The uninvited Internet of things

Posted Apr 1, 2021 10:05 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: The uninvited Internet of things by Cyberax
Parent article: The uninvited Internet of things

They actually do have a vested interest in

> controlling everything you do and believe

that’s what advertising is about. Google and Facebook’s bread and butter. Controlling what you think and auctioning tiny parcels of that control to entities that want to get you to do things (be it buy XXX or vote for YYY).

The first step in manipulating someone has always been to know what that person thinks today, it used to take talented con artists, pervasive cloud monitoring is achieving the same result by dumb brute force.

The uninvited Internet of things

Posted Apr 1, 2021 14:09 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Oh please, I know people from really high up in Google. They absolutely don't care about "controlling" anybody. Why would they? That's a lot of responsibility and not a lot of payoff.

They care about targeting for advertisers. If anything, they prefer people to stay really diverse to complicate targeting for other competitors in the ad space. If everybody thinks the same then there's nothing to target.

This pervasively led to small groups of people isolating themselves in echo-chambers.