If I recall that leak contained some serious stuff including a rape and some people planning some sort of heist.
I'm dreading the "I told ya so" from relatives.
However, I have changed my mind through a lengthy process of attrition of possible explanations.
Recently my wife was around her friend who was having a vertigo spell. We talked about it when we met. None of us searched about it. Lo and behold my YouTube feed has videos on how to mitigate vertigo.
It's possible that they transferred information across two phone devices that came in close proximity, the owner of one who has a history of vertigo. But even that is a stretch, why transfer 'vertigo' specifically ?
Again, while the simplest explanation is the most tempting one, we just have to consider that Google has an absolutely stunning amount of information on any of us. Like, it definitely knows your friend is your friend. It knows what your friend searched for recently, and it knows you met and spent some time together. So of course it makes sense to show you videos about some stuff that it marked as "interesting" for them. They are probably getting videos for stuff that you have looked up recently, whether you talked about it or not.
This friend has suffered from vertigo chronically, it was not a new one off. My wife's and her friend's phones have been close proximity many many times before. It's certainly odd that Google would recommend vertigo only after a vertigo spell happened in the presence of my wife. None of the three searched for vertigo.
Phone motion sensors detecting a vertigo spell ? Well that's a possibility, but I doubt Google would be running such a detector 24x7, seems too expensive, unless the opportunity to show a timely ad is lucrative enough to cover the cost.
Although none of the three searched for vertigo, the friend may have searched for her pharmacy to refill her meds.
This is not the only incident. I have come to believe what I now believe about this eavesdropping, after a long period of whittling out competing hypotheses. I would usually file these incidents under confirmation bias. But these have happened just too many times.
A quantative Bayesian analysis would have been the right thing to do. On that count I am delinquent. I will, however, grant you this, human intuition is terrible at Bayesian analysis and tends to see significant patterns when there are none.
I also separated identity linked activities like banking from other activities via a separate device with VPN.
The few ads that make it through my setup are usually generic bottom of the barrel ads for people in my region. Feels nice.
It's much more likely that they aren't innocent because:
1. There's no evidence contradicting the eavesdropping charges
2. It's likely that Google paid to avoid court discovery of evidence for their wrongdoing, not because "it's cheaper"
3. While the settlement is cheap, the litigation costs for Google would hardly be higher if the won. Moreover, reputational gains from winning the lawsuit would justify paying a higher price for litigation even if it exceeded settlement costs (besides, almost any amount is "cheap" for Google).
anyhow both our NAS died on the same weekend, across the country from eachother; his has bad drives, mine had a bad PSU; unrelated. However, we were discussing switching to dell servers and SAS drives, as they're basically "infinite lifespan" compared to our use cases. I asked, forgetting that DELL have BMC/built in boards for SAS, if he had a SAS card, as i had one, that uses the cables that have 1 plug on the card side, and 3-4 plugs for drives on the other, and that i had ordered it for my "make a PC a NAS" project, but wasn't using it anymore.
I was already on amazon on my computer looking for a kitchen cart. i was idly scrolling around while on the phone, after all the above was said. https://i.imgur.com/vBLntih.png
yeah. So i bought the card and cables on ebay five years ago, the card and cables do nothing for me, only for my friend (potentially, but Dell comes with SAS ready to go, no cables needed), and i last looked at this style of cables 5 or 6 years ago. I haven't searched amazon for "replacement" parts or NAS gear on my side, either.
This is such a hilarious coincidence!!!!
tokyobreakfast•1w ago