It’s hit or miss for me with my VPN, but between using an Invidious instance, Freetube, DDG video search, and cycling VPN locations, I’m never, ever logged in to YT.
And yes, Google/YT wants to track everything. Third party doctrine means that governments will pay them for this data rather than run their own surveillance systems. Anything that you’ve watched that can be used against you will be if it suits someone else.
AAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh, ok, say no more. Samsung used to be much easier to work around and they’re really joining the “lock it down!” club lately.
I used to run trainings on personal cybersecurity and explaining to people how much their data is worth. I’ve been paid to study this.
So, specific data about what you’re worth to a company is proprietary. I can’t find a link to a PWC or McKinsey report, but IoT device data typically sells for a range that’s an estimate of cost per user per year. On the upper end, I’ve seen estimates of up to $50 per user per year. Low end is $1. So if the assumed lifetime of the TV is 4 years and a “household” is 2 adults and 2 kids, you end up at ($50x2 and $25 x 2)= $150 x 4 years = $600. So if Samsung sudsidizes the cost of a smart TV by $400, they’re coming out ahead $200 on average, just on the subsidy. That’s the kind of math going on for TV sales. Again, that’s proprietary data, so short of trying to track down reports I saw years ago, all I can explain is that data monetization is a well-known cornerstone of business. Here’s a quote for you about companies needing to know the value:
The exact same dataset, when sold to a financial services company, was being used to make multimillion-dollar decisions, so the data aggregator could charge $100,000. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/what-data-wrapping-and-how-does-it-make-products-better
That’s for companies operating legally and in the clear. What’s crazy is that our data is treated sort of like student loan debt with them, because it’s seen by them as debt we owe to the company and paid back over the life of the device. For criminals, it’s pennies-on-the-dollar fire sales because nothing is guaranteed to work. So the data needed to steal your identity as a single line on a spreadsheet might only be $20 a person because the list of 10,000 records might only contain 200 winners. So you buy a $200,000 spreadsheet and hope to commit at least $1,000 per successful hit to come out ahead. which is a fairly low bar for fraud. Then the whole list is burned and you start over.
You may want to re-evaluate how you’re installing non-Play apps. I use F-droid all the time and never had anything even approach “inconvenient.”
Oh my sweet summer child. The privacy community is all over this and any economics course will explain how we got here.
Anyone making equipment needs to come in just below competitors in terms of price. How? By using telemetry and data collection to sell for advertising. This is seen as a subsidy to make the equipment more competitive to get it in more homes for long-term rent-seeking for income lasting years from every user. Same as with any smart appliance. The TV, connected to the internet, monitors what you watch even when you’ve connected by HDMI.
Can you just not connect the TV? Absolutely, yes. That’s how low the bar is, that simply not giving the TV a connection and using 1 extra device in between is all it takes to come out ahead. That’s a gamble worth it to Samsung. I have a Samsung TV, and that’s all I need to do to come out ahead. But many, many people think the TV needs to do it all and just give it a data connection.
The cost of that TV is heavily subsidized on the expectation that you connect it to the internet and it feeds Samsung data on you.
This is the key point - these have to be clear signals in the same room.
It’s really more like the Android apocalypse is looming. We have 11 months and some change before android phones get locked down like Apple.
But…I came here just for the gloating fediverse content.
What else could there be?
They also stopped support that allowed for easier development of custom ROMs a couple weeks back. So it’s not good news for custom ROMs. Either someone needs to form Android for good, or Linux phones are our next best bet.
Back in 2019 when the leadership changed, they moved to be 100% about advertising, which is why Google started going browser fingerprint tracking. Invasive is the name of the game. Within 6 months of that, they’re also locking down their entire ecosystem like Apples does, specifically to squeeze more data out for advertising. This isn’t an action taken in a vacuum.
“Look, guys, I vibecoded a wall!”
Sorry, I mean just for the UK, US, and apparently China also.
Fortunately, the EU isn’t going down the same path, and has Estonia, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands as guides. And to just do this in the right order and do step 1: sensible digital ID system.
So this whole list is actually
ChatGPT
How to ask ChatGPT how to:
Coding
Computer Science …
At some point they get large enough that the whims of users cease to affect their decision-making. If Google, Meta, and MS tomorrow rolled out a social credit system that made the Chinese version look generous, 95+% of their users would not change a THING to avoid it. Maybe 98% of their users.
Users are the commodity to be traded. They have what they see as a business model that’s too big to fail. And the users agree!
It bothers me so much that a ZKP system is entirely possible, and no one will just do the first step of setting that up.
I think we should be able to have a national class action against DOGE. 100% serious, all US citizens for sure, and anyone else with data in the Social Security database, should sue the individuals responsible for this.
Then we take the money and start a company that contracts out to the government to create a national digital ID system that is the most secure in the world, and allows for amazing anonymity.
Came here to say “Wait, aren’t we on like Dance Dance Revolution 20?” DDR4 had some bangers, but shouldn’t affect the solar industry.