this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
1525 points (99.0% liked)

Microblog Memes

5736 readers
1640 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

Rules:

  1. Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
  2. Be nice.
  3. No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
  4. Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.

Related communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Not to mention if you use a bit of game and network theory you can extrapolate political leanings, health conditions, sexual preferences, affairs, etc. All of the most personal and intimate details of a person's life are one data analysis away if you have a few things. Purchase histories from your rewards cards, browsing history, viewing history, most watched tv shows, if you mute ads or not; everything is tracked and aggregated and available for purchase. Even supposedly anonymized data can be de-anonymized with relative ease.

I remember a story from years ago where a woman started getting pre-natal coupons from Target. She didn't even know she was pregnant. She took a test a couple of days later and found out. They had determined she was likely pregnant due to the changes in her food-purchasing habits that she had been doing instinctually.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I read about that Target thing as well. I seem to remember someone who worked for them stated that their shopper data analysis algorithm was so accurate, it was able to predict a pregnancy's due date within about a five to seven days margin of error. I'm in the US, with conservative states passing all these draconian anti-abortion laws, I saw a ton of women searching for "period tracking" apps that didn't share data for fear of being tracked by the government. Someone should be able to use technology to track and maintain their own health without fear of big brother snooping around.

It's wild how much data is collected and what companies and governments can do with it.