have been observed in graphics and floating-point coprocessors.

In this essay, I note an analogous pattern taking place, not in peripherals of a computing platform, but in the most basic kinds of “computing platform.” And this pattern is being driven as much by the desire for “freedom” as by any technical consideration.

  On 10/4/2019 at 2:40 AM, zero said:

Sometimes I can't tell if I'm just being paranoid or what, but something like this happened to me today and I think it's really fucking creepy.

Earlier today I had lunch with my boss and I mentioned in passing how I would suck at doing sales, since I don't like getting up in front of people and doing presentations, public speaking, etc. I didn't have my personal phone with me, but had my work phone (iphone) in my pocket, which the account is synced with my work apple profile and work email. Later this afternoon, I had a conversation on my personal phone (iphone was sitting on the desk) with a friend about taking CBD to reduce anxiety. Then about an hour ago, I get an email sent to my work email that is some stupid spam junk email about improving public speaking skills and reducing anxiety....how the fuck does that happen?

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of all silicon valley companies i worry least about apple, btw. they make money be selling products the old fashioned way. not by selling ads like google and facebook (twitter, etc). google and facebook are literally in the business of making money with clicks. google less so than facebook (and other social media platforms). social media platforms literally make money with activity on their platforms. by selling data, or simply by ads. if you don't see many ads, you can be certain it's the data. apple sells phones, computers, software, watches, and whatnot. if they use user-data, it's to make their software work better (siri, maps).

also, that was your boss spamming you  (public speaking and anxiety go hand in hand, so i'm not too surprised the spammers connect the dots on that one)

  On 9/27/2019 at 11:48 PM, J3FF3R00 said:

I don’t know if there’s a thread about this already, but lately I’ve been feeling helplessly suffocated by how it seems almost everything in daily life has been modified to take advantage of you or study you or market stuff to you with the use of profiling and algorithms. 

Every device or application that you buy or use somehow finds a way to either listen in on you or collect your personal information in ways that are anything but apparent. 

I’ve deactivated my Facebook account, I hardly use any other social media app, I’ve restricted all of my apps on my phone to the best of my knowledge from accessing my microphone and I limit (to the best of my abilities) how my phone tracks me and shares my information, but my guess is that, as long as I have a phone / use a debit card / use email accounts / etc, I’m unable to prevent multiple companies from using and exploiting my personal info without my direct permission. 

I guess this is now just the way of the world, but it really bothers me. I’m not sure if it bothers me more because I’m a “Gen X/Y-er” and have memories of life prior to the Internet/cellphones/etc but I know I’m not alone. 

Anyway, I’m hoping that some of y’all share this frustration and we can use this thread as a way to not only vent these frustrations but share tips and tricks on how to best prevent this kind of thing from completely taking over our lives. 

 

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i shared similar frustrations here

  On 9/28/2019 at 6:55 AM, xxx said:

Probably shouldn't even put this out there but the Ted Kaczynski's manifesto pretty much nailed it on technology. So many innovations begin as something of convenience that should serve us but it seems to inevitably result in the reverse: we serve the technology. He was a dumbass for blowing up innocent people like computer store clerks but I have not been able to shake a lot of things he was talking about well before the mobile/web revolution even got started.

+1

one thing kaczynski concluded is that people are so indoctrinated to technology that they are unable to relate to a lifestyle without it, and the more people depend on technology, the more they cannot relate to the natural world. in the end, technology becomes man's natural habitat, and we end up depending on it more than nature. 

the one thing i've always disliked about kaczynski however was his complete detachment to humanity and his smug (and very arrogant) view of others- which is why he got fired by his brother after aggressively hitting on a co-worker even after she rejected him. 

'the one thing i've always disliked about kaczynski'

doesn't mention killing people

hm.