Comment on tech never works for long

• spongebue@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Honest question though: what of real value can a company gain by knowing that I turned my oven to 350, or that I switched my air conditioning on? Assuming app permissions match what’s needed and I’m not giving up my contacts or whatever. Or is that a more common issue than I realize?

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  • tyler@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    What time you usually cook, so the best time to show you other advertisements, or if you’re in the store once super targeted customer by customer pricing gets implemented (it’s already in place in many locations) then the price raises just for you since you turned your oven on (or will turn your oven on in a few minutes).

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    • spongebue@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      What time you usually cook, so the best time to show you other advertisements

      I guess I can grant you that they would learn that I eat dinner around dinner time, maybe a little later than most but also not abnormally so.

      or if you’re in the store once super targeted customer by customer pricing gets implemented (it’s already in place in many locations)

      I’ve seen that stores want to be able to adjust prices based on time of day or whatever, and my store has mostly switched to eink price labels so it’s a matter of time… But per person? How are they supposed to offer one price to me and another to someone reaching for the gallon of milk at the same time?

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      • tyler@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Probably not at the same time, but stores are adding cameras everywhere. Target has tracked customers using phone signals for over a decade now. I can’t imagine the legal minefield this will be but I’m just saying those are possibilities.

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  • kboos1@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I could also get more info from your habits and you home type and quality from the thermostat. All at your convenience. I didn’t have to ask for permission to any private information. Just by the oven app alone I would have clues about your personal life-

    I would now know about how far you are from home

    That you are not home

    That there’s no one home or that you don’t trust the people you live with to start the oven

    How much you spend on utilities

    What’s the average temperature you cook food at

    How long you cook

    How often you cook

    Which part of the oven/stove you use most often

    Where your home is located

    How often you entertain

    Where’s your favorite grocery store

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    • zikzak025@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Not to mention the companion app itself is scraping telemetry data:

      • What phone you use

      • What network it’s connected to

      • What times you use your phone

      • Approximate location

      • A list of other apps you have installed

      And that’s all before we get into the nitty gritty of how the user actually engages with the app content, or other device permissions the app might request. Maybe “Location” for recommending preheat times based on distance, maybe “Camera” to check doneness, maybe “Nearby devices” to pair with first-party accessories, or maybe “Photos and video” for some shoehorned social media component.

      They can ask for any permission for ostensibly innocuous/justified reasons, but once those permissions are granted, they have full access to that data to do whatever else they want with it. They’ll know who you are, where you are, when you’re there, what you’re doing there, and who else you’re with.

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  • musicjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Would you be comfortable if there were cameras set up in your house feeding to an unknown entity somewhere higher up the economic food chain whose mission is to find ways to extort you for money? Privacy used to be something many people wanted purely for the sake of privacy without any ulterior motive

    To me, it’s rather surprising that people don’t just have an instinctual desire to maintain a degree of privacy in their lives. I dont really want people watching and tracking how often I use my air fryer what times I go grocery shopping etc as it literally feels like I’m being spied on. It’s not about having something to hide it’s about protecting something that’s core to the American identity and has been for centuries. Plus these companies are notorious for data breaches and running psychological experiments on people based on personal data collected on them. I’d rather not be a lab rat for some reptilian tech billionaire and I’ll just preheat my oven manually

    You can’t think about what this information does right now to your eye. You have to remember that this data is someday going to be completely categorized via AI and same as we couldn’t predict life post-internet, there’s no telling how problematic it might be to your life to have a more robust profile of your personal information than a more private person once AI has fully taken over society. Your life patterns likely tell a lot more about you as a person than you realize which means they are getting way more from you than merely the temperature of your thermostat. Humans are way more patterned in their behavior than our grade school teachers telling us we are unique and special might lead us to believe

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    • spongebue@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Well, I’m not talking about cameras. I’m asking about my oven not because I think I shouldn’t care about it, but because I genuinely want to know why I should. Like, I can’t imagine some algorithm is saying “guys, this guy set his oven to 350 an hour before dinner, we got him!”

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      • musicjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Yeah like I explained, you can’t comprehend the degree of how much of your personal life is exposed by data points deemed trivial. The data collectors believe in the value of your privacy as a marketable commodity so to me that’s enough reason. If Palantir thinks harvesting data on how and when I cook can provide them with even more valuable private information then that’s probably the case

        For all you know, people who use lemmy and preheat their oven to 350 on tuesdays and listen to XYZ music fall into a category of humans that allows them to also know your romance life and how to best target you in vulnerable areas of your life in ways you don’t immediately identify

        The reason to value your privacy isn’t “what is the first order effect of giving this information”. Privacy should be valued because you can’t ever get it back and can’t know the future so why bother giving up something that tech companies spend billions gathering from you just to save a 10sec walk to the kitchen. It’s never been about having things to hide or the mundane of what time you turn on your lights

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  • Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The app on your phone is likely data mining you

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• HidingUnderHats@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Agreed

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