I would agree more if the thing was a product purchased and operated by the establishment, but these things are always run by a third party and their interests and affiliations have no oversight or accountability. What happens when there is an abortion clinic with one of these present. What happens when the controlling company is in KKK christo-jihad hell where women have no rights like Florida, Texas, or Alabama? What about when the police execute someone at random, who loses that recording? No one knows any of these factors or should need to when they wish to walk into a store. This device is stealing your right to autonomy and citizenship as a result.

From me specifically? When I was first disabled, I still used most corporate social media and stalkerware. In an isolated environment like I've been stuck in for a long time, it became clear that the user retention through suggested content manipulation algorithms and notifications were not able to compensate for someone in my condition and availability. What had always seemed like minor manipulative annoyances, became obvious manipulative annoyances. I started to see how the interruptions had altered my behavior. There were some interests I sought out on my own, but many pointless and frivolous distractions and things or projects I bought into because I felt like I had found or discovered something on the internet. Over the years of isolation, I can more clearly see the pattern of what was really my interests and what was suggested to me in manipulative contexts. One of the prime ways it happens is when I'm frustrated with something I'm working on and getting no where. Suddenly I get a seemingly unrelated suggestion or start getting what seem like random notifications. Those seem to target my emotional state specifically in a targeted way to tended to push me into new things or areas I didn't really expect or want to pursue prior.

I could write off that kind of thing. I became alarmed most around 2018 when Dave Jones showed some search results on YT and was talking about them. I could not reproduce his search or even find the reference at all. A week or so later, it came up. I had it happen again a couple of months later. No matter what or how I searched I could not find the correct results. It is because google was being paid to funnel me into another website some imbeciles thought was related to my search results but the website in question is a garbage third party referral linking middleman. When they showed up in my search results, I couldn't find anything I was looking for. They were quite literally paying so that I could not find what I needed. It wasn't ads placement. It the top 20 pages of google, the results were simply not present at all for what I was looking for. In this situation, I could empirically check and see what was happening. Any company that can do such a thing with what I can see should never be trusted with what I cannot see. That type of manipulation is world changing and extremely dangerous. There are only two relevant web crawlers by size, Microsoft and Google. Every search provider goes through these two crawlers either directly or indirectly. When google failed to work, so did DDG, Bing, and most of the rest. At the time, Yandex still worked.

Since I have offline independent AI running, I've been able to test this a bit further. If I start searching for certain niche products in a search engine I will get steered in bad manipulative directions. I do not fit the typical mold for the scope of experience and information I know about going back over two decades ago. When I search for something commercial and industry niche specific, I've seen many times when relevant products and information are obfuscated as I am steered to consumer land garbage due to what I shouldn't know. These are situations where I may have forgotten some brand name, but when searching for all of its relevant properties and use cases, the things never come up in search results. I can chat about the product with a decent AI for a few sentences and it gives me the answer. After I plug that into search results, suddenly I start seeing all kinds of related products in other places popping up like it is some kind of organic thing. It isn't limited to search results either, it was YT, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and even reddit I noticed similar anomalies. If this kind of connection works in one direction, it must work in both directions, meaning my information bubble is influenced directly by all corporate platforms. It makes me question what interests and ideas are truly my own. I primarily find it deeply offensive that, as a citizen, any corporate shit can cause me to question my informed reality in such a way. Any stranger that asks you to trust them, is nothing more than a thief and con. They are an irresponsible gatekeeper. That is the prima issue.

@delirious_owl

Interesting. But I do need to get messages and calls and airplane mode kills that.

In a country with many vocal boot lickers ("play stupid games . . .") it seems like a fair term to have in your lexicon