this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
668 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
85745 readers
3709 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's been happening for well over a decade now, and while "respectable security researchers" call it bullshit... there's simply too much anecdotal evidence for it to happen organically.
The reality is they don't need to listen.
They have so much data on users.
It just goes on and on and on.
People think they are unique but they are not as unique as they think.
NONE of that data can predict a random occurrence discussion that goes in a specific direction.
A great example is something that happened to me in 2015. One night I was out with friends, and one of them had a really bad panic attack. The next day I was discussing it with a colleague during a smoke break, who recommended he gets a clip-on pulse oximeter. No searches, nothing, literally just a half minute detour in our chat. I repeat, nothing was typed in or looked up or in any way entered into any computer intentionally.
Five minutes later we're sitting in front of our respective computers and I start getting ads for the very thing. Mind you, we're still at a point where nothing noted during this discussion was entered into any computer. Explain this.
"who you are near" does.
Someone that has recently purchased something might talk about it.
Someone that has commented on a news article might talk about it.
Someone has a panic attack and googles what to do about it.