MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown

Going back for years, the “Is _____ listening to my conversations?” question has been asked with various improbable coincidences given as proof. But the answer has always been (and I think it is even scarier than the proposition) “maybe? But they don’t really need to.”

It’s not a big leap to assume you might have interest in that show if your network traffic was coming from the same IP address at the same time that Crunchyroll was playing, or even the same location at a different time; it doesn’t really matter. They’ll add it to their profile of you. Then you and your friends get together, maybe multiple times before this conversation, and your devices get associated with each other: Maybe its location data, maybe its being on a shared network, maybe its Bluetooth proximity, it could be any number of things and it doesn’t really matter which. Now if y’all are together for a while then google/facebook/amazon/whatever can reasonably infer that you talked about things (or at the very least share some interests). And what would you folks be talking about? Things that they are interested in! So then while y’all are together, and a little bit after, [Tech Company] can boost your friends search/ads/recommendations with data from your profile. It’s all just a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and the big players just have access to so much data and processing that they can play the game that well.

That was a long walk. 🦕

2+2 = 5

…for sufficiently large values of 2