This is what I was trying to figure out, too. I feel like this should be automatic.

That’s fair. She’ll get it.

the politicians debating online abuse mean well

Let me stop you there

Fair enough. I guess I’m just overly sensitive to the broad-strokes assumption that any given thing is an AI “smoking gun” since I’m an em dash user.

(“it’s not just x, it’s y”, etc.)

Keep in mind, the AIs learned from us. So that’s a thing in AI responses because humans use that structure. Same with em dashes.

Go scold somewhere else.

If it’s altering snapshots, it’s not a reliable archive. Simple as that.

Yeah, Cruz is a terrible person and should be in prison, but this was clearly just a slip of the tongue. We should be mad at him about real things.

person is wrong

Someone points out person is wrong

Person admits they were wrong

Person still attacked by commenters

What do you want from them, ritual self-immolation?

Not even kidding, I think the fediverse is how message boards work on starships in Trek. Each ship has their own server, and as they pass within subspace range of one another, they federate. Probably most people even think it’s called “fediverse” because it’s how the Federation chats.

Hey, it’s still rising, it’s just like 11am.

“Why’s it red then?” Uh…smog?

Username checks out

I mean, people are dying. Including the people who didn’t pay for it. So, kind of a bigger deal than that.

Why might they be afraid of what an up-and-coming young Texas Democrat who pushes back on their co-opting of “Christian values” could potentially say? Gosh, what a mystery.

Y’all… they were doing this to Millie Bobby Brown as recently as 2020.

people were shocked that banks are businesses trying to maximize profits like any other business.

Because every ad they see talks about how respectable and responsible they are. Like I said above, they’ve spent billions trying to cultivate this level of obliviousness in their customers.

Still even if people are so ignorant that they are unaware of privacy issues, they have chosen to be willfully ignorant, because this issue has been talked about non stop for decades. For nothing to sieve in at some point, you have to be a special kind of willfully ignorant.

In our sphere, sure. But most people don’t live in our sphere. Most people don’t mainline tech news and privacy updates. A lot of “normal people” (i.e. people you meet dropping your kids off at school, or in line at the supermarket, or on a bus) would have trouble telling you the name of the company that made the phone they stare at for seventeen hours a day. Some of the smartest, most world-aware people I know couldn’t tell you the difference between “encrypted” and “password-protected.” The stuff that breaks through into the mainstream are the huge breaches, but the problem is always spun to be the hackers, or one guy in the IT department who did something wrong, or whatever, not the fact that they’re even collecting all of this data in the first place.

And this isn’t willful ignorance, it’s just not something they think applies to them. Maybe they bought the “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” line, but more likely they just don’t actively think about it at all. Like how, if you live inland, you probably rarely worry about tsunamis; they’re simply a reality, and they probably vaguely know about the danger, but they’re a fact of nature, there’s nothing they can do to change it, and it’s not a risk they face personally. That doesn’t make them willfully ignorant, it just means they think it’s something that really only matters to spies or whoever.

Even people that are very low information on technology, know that the Internet is a source of potential surveillance, and having your info on the internet in any form is a potential for being surveilled.

But usually only in the abstract. “Oh, as long as I just look for the lock in the top left of the browser, I’m ok.” They think the threat comes from hackers and foreign governments, not companies that make the funny cat meme service.

Everybody knows that all the big IT companies are trying to gather as much information as they can. And Amazon is right at the top among them.

No, I think you’re wrong about that, and I think that’s because–again–these companies have spent billions trying to convince people that they aren’t. Even in the rare cases that they do see a threat, they have completely the wrong idea about what the threat really is; think about those memes that go around from time to time saying “I hereby declare that Facebook doesn’t own my photos!” or whatever. Zuck doesn’t want their photos, he wants to be able to lock them and their friends in, he wants their personal data, and he wants exclusive, 24/7 access to their eyes so that he can cram personalized ads into them.

All of that advertising may not necessarily convince people that the company is good, but it might cast just enough doubt or confusion to get them to focus on the wrong issue.

And Amazon? If people have anything against Amazon, it’s probably just “oh, they’re trying to put mom & pop companies out of business!” (Which, in fairness, they are also doing). Do you think the average person knows that they even own Ring and Roomba and AWS? I would submit that a surprisingly large chunk of the population probably doesn’t even know that they own Alexa.

Not because they’re ignorant, just because (1) it doesn’t matter to them, and (2) they’ve been aggressively propagandized to not care.

Question is why they bought a Ring camera in the first place?

Probably because of marketing.

There is no way they can have been unaware that these gadgets can be accessed from outside.

(1) Clearly you’ve not talked to enough people outside the privacy-aware community. Absolutely they can have been unaware of that.

(2) They may well have known, but not known the scope, or not cared. If you’re having trouble with (for instance) porch pirates, you might not care about the privacy ramifications.

But it was only when the evidence was put right in their face they finally connected the dots?

Yes. When you don’t live and breathe this stuff, a lot of times that’s what it takes.

My mom used to use the same password for every service. It was a ten-letter password that she came up with in 1999, and she essentially never deviated from it; until I typed it in for her on haveibeenpwned and showed how many times it had been leaked. People who don’t care about privacy won’t care until they’re shown how it actually affects them.

So my answer is quite simple: Because they are stupid,

Profoundly uncharitable read on the situation. Are you “stupid” if you don’t know what you don’t know? We don’t have classes about this sort of thing in high school or anything. There are billions of dollars going toward telling people that sleazy products are actually great and companies actually care about their well-being, and only neckbeards like us on Lemmy spending $0 to tell them the opposite. If they’re not watching tech news because the regular news is too much, or because they have jobs and families and hobbies, or because they don’t know how to process or parse it, or just because they’re not interested and have never been convinced that they should be, they aren’t stupid, just propagandized.

and bought a sleazy product from a known sleazy company,

First of all, “sleazy” is a perfect word for this, and thank you for using it.

But second, keep in mind that for a lot of people, most companies are still responsible members of society; “pillars of the community,” and generally worthy of trust. It’s not because they’re dumb, it’s because they’ve been propagandized into believing it.

and when they found out it was in fact as sleazy as could be expected, they figured that maybe they didn’t want to to be voluntarily surveilled anyway.

People are waking up to the reality of big tech “convenience.” That’s a good thing. Don’t shoot at them for coming to their senses.

It’s kind of a weird game theory thing, because the industries affected aren’t consistently losing. A decision he makes on Wednesday can help the finance industry but hurt the tech industry, and then he can reverse it on Thursday and now the finance industry is tanking but the insurance industry is up. It’s tough to know who would work together to pull him out of office, because between any two given days, the people who have the money have different opinions on how he’s doing.

I can’t imagine “Discourse”'s branding will survive for long.

America really biffed it,

Pretty decent summary of American history, that. With few exceptions.