Listening to audio would be the least effective and most expensive method of data collection for advertisers. It’s not happening. They already have literally over a million data points on you, there’s nothing useful for them to glean from your audio that they don’t already have ad nauseum.

You see thousands of ads and recommendations every day. You finally found one that was relevant to you. It’s not that deep.

Watchdog groups have been monitoring these services for years now and have yet to find the “your phone is listening 24/7” smoking gun.

I am absolutely not advocating rudeness to the cashier.

IMO, lying to somebody, specifically with malicious intent (as opposed to a white lie to avoid hurting somebody) is rudeness. Just because they might not catch onto it doesn’t change anything; you’re being a bad actor in this scenario, and taking out your frustration on somebody who had nothing to do with your ire.

People do have that phone number, you know. It’s not reserved or blocked.

Except the person you just signed up for unwanted spam texts.

Yeah, that’ll teach a lesson the minimum wage employee who didn’t make the rules.

If you’re just looking for the out-of-the-box experience, I’d say a Pixel is probably your best bet. It’ll run stock Android, get updates the fastest, and generally perform very well. My Pixel 6 Pro is still running smoothly today. I’ve never dived too deeply into it, but I believe Pixels will also run GrapheneOS, if you’re looking to really lock your device down and de-Google it.

All the more reason it doesn’t need to be on the internet.

From my bedroom, right this moment, there are four unsecured networks I can connect to, which I do not own or control.

This is not an uncommon scenario.

Neighbors, bro. You can’t control networks you don’t own.

Are you really this obtuse, or is this just an act?

Some people live in apartments.

You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.

I suppose it could be used to streamline ID verification for online purchases? I vape, and whenever I order supplies online I have to go through an ID verification process, usually involving uploading a photo of my driver’s license to some system. If they had a way to tokenize this step, that would make the ordering process a lot simpler.

Could also perhaps be used for something like carding at a bar; just a quick tap on their tablet and they don’t have to sit there looking for watermarks and stuff if you look too young to be there.

What does freezing your credit do, exactly? Is this still something someone should do if they don’t even have any credit cards?

I’ve generally been pretty ignorant toward how credit reporting works.

It’s already infrared. Also, UV is partially visible to humans in some scenarios.

YouTube isn’t remembering your progress for this video. I just opened an incognito window and searched YouTube for “gnu taler” as you mention, and in my results I see the same progress bar. I’ve never seen this video before, and certainly have never watched it.

For some reason, YouTube is adding a timestamp argument to the URL within the search results. Not sure why, maybe it’s a “smart” detection of moving you to the spot in the video that’s relevant to the term “gnu taler”. But it certainly has nothing to do with you, specifically.

That is not correct, either. The outage even took out decentralized platforms.

Yeah that’s true, and I’m honestly surprised that they’ve had features like that available for free for as long as they have.

I kind of wonder why they haven’t attempted such a pivot already, though, as it seems like they could easily take over the gaming video space that YouTube currently dominates. Much of that audience uses Twitch already and would easily transition over to a more curated platform, so it feels like it should’ve been a pretty obvious move by now.

Dan Clancy has already said that Twitch isn’t profitable as it is. Right now, they basically only still exist because of existing contracts, otherwise Amazon would’ve likely pulled the plug a while ago. They can’t handle their current user base; they wouldn’t be able to handle YouTube refugees en masse.