It's absolutely insane that this is legal. This type of spying is explicitly forbidden in the constitution of the United States of America, but since it's a private corporation it's suddenly okay? The FBI has been known to purchase information about consumers from private corporations. This is a back door around the 4th amendment. Actually since corporations are essentially governing by proxy, buying laws and legislatures, this is a constitutional violation.
They already did this with Youtube. I turned of Youtube history because I didn't want anyone being able to track what I watch. All of a sudden, Youtube's home page for my account was blank with a message that said "Turn on history if you want to see recommendations". I sat with that for a couple days, going to Youtube to check out channels I'd subscribed to. It wasn't the same. When I got to Youtube for some distraction, I want to discover something different from my usual stuff. So I delete my history weekly as part of "routine maintainence".
It's crazy to think that this level of intrusion is considered fair game. The way these behaviors are normalized is completely dystopian.
It's absolutely insane that this is legal. This type of spying is explicitly forbidden in the constitution of the United States of America, but since it's a private corporation it's suddenly okay? The FBI has been known to purchase information about consumers from private corporations. This is a back door around the 4th amendment. Actually since corporations are essentially governing by proxy, buying laws and legislatures, this is a constitutional violation.
Incremental changes have muffled the impact to most consumers sadly and as long as that works they'll keep doing it.
They already did this with Youtube. I turned of Youtube history because I didn't want anyone being able to track what I watch. All of a sudden, Youtube's home page for my account was blank with a message that said "Turn on history if you want to see recommendations". I sat with that for a couple days, going to Youtube to check out channels I'd subscribed to. It wasn't the same. When I got to Youtube for some distraction, I want to discover something different from my usual stuff. So I delete my history weekly as part of "routine maintainence".
That deletion strategy is useless. They can still retain that information indefinitely.
Just use the search bar.