At this point if you haven’t figured out that Siri, or Alexa, is a device used to listen in on all you do full time inside the “privacy” of your home, to gather meta data on your behavior, so as to sell your inclinations to those who can profit from your intentions, then you don’t understand commerce or big tech.
If you think you purchased a “convenience device”, made and created to “serve your needs”, I am sorry that your parents raised a complete and utter fool.
We should all have no doubt whatsoever that these devices that you not only voluntarily purchased and put into use in your own home are a two-way communication device, and that the most important of that two-way communication is their ability to listen to every utterance inside the household and collect such data.
I do not have such a device inside my own home, specifically for these reasons, however I was reminded that indeed I do have two similar devices as I called out to the wife “Cindy” this morning and my iPhone started up asking me to repeat my request. “Cindy” sounding a bit like Siri to Siri.
One simply forgets that it just sits there listening full time. The same with my computer.
As I’ve mentioned here before I am in the process of exploring how I might import a bedding product from Ireland for sale in the US market. So I find myself frequently e-mailing about mattresses and bedding, discussing those products on the phone, and now and then using google to find out market information about the sale of mattresses in the US.
And as a natural course I also find all side ads when I am online for personal use to be all mattress and bedding related. All day all the time. And I also begin to get e-mails that are really just advertisements from competition mattress and bedding companies, and I’ve even begun to receive inquiries from Chinese suppliers as to whether or not I would like to import their products for sale here in the US.
None of my own inquiries are “public”, my e-mails are a private affair to the best of my knowledge, and my phone calls should be private as well. However, somehow the “internet” understands all about my communications and begins to send me side ad after side ad, and e-mail after e-mail, all about mattresses and bedding products.
Now it could be just as simple as the few google searches entered. But there are mornings that I enter the online sites absent any mention of those products in query, and I am only talking to my wife about them in the background, and yet all ads are for mattress and bedding products, and some e-mail communications as well.
Why it is as if someone is “listening” to my conversations and responding in kind with related information.
We have no more privacy. It is dead.
Articles now appear with a regularity about some ability for programs to intuit our intent from the smallest bits of information gathered. Algorithms that can see a pattern to our searches, and keystrokes, and know before we know ourselves where we are going, or intend to go next.
I feel sorry for those of you who, after I point out that Siri and Alexa are always wide-eared and listening, say “why do I care, I have nothing to hide”.
Oh, Dear God, you poor deluded soul.
You have no idea the level, detail, and size of the machines you are up against. Meta-data collection devices and algorithms that can not only see where you might want to go next, but steer you exactly where they would want you to go, absent any understanding on your part that any manipulation at all is in play.
All iPhone activity, every button on your iPhone, every tap you make, has been designed to make you tap, tap again, and even tap again. Even if that extra tap is somewhat involuntary. Even if you are tired and wish to go to sleep, even if you have other multi-tasked interests going on at the same time. The programs in use on your phone have been designed to keep you engaged as long as possible. They have been designed to ensure you won’t sleep, you won't be distracted, that you will keep tapping and viewing.
Now I’m sure it is quite the convenience to just yell out “Hey Siri”, and that what follows are lights that go on, or off upon command, music comes on, on demand, and that even dishwashers start-up upon request. All as you sit sipping Chardonnay on the sofa in complete comfort.
But God forbid your teenage son call and the two of you get into a tete-a-tete, and argument, as all is being recorded somewhere. That heated discussion with the husband over finances? Recorded. Somewhere.
We are all moving rapidly toward a world where there are no secrets. Not from the state, not from big tech. They know in real time what you think they have to interrogate you to discover. There is no need for interrogation other than to determine whether or not you’d lie, or obscure the truth.
It is instructive to hear the following.
I was told as a young man that the giant retailer Sears, with stores all across the country selling all kinds of merchandise, including both the Craftsman brand of tools which was the most popular brand in the country, but also the most famous brand of white goods in the industry, the Kenmore brand, as well as having clothing, household goods, and every product under the sun was not a retail goods company.
Whaaaa?
The company with every retail good under the sun, selling just about every product one could imagine, with some of the most recognized household brands isn’t a retail goods company? That is insane, that can’t be right, what kind of moron would make such a claim? How could they utter something so stupid?
Sears wasn’t a retailer, they were a credit company. Sears, or the executives running the firm, didn’t care what you purchased, as long as you used a Sears charge card. Because the bulk of Sears profits, the reason they were even a profitable enterprise, was because they were charging 18% interest on everything people purchased. And people bought, and bought, and bought, and just kept charging, and charging, and charging, so that the revolving amount owed kept a running 18% annual charge which kept Sears in profit for years, and years. In fact, they were so focused on making money as a credit card company they got lax on the retail side, didn’t pay attention to store location in relation to a shifting population demographic, and didn’t pay attention to quality in the products vended, and eventually it didn’t matter that the giant Sears Corporation was a credit card behemoth, the products were shit, and even on credit no one wanted to buy them. So out-of-business Sears went.
Sears was a credit company, charging exorbitant credit card fees. They were not a retailer. Retailing was only their way to get you to buy a freezer, a drill, or tires, and extend the payments out until they’d made a sizable chunk of cash having financed your purchase at 18%.
Think of all the big tech companies in the same way. Facebook is not in the business of providing you a communication device to keep up with friends and family. Facebook is not in the “news business”, though it might be a place that many people in the US get their news. Facebook is not a “community” of all your friends and family. It is not a place where you get to see that some long lost high school friend is on vacation in Mallorca, no it is not.
Facebook is a meta-data collection company, that uses the aggregated data on users to profit from suppliers and companies willing to pay for that data.
Facebook shows you the “face” of a company that is your friendly, societal organizer, the place where you can instantly communicate with all of your acquaintances, and friends. But the entire time you are using Facebook it is collecting data on you, your habits, your financial status, your inclinations, social standing and status, every last bit of information that can be gleaned from both your inputs, and views, that are possible, so that they can then turn that data into cash by selling information on you to others.
The search engine Google is no some friendly device you can utilize to find information that is “Free” to use. Oh, no.
Google has two main functions. First to show you only the approved information it wants you to see, no matter how specific your inquiry. They will rank what they want you to see, how they want you to see it. All pre-approved.
And second, google is in the meta-data collection business and is the biggest and best at it. They are full-time collecting data on you, analyzing it, packaging it, and selling it, making billions and billions of dollars in the process.
Google is not a search engine firm. Although that is what the program “does”. Google is a data collection agency using your own voluntary conscription and use of the services they offer to rape you of all your privacy and personal information for their own profit motives and possibly nefarious means.
I say possibly nefarious means as it has been shown over, and over that Google has a far Left bias, and I mean far, far, Left, and Google wishes to steer your own attitude and mind toward having the same far, far, Left bias as much as is humanly possible.
If your own “intent” is to be as far Left as possible, then you might see their effort as benign, however, if you are an ultra-conservative like myself, you’d label that effort “nefarious”.
I myself do not wish to provide Facebook, Google, or any of the giant meta-data companies to use my own personal information for their profit. Which is why I don’t have a Facebook account. For that reason, and the fact I am a sixty-six year old man and not a twelve year old girl. I don’t emoji text either, for the same reason.
But the point is, we all must come to the understanding of what these devices are, and what they do. the iPhone is the most convenient device ever created, and there is no end to what it does for each of us. It is as if we have a full sized computer in the palm of our hands. All of the known world’s information is stored within the iPhone, available to each of us on command at all times. What an amazing device.
But it acts for Apple as a meta-data collection device, not a phone, or an Encyclopedia Brittanica, or a game machine, or a small screen TV.
The purpose of the iPhone as far as Apple is concerned is to rape you of all your personal information and data as quickly and efficiently as possible so that information can be sold at big profit to companies that need such information to profit from you.
Apple happens to make a phone, but they are in the information collection industry. First and foremost.
If you choose voluntarily to add to their collective profits by voluntarily installing a Siri or Alexa, that is just great for you, as long as you know that what you have done is sell off your privacy completely. To open yourself as a wealth of information so that you and your entire family can be exploited by business.
Being able to control the lights and Apple Music may be a convenience, but you sold your very soul for the privilege.
And if you have installed a Siri, and to save money with the electric company you put one of those devices onto your thermostat that they can regulate absent your direct permission, well, you my friend are on one big slippery slope. You have not only sold off your personal preferences for comfort as measured full time and seasonally, you’ve turned over the rights to make you very, very uncomfortable at the discretion of someone else. They, the giant power conglomerate, will decide what temperature you will live with this Summer when peak demand hits.
And if you also put one of those devices on your car, where the insurance firm can measure just “how well you drive” so you can save a few dollars, well, the insurance company not only knows every little breaking maneuver, how well you stay in your lane, how fast you go at all times, but they also know everywhere you go, every stop you make, what your daily motion habits are. Add in a Fitbit and your movement is a complete open book. You are being tracked like a fugitive full-time.
Big Tech knows more about you than your psychiatrist. Hell, you lie to your psychiatrist, you don’t want them to really know just what a loon you are in real life. Speaking with your psychiatrist you’ll tell a small fib so they don’t prescribe yet another dose of Lithium. Even if you are paying them a hundred an hour to tell them small lies that may hurt your overall evaluation.
But you can’t lie to Big Tech. They know. They see all.
For those that say “I don’t care, I have nothing to hide”, wow. I feel so sorry for you.
Because just as they manipulate the algorithms to keep you engaged on the programs, the games, the phone, you will be manipulated by Big Tech absent any consideration it is happening at all.
I just hope for your sake that when you and hubby are home you aren’t saying some subversive things about the government, our politicians, and our security state. Not out loud. Because Siri and Alexa are worse than Soviet spies, they are listening full time, and sending all that information to our government through Big Tech.
If the FBI will watch Catholic soccer moms because they might be “MAGA terrorists” because they don’t want their children indoctrinated into the alphabet mafia, what do you think they’d do to you and hubby for bad mouthing Chris Wray?
Can you say Ruby Ridge? Can you say Waco?
Have you ever heard the name Douglass Mackey? No?
I’m just saying, you might want to place tape over all those cameras, and remove those devices.
Otherwise your life is truly an open book.