What made them change their mind? Pretty sure that’s always been part of the implication lol.

iOS literally prompts you to provide permission for that when you first start up your phone (either restore, or first use). So either you opted in or out but they’re pretty transparent about it.

Companies spend hundreds of millions on lots of shit that doesn’t work. There have been plenty of studies saying that ads are not nearly as effective as companies think they are. Do you think that companies are somehow smarter than the people outside those companies?

Being exposed to a product that exists is not an ad. An ad is explicitly something that a company has paid to make visible to people. If a company isn’t paying for it then it’s not an ad, no matter how much it sounds like one.

And yes, going to a store and trying shit out is exactly how it should go. Reading reviews and talking to others is exactly how it should go. Companies paying to manipulate people of the world using psychology is what ads are. Not seeing a product being used in the wild.

a paid notice that is published or broadcast (as to attract customers or to provide information of public interest)

Huh?

They literally told you how it’s used for practical applications and you just ignored it. It makes cryptography stronger, hence your password less likely to be broken. National secrets less likely to be leaked. Your identity less likely to be stolen.

No first time ever. This isn’t a supercomputer, it’s a distributed cloud network that they’re referring to as a supercomputer because it has a lot of power. It’s not a supercomputer in any other sense of the word, as it’s set up on cloud providers around the globe rather than in one location in the same room.

You’re getting downvoted because it sounds like you think COVID is fake. I agree with you that companies made up every reason they could to raise prices, but it was because COVID was a good scapegoat, not because COVID is fake.

Hey’s spam filtering is a thousand times better than Gmail at least nowadays. Mostly because hey is literally built on the premise that you whitelist who you want to get emails from. The rest are blackholed. But the spam filtering is still very good for the approval part of it.

You’re literally using a service there that isn’t the case for.

The stats disagree with you, so your anecdotes don’t really mean anything…

It’s not an either or. It’s _if it’s free, you’re the product _. That’s it. It’s not saying anything about if you pay for it.

You tried three in person places and then went straight to Amazon? Why not trying to buy directly from the manufacturer? You clearly didn’t try at all. Ignoring the fact that there are still plenty of other retail stores, you didn’t even try the online shops of any of your retail stores.

Those articles have been proven wrong numerous times, but even if they weren’t, that has nothing to do with OP who is claiming that Google controls those companies prices.

Dude, I have a pi-hole, I block ads on every device in addition to the pi-hole. When I’m not at home I route by traffic through my home pi-hole. I know how ads work. I’ve even added ads to websites and used Google AdSense myself.

What they said in the OP is categorically false. Google does not control other companies shop prices. They simply sell a spot to companies to match a profile. They do not control pricing. They do not sell your data. They sell a spot that matches a companies targeting profile. If Google sold your data they would lose their biggest cash cow because other ad companies would buy it and decrease Google’s market share. What you are seeing is Google’s Adsense script running on people’s websites. Google controls that data, not the website.

the problem with the person you’re arguing with is that they clearly value property more than the human. Who cares if a business gets destroyed? Well in america you don’t have the support structures to help that business recover from that, since insurance will try their damn hardest to not cover it, and the government isn’t going to help. So the person you’re arguing with is arguing from a completely different position than you. You’re arguing “why are you using to force to stop protests” and they’re arguing “property might be destroyed, so you have to stop that”.

That’s not how selling ads works…

Hmm I got Starlink earlier this year and I don’t remember it having a default. I think it asked me to set the ssid immediately.

https://easysociology.com/sociology-of-power/the-iron-law-of-oligarchy-an-outline-and-explanation/

Or alternatively https://themindcollection.com/pournelles-iron-law-of-bureaucracy/

Why in the world would you think that someone paying to use a service is a problem? Sure direct donations are more helpful, but that doesn’t run servers to actually distribute the content you’re viewing. Your problem is completely different than what we are discussing about ad blockers.