You live on an island, see ads for kayaks and the first thing you went with was: "somebody is listening to all my conversations even though my phone battery wouldn't be able to handle a slightly long phone call"?
That's what people mean when they say there is a lot of data points that can explain things very easily without having to resort to a convoluted explanation.
> How about a pitch deck for a company [1] claiming it can offer microphone eavesdropping based ad targeting [2]? Maybe that was still aspirational though.
What companies claim they can do when they try to sell their shit product at a ridiculous price is a very different thing from what they can do.
Amazon Shopping was also supposedly a leap forward for shopping. Turns out it was just a guy watching a camera (we were told it was all automatic with state of the art object recognition tech).
Cellerite is another incredible example of this that places like reddit and HN love to suck off. They are the be all and end all until you read their actual technical papers (which companies and police forces that purchase from them do NOT do) and their very strict limitations (which they don't hide in their manuals, they just don't include any of that in their lovely powerpoints).
I hate corporations as much as the next guy (probably more than the next guy) but the argument that "it wasn't proven they were doing it which proves they were doing it" is probably the worst one you could have come up with tbh.
That case dragged on for 5 years, and ended up with them paying $95 million anyway. I think if they could have proved that they weren't doing it, they would have. Maybe I didn't say that clearly but it makes a lot of sense.
Apple spends a lot of money to keep its secrets. Paying $95 million to avoid letting people snoop in exactly how Apple systems work is a bargain, and I don't even think they're using audio for ad targeting.
Eh I don't think that is what happened here. If other companies want to know how Apple did things 5 years ago, they can just hire some ex-Apple employees. I think someone could build a competitive system with current technology for something in the ballpark of $95 million lol.
So...... the listening isn't very good? Because recommending a swimming pool simply based on the single word pool is just terrible.
Either they have the most technically impressive spying system that can't do anything right or it's just not happening and people are making connections where there isn't really any.
I’m not sure what point you’re attempting to make here, but they chose the phrase “pool fencing” and were rapidly inundated with ads for pool fencing, which, in isolation, would suggest the listening is extremely accurate.
If you believe that Microsoft is stealing Recall data behind its users' backs do you also believe Microsoft is stealing any or all of the files stored on Windows devices belonging to billions of personal and business users? If Microsoft isn't doing that could it be because that would be suicidal from a business perspective?
I don't believe they are proactively stealing user files, but they absolutely pit in backdoors for the NSA and other western intelligence agencies to exploit at will (and I'm sure non-western agencies do it too any time they can discover them).
I'm sorry but I do not fully understand what you're trying to say.
I have used Microsoft products. I have a Windows VM, and an old Windows laptop somewhere. I have no love for Microsoft, and is perfectly aware they can do user-hostile things. Yet, when analyzing something, I'm trying my best to avoid biases and remain neutral and detach from my feelings (or propaganda/ragebait/memes/whatever you call it) when I'm thinking of something. And this particular time, for this particular feature, so far, I believe they did alright.
Simple: they sure love to talk a big game about responsibilities and taking responsibilities. Until it's time to actually do it. For the good of the company of course (if the company is in such dire straits, as the most highly paid employee - and probably not the hardest working one - why don't you take a big pay cut? For the good of the company of course).
> Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?
There never is an excess amount of workers (sure, there probably are 4-5 exceptions). What happens is that they need those employees, but instead are going to demand that the employees that are left pick up the slack. Which they will because they need a roof over their head.
Those companies are merely cutting costs, they don't actually have any excess employee.
It's not black and white like this. There is such a thing as having to many employees and such a thing as having too little. I think realistically, most of the time, it's a mix.
> What nefarious purposes do you imagine the government has? Is matching suspected criminals against the crime database a nefarious purpose?
This is just strange.
Do you have no imagination whatsoever or have you never set foot in school or do you know literally nothing about history (maybe you were born yesterday and really quickly figured out how to write, I don't know)?
The government will try all sorts of immoral things, it is made up of people after all, and a significant portion of people have no or very weak morals/compassion. Tuskegee experiments, human radiation experiments, edgewood arsenal experiments, project 112, operation sea-spray….
That's what people mean when they say there is a lot of data points that can explain things very easily without having to resort to a convoluted explanation.