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To answer your question about the insurance thing, yes. Yes, that is a thing that is happening today. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
To answer your question about the insurance thing, yes. Yes, that is a thing that is happening today. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
The concern is what other pieces of information are they collecting, and when and who do they share that information with. Does it also collect data on what places you visit, or what kind of potentially controversial information you look up. People are concerned about things like visits to a hospital making its way to their employer and insurance against their will, or a trans person being outed by the ads they are served in front of their family, or maybe that the police will knock down their door because their GPS falsely placed them at the scene of a crime. Or what if they live in an actual fascist regime, and that government comes knocking because they searched for something verboten. Even aside from all that, all this data is inherently your’s, and yet all these companies collecting it are just taking it from you without your explicit knowledge or consent and without you seeing even a dime or what a quick search tells me is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Also you’re allowed to plead the fifth on the origin of the income IIRC, though honestly that’s just as likely to get you looked at by the FBI/local constabulary.
I use Microsoft rather than Apple because I don’t use any Apple products and am significantly less informed on the level of tracking they employ, and I use Microsoft rather than Google because Microsoft in in charge of the operating system I use and is making my user experience measurably worse with the amount of crap they run and track by default. Google on the other hand only tracks what I do over the internet, and even then not all of it (though they actually do probably get everything I do since I haven’t worked up the motivation to switch to Firefox yet). I also will say I actually don’t much mind someone tracking what parts of a website I visit, such as what products I view on Steam or Amazon, so long as I have an actual account that tracking is attached to.
It is also important I feel to emphasize I am only giving examples, hate all involuntary tracking, and hope that any theoretical anti-tracking laws would be broad enough to stop this kind of behavior from every company rather than just a few.
I won’t argue that tracking on mobile isn’t more important, but I will argue that it shouldn’t be allowed at all, or at least not without an informative opt in for those systems who insist on having one. And when I say informative I mean telling the user exactly what information is being gathered, why, how often, and who else can see or gets sold it.
The reason is that windows is used on nearly 3/4 of all desktop computers (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/), but that doesn’t change the question of ‘why the fuck should anoybody be allowed to do that?’ Also I would call Linux at least mainstream parallel, in that I would guess most people have at least heard of it, and it doesn’t inherently track your activity.
That’s where the reasonable expectation of privacy provision usually comes into play. It is already illegal to go up to the window of someone’s home and take pictures of them, why then is it legal for companies like google to gather information about your activity, such as browsing habits, without asking or even notifying you. Microsoft is another really bad offender here, modern versions of Windows collect and transmit massive amounts of telemetry regarding everything from what hardware you’re using to what programs you run and how often, just as a basic part of the operating system.
Wait really, they’re adding Red Rescue Team!? Didn’t Nintendo just release the remake of that game recently.
Oh no, it was four years ago, it feels like it was more recent than that.