[mhuffman]

>Day to day what does "monetizing my data and removing my privacy" actually mean to you? Are advertisers following you around town? Bothering you at work? Hounding you in the loo?

They are doing all of those things if you have your phone with you! Unless you manually go about disabling notifications, turning off gps access for all apps, etc.

[godelski]

They do all these things even if you don't. Even if you don't have a google account. The degree in which they do is higher if you do, but that doesn't remove it, it just lessens it.

And it is worth noting that even turning off your GPS, you can still be followed. The very nature of how cell service works requires the ability to locate you, even if not to the same precision level (as aforementioned).

There are of course trade-offs and this nature does not mean the tech is bad. But it does mean that we need to be aware of how it is used and how it can be abused. It is okay for mistakes to happen, but we need to fix them and resolve them, not ignore them or underplay them. My larger fear is that we live in a cluttered house and all these conversations end up being "well that piece of paper on the ground isn't that bad. That doesn't mean I'm messy." Because that is true. But there's a million instances of that and the accumulation is what creates the messy/cluttered house, not any singular piece of trash. If we can't see the forest from the trees, we're doomed. Because most of the problems that exist in our modern world are through these larger complex chains of coupled interactions. Where singular events are not that bad, but the system is.