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The real issue is not so much whether it really happened or not. The real issue is that it *could* very realistically have happened, and that we need to fight so it doesn't

You won't know them, just the same as you don't "hear" the tobacco lobby, or the oil and gas lobby, they do it in the silent corridors of the House and Senate

That's a good take. On top of the coincidence amplification mechanism, I would add another, where Alice talks to their pal Bob about X, Bob goes on to google X, and Alice gets ads about X. I'm sure there are a number of such mechanisms at play and none of them involve eavesdropping.

I’ve always thought the truth is much creepier — we emit so much data through our online behavior and we’re predictable enough that people don’t need to eavesdrop on us to know what we’re into at the moment.

It's easy to dismiss conspiracy theories but it does not do them justice. The truth here is not the material truth about whether or not companies listen to you. The truth is what people believe these companies are capable of and willing to do.

I think it depends on the app you have open with a specific set of permissions, but I have seen at least one case that was hard to explain otherwise specifically because of the timing and the hyperspecificity of that subject to only that moment. It for sure didn't demand any on-device processing

this is good!

Wow there are a lot of credulous people on Hacker News news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4258...

It used to be easier to argue against this (read: still impossible) because it was trivially technically infeasible. On-device voice recognition wasn’t a thing and the bandwidth to process audio from a billion devices wouldn’t have been worth it. Now that on-device voice recognition is good, though…

Thank you for tilting at the windmill. I’m annoyed that Ars, of all outlets, was so credulous.

Obviously what anyone has to offer is opinions but one thing is for sure: Apple is not privacy minded. They just like control on their own devices. They'll give up your privacy if profitable and as a matter of fact one of the iOS syscall gives you an advertisment ID for the user. Not white-knight-y

This is one of those claims that definitely isn’t true but it will probably literally become true faster than people’s minds can be changed 😆

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