Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by eip 2989 days ago
> they will show ads on her devices based on your behavior (and vice versa).

She went house hunting and watched kung fu movies. Has nothing to do with the partners behavior.

Most android (CIAlphabet) phones have CIABook installed by default and it cannot be turned off or deleted without root access. Both listen to microphone and probably take random photos. The phones are both linked to credit cards which are probably also linked to Netflix account.

Why are people still surprised by this?

1 comments

I cannot attest to the above suggestion that "CIABook" is installed, as I have not reviewed any of the Android source.

Instead, I offer different information: I know of a person who is switching back to a pager to avoid smart device-based tracking. This after he received the requested "all information Facebook has about me" and saw how many of the quizzes he took for fun were advertiser-based, articles that seemed to be interesting (and were not about products or services, per se) being brought to his attention by advertisers, as well as other behavior he thought was innocuous but instead resulted in yet more data gathered about him.

It is my understanding he is piecing together different services to allow the pager to still be able to communicate (eventually) via IM with the right hand-offs involving services who rank privacy/no-tracking towards the top of their service offering.

There is some interest among his peers to offer this as a service, for those who might find this idea desirable. Apparently there are refurbished pagers available for purchase that can be used in this way.

He has jokingly referred to it as a "Hi-Tech detox" process...

I, too, listen to this person in the morning! Maybe attitudes have changed over the years but IIRC his partner isn't very well liked around here.
I find thinking dimensionally helps me understand better...
I find HN to be a really interesting intersection point of the Dimensions