archomrade [he/him]

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  • 99 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • If you put up any guards at all against data tracking, they get pretty bad pretty quick. They get skewed toward the one or two datapoints that you didn’t shore up, so they think “huh, this user must really like phone games because they played doodlejump in 2016 and still has it installed on their phone”. Or at least I think. My wife gets ads that are far more on-the-nose than I do, but she doesn’t lock down her tracking data at all.

    But I don’t even like them trying to match me to ads, I don’t want to incentivize their data collection practices.





  • Not to mention that it would be extremely difficult to implement an effective watermark on text below a certain size

    There are hundreds of thousands of pixels in an image where you can hide a watermark, but in a text output of a paragraph or less there are only a couple hundred characters.

    How precise is the watermark? Is it a specific sequence of characters? Is it a sequence of words? A number of characters in a row? Non-print characters?

    How precise the watermark is will determine how easy it is to get around. I imagine some of the most important uses to detect would be twitter/social media influence bots where the output length is only 140 characters or less. I find it hard to imagine a watermark on output of that size being effective or reliable.



  • Why are they trying to re-invent social media monetization schemes instead of incorporating already existing ones that are value-adds?

    I could easily see a ‘reddit marketplace’ work well for them (i’d never fucking use it but i’m betting a bunch of people would), and it would drive more traffic to the site and lure more advertisers. Better than facebook marketplace, which requires real personal information to use, or craigslist, which feels a little too seedy and un-moderated for the faint-of-heart. Reddit could leverage their reputation for being a place for passionate hobbyists and even provide users a way to make their own income from their reddit activity.

    Milking your users for paid-content seems over-the-top obnoxious when they absolutely had more options before needing to resort to that. What a trash company.










  • I can see why people are quick to think this but I don’t see any compelling evidence this is the case, and as others have pointed out it would be impractical for them to do so.

    More likely they use it for consumer lock-in and to collect data through its api endpoints. Collecting media activity and smart home device information is valuable enough on its own, before even approaching the value of collecting recorded audio.

    They can already intuit consumer habits/word of mouth exposure from other associated data with your online activity. After locking down all my other privacy, the ads I get are far less relevant to me, even though I have a number of smart listening devices in my home