bootaccount

ah, so you're just talking the talk, without preparing to walk the walk... things don't improve because you just wrote a comment on HN, it has to materially impact the business for them to notice the disagreement with the policy.

Most people are like you though, too lazy to do anything and they'll subject themselves to whatever big G says is good for them.

why consider it when you can do it? Behavior can only change when there's a massive drop in MAU and revenue, then the product team will consider backtracking

I was exposed to this while talking to an Amazon recruiter recently, while I also hear stories about how they seem to work people to a breaking point.

The median tenure at AMZN is also 1.5yrs, per linkedin. Their strategy seems to be to work their people extremely hard to earn their RSUs and pay them like plebs with hard caps on earning potential (base comp).

Windows 10, which was forced on users machines (often without consent nor approval) meets the threshold for spyware.

Could the entire OS be considered spyware? Should Win 11, which is expected to have mandatory MSFT account, be considered something worse than spyware?

Amazon's Ad business is a monster that is growing faster and faster [1] so they'll want to track and absorb as much data as possible. FireTV is one of the noisiest devices in my home, second only to Roku, constantly phoning home.

Selling access to a mesh network to other providers will become an additional source of recurring revenue from what would have otherwise been one time revenue source (hardware sale).

It will be no different than Amazon competing w/ FedEx and UPS using it's delivery engine

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/29/amazons-ads-business-nears-7...

reddit also injects unique tracking into every outbound URL click, allowing them to monitor individual user behavior and engagement (similar to Google Search results)

it's at the top of the release to distract the investors that don't spend the time to dig through all the details in the rest of the document.

there's nothing stopping from Alexa recording content locally and transmitting it with a traditional request once activated.

Also, there's no reason for Amazon to want a constant stream of Alexa data hitting their cloud services. The goal is to mine and extract valuable data about users to build profiles, ideally you'd want to do that on-device and send up the most valuable bits.

These are also capabilities they can silently introduce at anytime for any device.

Steve Gibsons "analysis" means nothing.

try disabling Google Maps location access permission. For me it triggers an endless loop requesting Location permission, rendering the app unusable.

Google's always mining data behind the scenes and gapps are constantly phoning home, your "opt-out" preferences are meaningless.

advertising is the biggest thing 'educating' voters, and usually it's usually something along the lines of here's why <party> <candidate> is bad, vote for me instead. News media is trash and unreliable as they too pander to advertisers or are just spewing nationally distributed talking points.

Bernie who was the most vocal about changes was taken out by Hillary, but no one batted an eye. No one really wants change to the healthcare and pharma industry as it will hurt the entire ecosystem (especially advertising $).

you can start with getting NetGuard - a no-root firewall that can be used to prevent apps from connecting to unnecessary domains. It's from the same developer who made xPrivacy.

If you can achieve root, you will have much greater controls over privacy. Unfortunately, it seems cellphone manufacturers are moving away from giving users control over their devices.

the only option I've found is to force desktop mode, otherwise virtually all engagement with the mobile site will redirect to the app

they're using app.adjust.com to force the user to get the app and track the behavior -- using Firefox and something like uBlock will prevent the behavior and block the redirect attempt

I disagree. My parents emigrated to different lands (with me) to provide me additional opportunity to excel. I'm early into my career and have a higher salary [6fig] than my parents', primarily due to the sacrifices they made over the years.

My job, life and other attributes couldn't have been predicted by salary nor any other vanity metric.

google chrome drops cookies that you cannot clear with recent updates

also in Chrome it's not possible to block things like sending URLs back to base for safebrowsing (like Firefox)