I worked in a field that managed a lot of technology in retail stores. The big ones know everything about you, it’s just astonishing. At the time (around 15 years ago) there was very little oversight, but also most CIOs were inept and couldn’t really make the data sing and dance. Today that is very much no longer true, and it’s almost too easy to build a comprehensive profile of an “anonymous” guest and then attach it to their personally identifiable information, all without their consent or knowledge.
I was looking at cool world record gokart pictures in 2008, and the next day the sidebar on Facebook was full of ads for the shitty kart track by the highway. It felt dirty and unsettling as a 13 year old that everything I was interested in would immediately be sent straight to the weirdest meth head carny I knew.
Then the Snowden leaks happened, and at that point I was fully radicalized.
Wanted to “aquire legitimately” a movie and from there learned more and more about how big business and big brothers all over like to invade privacy for power and profit.
i was online before cookies were online, before smartphones connected billions and everyone put their faces on zuckHead’s site to write each other insults while shitting
When I was quite young I was trying to figure out how to play games on a school computer and must have set off some red flags because the IT guy came in and asked what I was doing.
Sure there’s not much more to it. I think it was a Mac and I was trying to get around the administrative privileges.
On a similar note a different school used Windows but had a pretty good blocklist of sites that had anything to do with gaming or social media. I really wanted to browse some game review but didn’t have another way because of how prohibitively expensive mobile data was at the time and ended up using Tor.
I never heard anything about it but it’s funny to think I used it to read Metacritic reviews.
Well. Isn’t anyone’s business what I am doing. I want to decide on my own what I want to share. Unfortunately some corporations exploit that little willingness, where others are respectful.
Even if I don’t have to hide anything, it’s still no reason given to tell the world. I mean - I don’t live in a glashouse, even when I got nothing to hide.
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