This article is not a real article. Its a covert form of advertising called native advertising.
In this case its a native ad for the VPNs associated with PCMag.
Does lemmy have a system where we can tag crap like this as an ad?
Yes, downvote.
A lot of servers disable downvotes so actually that’s not a good solution
Anyone wants to take one for the team and spoil the article? I don’t click on clickbait article. I’m curious but fuck this practice.
Your phone doesn’t listen to you, but it builds a fingerprint and uses that fingerprint to serve ads.
It also serves ads for things based on who you’ve been around recently. The example given was the guy’s wife asked for a power drill for her birthday, and then the guy started seeing power drill ads.
This wasn’t because of the conversation, but because his wife had looked up power drills and opened herself up to ads about them. Because the husband had been around the wife, the ad algorithms thought he might be into the same sort of things she is, and so they started serving him ads based on what they think his wife would like.
The article takes issue with this and considers it an invasion of privacy. It’s the same sort of story we’ve seen dozens of times before; John Oliver did it better.
You are my favorite kind of person. May you always find the best parking spot right in front of your destination and may your pets always choose to cuddle with you, even when there’s a cozier spot nearby.
They aren’t listening to you speaking because they don’t have to do that. They already know about everything you and your friends do because of all the other shit they track about you and them collectively. The article is fine. Not really new information for most people here or that would probably be reading Lifehacker though, which makes me think they might not buy enough user data…
It has a microphone right there, so why wouldn’t it be sending our voices to Google headquarters or wherever so they can send me an ad? What other explanation is there?
She made a search on wifi for a cordless dremel. Ad companies saw “this IP is searching for cordless dremels we should give ads there”
Author joins same wifi network and goes to a page served by said ad company (or company in general like amazon). Gets ad for dremel.
This isn’t an article. It’s an ad.
It’s an old Gawker blog. So yeah, ads are the point.
Who actually sees ads? Between NextDNS or PiHole and ublock origin, I haven’t seen an ad in years.
Except “native ads” posing as legitimate content.
People who are not tech savvy and let’s face it, that’s most people. Ask random people on the street if they know what DNS is and you’ll have a lot of people not having a clue. Maybe more will know about ad blockers but my parents, for example, would have no idea if it weren’t for me installing an ad blocker on their systems.
Sure. But you can install a plug-in if you aren’t tech savvy. You can also run something with ad blocking turned on by default.
Ad-blocking on the browser level is enough for most people to never see an ad again.
I’m not sure if you’re trying to make a joke, but the article wasn’t advertising any products. It mentioned 5 VPNs, but it didn’t seem sponsored.
It was absolutely selling people that don’t know better that they need 24x7 VPN.
Each of those links bounce through pcmag with referrers, I strongly suspect they get kickbacks from all 5 providers listed.
They pretend that VPN is going to magically protect you from google and apple tracking your surfing habbits and purchases when your IP isn’t even the most identifiable thing you’re using.
This is just an ad covered in more ads.
This is a comment complaining about ads.
Brought to you by NordVPN
I’m sad to see so much click bait on this site.
So is MementoMori half bot, half human? I’ve blocked bots because they post so many articles of poor quality, but then you have people like this who also posts a lot of low quality posts without any opening comment, but is not marked as a bot and occasionally write some comments.
It is worse. You’re willingly feeding them the data that’s needed for ads.
I’m actually trying to be very careful with my data, to the point where I get sidelooks from some people who don’t care at all. Yet I try to still be able to use the services I want to. Like Google Maps. I know that I am selling my data to them. But the service helps me so much in my everyday life that I am willing to pay this price. But also I use AdBlock on all of my devices. So I really don’t care too much about advertising. I’m more concerned about other consequences like, individual pricing, or change of government to a dictatorship which would prosecute me for my beliefs I posted online, or Netflix not fuing finishing the series because they already calculated that they wouldn’t make as much fuing money as they would like to.
That hacker known as “4Chan” is at it again!
This is not only an ad written by a hack, it contributes to widespread gaslighting on what our phones do.
It’s well documented that our phones are always listening and sending keywords to advertisers.
Battery life is the single biggest indicator of how invasive our phone are.
If you’re old enough to remember flip phones, you know they’d last easily days, to a week, or even longer between charges.
Even as Blackberrys came about with GPS navigation, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc, the battery life stayed about the same. Over time we’ve expanded the ability of those features, but we’ve also made them all significantly more power-efficient.
Some argue all the “always-on” features for optimizing signal and spontaneous device pairing is responsible, but these can all be turned off.
Even with all the Android Dev settings optimized for minimum background activity and all apps restricted, an S22 Ultra with 5000 mah battery will burn through most of its capacity in your pocket in a day.
Worth mentioning how tiny flip-phone batteries were too. A 500-900mah battery would take a flip-phone through a week where a modern smartphone with a 5000mah battery barely lasts a day.
It is not well documented that our phones are sending keywords to advertisers from audio. Are phones always listening? Yes. How else would they be activated. And anything you tell it after activating it is going to be stored. But outside that, there is no reason for phones to save what you say. Most of that audio is entirely useless to them. If you have the documentation of them sending audio recordings to advertisers, I’d love to see it.
<conspiracy-mode> Unless they collect voices to then use them for NPCs in their private VR worlds where they will live when they finally destroy the planet! </conspiracy-mode>
Got facts and sources to back these assertions up? Yeah what they do sucks – but facts are required.
Is that why my phone isn’t always dying now that I’m not on reddit? It used to get mad hot after about 15 minutes. Now being on lemmy my phone is actually pretty cool to the touch…
