Be careful next time you buy or shackle yourself to a new phone, it will probably have an unremovable FB app. I see no reason why it would need you to have an account to track and analyze you.
This is why it's so important that open source forks of Android are available. Without them, it's not possible to have a modern mobile communication device that you can actually trust. (Arguably even then, since drivers tend to be opaque blobs and the radio subsystem runs its own closed code, but at least you're no longer free real-estate for any application big enough to pay for an unremovable app.)
I agree it’s hard to really stop being tracked but I’ve been trying to become less of an easy target lately. Stopped using gmail as my main email and made duckduckgo my default search engine. Plus the traditional browser extensions.
Far from perfect? Yes. But at least I take some confort from no longer being such a juicy ad target.
It's like knowing that you are a duckduckgogo user/or that you don't like being tracked is also a valid data point for advertisers.
I remember seeing a post yesterday on HN where they mentioned that some ad networks treat the 'Do not Track' preference as an additional data point about your personality instead of simply honoring your preference.
It’s kind of like putting your stuff in a safe rather than showing it to everyone: sure, nobody gets to see what you put in. But it’s probably something of value.
It's not misinformation, and there is more nuance to that than you think.
Your phone listening to you to say "Hey Siri" is an Apple device listening to you. Yes, as for any reasonable implementation of an assistant, that detection and recognition is done on the device - but there's the issue of false positives, i.e. your phone can mistake a part of your conversation for the keyword, and start listening to you and upload said conversation. Then it is quite nuanced as what counts as "Apple is listening to you".
I understand what you are saying, but it’s neither accurate nor reasonable.
For one thing, it is false to say ‘upload said conversation’. It’s true that a false positive can lead to a sound sample being uploaded to Siri.
That is not uploading a conversation. Saying a conversation is being uploaded is clearly mischaracterizing what is happening. Why exaggerate from a sound sample into a conversation, which is a quite different concept unless your goal is to mislead?
Separately, the uploading of short, misidentified sound samples does not constitute ‘Apple is listening to you’. This is also clear.
In any public space, people around you may briefly give you some attention if you say their name, even if you happen to be referring to someone else with the same name.
Only paranoid people construe this to mean that everyone is listening to them all the time.
To accept your reasoning that ‘Apple is listening to you’, we must also conclude that if you are in public, ‘everyone around you is listening to you’, rather than the regular understanding which is that people pay attention to you when you say something that is relevant to them.
You can decide for yourself what counts as 'Apple Listening to you', but this particular reasoning seems a lot like paranoia rather than what most people understand 'listening' to mean.
If you say 'Apple is listening to you' based on exaggeration and uncommon definitions, unless you explain what these are, most people, if that believe you, will interpret this using the common understanding and be misinformed.
Saying 'Apple is listening to you' is therefore misinformation.