>And nevermind the conspiratorial thinking required to believe whole teams of engineers are developing and maintaining this capability across several giant companies, but nobody ever puts it on a resume. Apparently the thousands of people working on this are all personally committed to complete secrecy, forever. Uh-uh.

Bro it doesn't matter how much evidence you provide people with that this IS happening. They usually won't accept it. If they do accept it, half the time they shrug it off with "I've got nothing to hide anyway" kind of cope.

I seriously think I'm arguing with employees of these companies on HN because all you people do is deny everything and smear people who talk about this stuff. I hate to break it to you, but conspiracies are real. Noticing that people are conspiring to do things that nobody likes is not unreasonable in any way.

I spent a long time running an adtech program. The biggest secret is how basic most advertising systems really are.

Just because most adtech is the equivalent of Internet billboards on the side of the highway doesn't mean these systems aren't in place. You don't even need a very complex system when the entire device platform is designed to spy on you.

Take a look at this for example: https://www.theverge.com/23293687/amazon-irobot-acquisition-...

Even simple ad systems are a huge privacy threat. Add to that audio, location, and even AI screen reading surveillance, and you're screwed.

Both things can be true. Companies vacuum up massive amounts of personal data. And then they run it through crummy algorithms that are designed to increase the number of people who fit into a given category instead of accurately finding only the people who really ought to be in that category.

I agree with most of this, but have to take note that

>thousands of people working on this all personally committed to complete secrecy

Basically describes a LOT of government spying programs or horrific abuses that have happened, for instance.

Secrets can absolutely be held, and I wouldn't be surprised by even thousands of NDA'd engineers (who already have been doing this sort of thing for a loooong time) opting not to leak anything in a way that would be credible.

I'll reiterate that I'm skeptical of the overall conspiracy claims even though I usually believe in mass spying claims or institutions/corps/etc. being awful. I just think your argument there is pretty flawed, at least that aspect of it.

In fact, on why I'm skeptical: I just can't shake this profound sense that it's like the "Frequency Illusion" phenomenon that I've demonstrated to people while driving or walking outside.

Or more likely a mix of it with people also getting prompted with what they "want" in the first place by all the advertising and targeted media and their various search history data.

The traffic would obviously be encrypted. Obviously.

So modify the application binary to swap out the certificate in order to spy on the traffic. Difficult, but not impossible.

You're just saying words.