Okay, look, guys. It costs a ridiculous amount of money to do speech recognition at scale reliably, and even when they do it can't reliably detect what you're saying when you speak clearly in a quiet room to your Google Home or whatever. And we can barely build a reliable barcode scanner app that doesn't need to be lined up perfectly, and barcodes are *explicitly* designed to be scanned.
Yes Facebook, Apple, etc. share data with other parties to some extent. Yes Google pays people to be the default search engine. But scraping your camera and microphone all the time to go get fed to some magic AI overlord, that's silly. And you couldn't keep it secret either, since if you could do it you'd need to basically double Google's computing power, which means someone having as many datacenters as Google and no one knows what they're for, and you just can't hide a bunch of gigantic mysterious buildings that eat power and network bandwidth like candy to secretly run the AI mastermind overlord data consume-o-matic 10000.
Plus if we had that tech we'd put it in the Google Home or something and sell it to you for a low monthly fee of $4.99 and make more money than scraping your data for ads anyway since honestly how many of us wouldn't pay for something that could just always understand us no matter what, including the context of what we're doing, and be able to answer our questions perfectly or something? Come on. It's ridiculously paranoid to decide that this tech exists while somehow being secret and also we only use it for ads and Youtube recommendations without telling you, especially when they can do the same thing by just looking at your search history.
Even if it only sends a little bit of data, people can both see and intercept it, and we'd know, unless you also want to propose that it has some sort of magic 100% effective "I have detected the person holding this device is a security researcher" tech? perhaps by doing facial recognition against a database of known security researchers? Or maybe it uses the wi-fi card to detect your brain waves to tell if you're thinking about security, perhaps? O I know, it can use the accelerometer to tell that you're nervous and the embedded black hole in every iPhone to edit the past to remove any data it might have sent an hour ago from your network logs! Yay!
But seriously, if things were as bad as this there is literally nothing you can do ever, not even uninstalling apps, not even getting rid of your phone and all your electronics because your neighbor has some, and don't forget about the weather satellites...it's ridiculous to think this. They share browser history, and app history sometimes, and sometimes your apps will share some data, but it's not just listening and watching what you do and somehow detecting things from that, because seriously that doesn't exist right now and probably won't for another 5 years, and when it does exist they're not able to do it in secret without editing the laws of physics to do it, so come on people. Critical. Thinking. Skills. And I think some of you are even programmers as well, which is extra disappointing, especially you Munawar, given that you've been programming for a long time and should understand the absurdity.
Even Chinese surveillance isn't secret, in the sense that everyone knows what exactly they do to phones and you can find documentation of it if you look around, and the reason they get away with it is they flat out let citizens know they do it and pass laws that makes it illegal to circumvent. So: even a giant government with a vested interest in having this tech and not telling anyone doesn't have this tech. And when they do have this tech (which everyone knows about) it likes to just have all sorts of false positives and ban things and stuff because doing this reliably can't be done, sorry, it just can't.
And a VPN doesn't protect you either, which if you did your homework on how the tracking that exists actually works, you'd know. It's actually done off cookies and things in the browser, not your IP address, and all a VPN does is puts one more party in the mix, except this time you explicitly gave them permission to analyze all your network traffic if they want and installed their spyware on your machine to send them a 100% accurate copy. IP addresses haven't been a reliable way to track users in years.
Yes, you're tracked, but none of it is secret and what is being proposed on this thread is well outside the realm of current technology, and since it is literally impossible to make any of this secret and keep it that way for any real length of time, you'd know about it almost immediately if it started happening anyway. So it is ridiculous, and if you stopped to analyze your thinking rather than let paranoia run away with you, you could go become educated as to why or even reason it out yourself without having to learn anything. The only remotely complicated part to understand is how SSL protects you from letting the ISP see your traffic, but even that's not that hard since anyone who has even vaguely heard the word cryptography can understand what it's for and even a little bit of how it works in 20 minutes.
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