On Friday I was standing next to my son and a carpenter.
They were having a conversation about the merits of differing metals and their strength.
The carpenter had a boron steel drill bit that he had been using for twenty years.
My son commented that his tungsten wedding ring, which he felt was the harder metal, beat the drill bit.
He may be right because I know some federal officials have in their arsenal tungsten tipped bullets.
On Sunday ads for tungsten wedding rings started showing up on webpages as I moved around on the Internet.I was not part of the above conversation, I was only standing near them with my iPhone in my front pocket.
Another incident happened where I had a discussion with someone about how my mother had passed away from cancer.
A day or two later ads for cancer hospitals started showing up.
The company that served up the ads must have a deal with Apple who is listening on our phones to us....
I am not alone in my observation of this.
So... should we be paranoid?
Do we know whether our gadgets are passively listening to us?
No.
We don’t know for sure, beyond what they tell us in their privacy policies.
But we do know that voice recognition is what many major companies are trying to get us to start using.
Google has OK Google, Apple has Siri, and Amazon has Echo, a home appliance that listens to you all the time, and Microsoft has Cortina.
We know that many third party apps use location data services, and we know that personalization – especially personalized ads – rely on tracking.
We also know that there is a report out this week from the New America Foundation called "Ranking Digital Rights."
Their team read all of the user agreements, privacy policies, and terms of service at major telecom and Internet companies, and then gave them scores on privacy and censorship.
The best-scoring company was Google, with a 65 percent – a "D." Facebook scored 41 percent –an F-.
Walter Kirn's "this is a little bit too much of a coincidence" moment came in the kitchen, as he searched for a bag of walnuts.
Listen to the show and read "If You're Not Paranoid, You're Crazy" for more.
No comments:
Post a Comment