I wonder sometimes how they get their data. Maybe it’s mere coincidence, but I feel like I’ll be having a conversation with someone, in say, VRChat, and then suddenly like 2 hours later I get an ad about the same damn thing, without having searched anything online about it or anything. It doesn’t happen too often, maybe once a week. So I guess there’s still benefit of the doubt. But man, I’m not the only person to notice this. I’m sure you all have too. There’s no way to feel peacefully in private anymore without a good linux box and Tor.
I’d be surprised if they weren’t spying on you. Turning on your mic out of the blue might be a stretch in most cases, but I think it’s not unreasonable to assume that any and all voluntary voice data, like calls over internet chat apps that are not e2ee, voice assistant inputs, private voice messages and videos sent to other people, etc, are not only kept indefinitely but thoroughly analyzed for stuff they can use on you.
The absurd thing is how it’s all tied to one place. Maybe it’s IP, hardware ID, I wouldn’t know. It’s just absurd how they tie it all together so efficiently and so quickly.
I think browser fingerprinting is the new hotness. They like that because all it requires is JavaScript, is independent of easily hideable things like IP, and is extremely hard to combat as long as JS is enabled, which you can further ‘encourage’ by making it a shitty single-page web app that requires JS to even render.
I wonder sometimes how they get their data. Maybe it’s mere coincidence, but I feel like I’ll be having a conversation with someone, in say, VRChat, and then suddenly like 2 hours later I get an ad about the same damn thing, without having searched anything online about it or anything. It doesn’t happen too often, maybe once a week. So I guess there’s still benefit of the doubt. But man, I’m not the only person to notice this. I’m sure you all have too. There’s no way to feel peacefully in private anymore without a good linux box and Tor.
I’d be surprised if they weren’t spying on you. Turning on your mic out of the blue might be a stretch in most cases, but I think it’s not unreasonable to assume that any and all voluntary voice data, like calls over internet chat apps that are not e2ee, voice assistant inputs, private voice messages and videos sent to other people, etc, are not only kept indefinitely but thoroughly analyzed for stuff they can use on you.
The absurd thing is how it’s all tied to one place. Maybe it’s IP, hardware ID, I wouldn’t know. It’s just absurd how they tie it all together so efficiently and so quickly.
I think browser fingerprinting is the new hotness. They like that because all it requires is JavaScript, is independent of easily hideable things like IP, and is extremely hard to combat as long as JS is enabled, which you can further ‘encourage’ by making it a shitty single-page web app that requires JS to even render.