Sad, isn’t it? I saw this coming many years ago, as I’m sure many of you did. We create so much metadata in our lives, both physically and digitally evident, that our past and future behaviors can be observed at a level of detail only previously imagined in dystopian fiction.

We learned about the government’s domestic surveillance programs from Snowden over 13 years ago.

About ten years ago, I learned about fiber optic and WiFi sensing techniques that would make the hair stand up on the back of most people’s necks.

14 years ago, stories were written about a pregnant teen whose parents were sent coupons from Target for baby items, because Target had automatically marked the girl as pregnant because of her shopping habits.

Computers, vehicles, and software that we pay for have so many built in tracking mechanisms that I think circumventing them would make you more of a surveillance target at this point than not.

I know people try to rationalize the whole “I said something near my phone and Facebook gave me ad impressions for it” as simply the algorithm finding a strong signal in your browsing data, but I’m fully convinced that Meta apps are listening on iOS, even with the screen locked.

Those who enable these sorts of things should feel shame. You’d have to be a complete asshole to do this stuff to fellow humans just for money.