sijt @ sijt @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

I think they might mean bricked up, as in the windows have been bricked over?

Or maybe they’re associated with buildings built during a certain period that are now mostly empty due to a boom and bust cycle?

That’s what’s great about all these companies. They take credit for, and try to derive value from, things they didn’t actually create. Reddit keeps on talking about “their” data that was created by users, for free, and moderated by other users, also for free. Yet it’s somehow theirs and they can sell it?

Twitter didn’t invent hashtags. They were user created annd eventually incorporated in to the service.

These services add very little value, but they believe they add it all.

Meanwhile Porsche are developing an even tighter integration allowing you to control parts of the car through the CarPlay interface.

I'm not surprised in the slightest, but I've seen lots of posts saying how diverse it is over there, and how vibrant, and that it's more like old Twitter.

And yeah, it's brands posting stale memes and old Twitter personalities fighting for their lives, so I guess it is like old Twitter.

It’s so bad over there. Might be the worst case of quantity over quality. It’s just stuffed full of brands trying to make themselves relevant and influencers posting engagement bait. I’m not even exaggerating, 100% of my feed is that.

There’s nothing of worth there other than sheer volume.

I think there's a more fundamental issue than that. Many many Tory voters are of the opinion that life shouldn't improve. They want to "conserve".

I've spoken to Tory voters about exactly this and their opinion is that they had to work 5 days a week so everyone else should have to. Even if it's overall worse for all involved. The same rule can be applied to anything. If they had to suffer, everyone else should also have to suffer. Tories are selfish, and regressive.

I particularly enjoy the "if you need immediate assistance" note for a telephone line that's open even fewer hours than the website. it's positioned as an alternative to the site, but absolutely isn't. Also, if that message is only displayed when the site is closed, there are no hours when the phone line is open but the site is closed, so who's it helping? You couldwrite it down and call it when it's open, but the site is also going to be open then, several hours earlier in fact, so is less "immediate" than the site that's closed.

Enforcing is unfortunately really difficult because the incentives are too strong. We have rules here which are meant to prevent AirBnB and similar by limiting the number of nights any domestic property can be let in a year. So all the hosts just jump from site to site and change the descriptions slightly to get around it. And it's so brazen. They use the same photos and everything. The really organised ones have whole buildings and when you book they're non-specific about the unit you get, so it's very difficult to actually track which ones are rented at any point, particularly when the enforcement teams are so underfunded.

We (i.e. those of us who work in the industry and care about such things) really need to work on messaging to get through to normal people.

For instance, people are genuinely freaked out at the idea of Facebook listening to them through their phones. It really hits a nerve. Now that isn't happening, but what is happening is even worse. Facebook are able to predict your behaviour, your thoughts, so well that it gives the illusion that they're listening to you. They've spent decades training their models on your behaviour, your content, both on their website and across the entire web and beyond. And they've fucking nailed it.

That's far far more scary than them listening to you. They know things about you that you don't even say out loud. It's terrifying.

My slightly vague recollection was that they were basically feeding "enterprise customers" a load of information including stuff that could be used for union busting, monitoring protests etc. Their enterprise plan has

Feedly AI Advanced Skills: Market intelligence Threat intelligence Biopharma research Competitive intelligence

as features. So yeah, creepy as fuck. And they said at the time that this was all done using "AI".

I stopped using Feedly after all the creepy AI stuff. Reeder synced over iCloud with an OPML export every now and then keeps it so I'm not reliant on a central service and can run it all locally should I choose.

Anyone using Feedly, or equivalent, hasn't learnt the lessons of Google Reader. Manage it yourself, don't rely on a central service that's going to do creepy monitoring on you to power their AI model.