Facebook and other Giants

Eh. The price of being online and using other's people's playgrounds. that sounds like a lot of work. You do you.

Facebook is indeed censoring many stuff and deplatforming many people for BS reasons and "rules". Also as a malicious mega-company it sells your data and let some other companies have access to your PMs. If they cooperate and find the wrong-think faster (cuz in 2018 ideological purity is more important than making money aka get woke go broke), they can even ban people and cleanse the place much easier.

The tracking and storing of information itself was never much of a problem because the bottleneck really used to be anlysis, rather than gathering. You, as an individual would just be hidden in too big a data set, unless you really did something outstanding for legacy analysis tools to pick up on. Yes, you might get some personalized adds and things like that but in general, the algorithms were pretty crude and no one would really use the data on you for anything but few adds because, let's face it, the gain wasn't really worth the trouble.

However, this is in the process of changing ... massively. I was just at a conference last year, listening to a talk by a group that uses deep learning AI to analyze cell phone keystrokes of people, suffering from chronic depression and thus getting real time readouts on their mood. Mind you, this AI is fairly unsupervised and it simply analyses key strokes, not content, just the key strokes themselves. From that data alone, after some training time, the AI could predict peoples moods as accurately as the current gold standards of psychological evaluations.

This group is using that technology for benevolent purposes and within ethical boundaries. All participants download an app, specifically agree to sending the data and the idea is that if a drop in mood is detected, notifications can be sent through the app to the user or (theoretically and if the patient agrees) relatives/emergency contacts can be notified.

However, (and the presenter was very well aware of this and made a point out of it in their last slides), this example goes to show the enormous power of the combination of big data sets, real time information gathering and AI-assisted (or conducted) analysis. Used unethically, we are in for some pretty nasty surprises (think of china's social credits in this context for example) in the very near future, I could imagine.

...But I don't want to panic anyone.

I use Venmo, Robinhood, Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Whatsapp, Line, and Signal on my Android phone and Chrome.

I also have half dozen credit cards that I've saved on my Chrome/Google Pay and Samsung Pay. I use them everyday for purchases in brick-and-mortar stores and online purchases like Amazon, eBay, and Newegg.

I surf and download porn with my Chrome everyday while I monitor the stock prices and transfer funds between my bank accounts and my portfolios. My FICO credit score usually hovers around 820 to 850.

Ask me anything.

Nah, I just don't give a shit.

Life is too short to worry about things like that.

I use Amazon in web browsers only. Speaking of which, Vivaldi's my browser. It is based on Chrome minus the spyware and far more customizable with a better built in popup blocker.

Deactivated my Facebook recently, but not because of this. I live in Brazil, so Amazon really has no power here. The only thing I use is Google Chrome and Youtube. But as already said, they don't really collect my data to "spy on me", I'm just a little ant on their scheme.

It all roots down to one thing: as long as profit is the base of our society, this kind of shit will prosper.

And a goodie

Uh.... no.