this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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The stalker is trying to intimidate or harass me for their own personal ends. People are bad, companies are in for profit.
The company will try and sell me more toilet paper because they know I have diarrhea. The multimillion dollar corporation is spying on me to make line go up. The thing people actually get angry about is the predictive ad which feel like it removes their autonomy.
The thing people forget when they get an personalised ad is that they are not the main character. Their behaviour is similar to others and the in the end the feeling that actions, even benign ones, can be predicted gets people upset.
It's like the guy today complaining that his TV is always listening to him. Yes, because Samsung can make a few cents for putting a Domino's ad on the TV when the word pizza is said. Oh but that means someone could access hundreds of thousands of hours of recordings! Of people talking in front of their TV. Of Hundreds of thousands of people. Oh but someone could access the recordings of my voice, determine a close family member, make a voice clone and get them to give them money!
I dunno, romance scammers seem to do just fine and that even works on people with 50 year old TVs.
I prefer to refer to it as contributing to the PornHub Year in Review.
Negative, it is the farther reaching effects of this data-mining hellscape that bothers me.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
It's not a matter of my autonomy being removed, it's a matter of privacy. Full stop. This is the very first time in human history where people's lives aren't private. Your attention is a commodity traded on the open market, whether you want to be or not. And that's the part I have a problem with.
Today, it's being too aggressive marketing to pregnant teens. Tomorrow, it's your insurance company buying your advertising profile, analyzing your past shopping habits to determine that you're at a high risk for Chron's Disease, and jacking your rates up over it.
You said it yourself, the line must go up. It's not just about charging fair prices for goods and services, it's about separating people from as much money as possible, by any means necessary.
Data aggregation can be weaponized against you. How many times do you think people struggling to make ends meet get shown ads for predatory loans? Or gambling addicts getting shown sports betting ads?
In the days of AI chatbots, is this really a far fetched idea? Just pipe the data into an AI and tease anything useful you possibly can out of it. The computers handle the raw data processing, you just collect what comes out the other end.
After all, the line must go up.
Hey, I've seen this one and guess what, Domino's would prefer you order again.
You mean, in 2012 a father opened her daughter's mail and saw some suggested coupons. She had made several healthy decisions in regards to a situation she was in, it was her Dad invading her privacy that blew this up. Someone at target had noticed some sales correlations for particular vitamins. She knew she was pregnant.
Yes, and even with the barrage of ads I've seen today, I've been able to choose to come back to this thread to try and convince people that something that the boogeyman of data collection is actually too expensive to weaponise and there's some people out there who will always be assholes and taking away this particular tool will not solve anything.
I can't help but notice that you've picked industries that have always been predatory. Stopping data collection doesn't magically increase harm reduction.
I don't think you've ever been in a position to see data collection used for a good thing.
No, it's the exact reason I brought it up, ElevenLabs is magic (except that one time) it's also why, in the very next sentance I said that you're far more likely to be got by a romance scam. It's just makes more sense at scale.
I suppose if you want to hold corporations wholly blameless, the dad isn't the worst person to blame. But it's not like those brochures are sealed. Or have you never received a brochure in the mail?
You're really going to call the dad reading a non-sealed advertisement brochure "invading her privacy", but Target building a shopping behavior database isn't invading anyone's privacy?
"Aww nuts, we can't wave a wand and fix literally every problem at the same time, why even bother trying?"
We can't prevent murder either, but we can recognize that people have a right to not-be-murdered. IDK why it's not easy to understand that I vehemently disagree with the implied notion that I don't have a right to digital privacy, and that is wholly at odds with the entire advertisement industry.
In the end, it's your right to open your private life to companies so they can try and advertise to you. But that data isn't innocuous, and it will one day be used against people.
I'll keep running my network ad blocker and script blockers.