sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
No bio...
User ID: 636
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
No, I don't trust the notification because I don't see any mechanism that prevents microphone from working while not displaying the notification, those are completely different systems, and the only thing linking them is software. Which is extremely fallible. If I break the electric circuit, I'd trust the laws of physics to prevent the microphone from working.
That you think the mechanism is fallible doesn't mean there isn't one.
Doesn't have to be Facebook, could be google feeding some data into one of a myriad of data aggregators, and ad platforms just using the end result of that.
This is not how Google's business model works. Selling user data to other companies defeats the purpose. If you're seeing Facebook ads for stuff you talked about IRL, I guarantee that information doesn't come from Google.
phone manufacturers aren't those who profit from ads
Facebook isn't a phone manufacturer.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4hr ago
This isn't NIMBYs (who mostly don't want you to build halfway houses for criminals and/or the mentally ill, or dense pod housing, next to them)
That's the sanewashed position. The reality is that NIMBYs are against duplexes and fourplexes too.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4hr ago
Not untrue, but how many years one spends as a teenager? 4 years from 14 to 18 perhaps? Substantial but a minority fraction compared to time one is a kid, and not that large fraction of human lifespan.
Small children play in the yard with their dads. By the time they're six, they're old enough to play with friends on their own. Options for autonomous play are extremely limited in suburbia which means that kids basically play in front of the house on the driveway or, if the street is quiet enough, on the street.
Kids under sixteen rely on their parents to drive them to every single activity since they have no other means of transportation. That means those activities are usually planned by the parents too. So much for intellectual growth.
boredom is supposedly good for intellectual growth anyway
It's 2025. Nobody's going to be bored, they'll just scroll tiktok if there's no point going outside except when Mom drags them to soccer practice.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4hr ago
Indian food safety leaves a lot to be desired, but even Indians don't wear shoes in the house which a lot of Americans do.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
8hr ago
My friend, I live in a bedroom community of nearly a hundred thousand people. This is the reality of life in the bay area.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9hr ago
I live in a suburb right now and it's a 50 minute drive to the nearest proper city, where I can spend another 15 minutes looking for parking.
Looking at pics on the Internet is so far away from what any humans before the rise of the otaku would have recognized as "participating in culture" that I'm not even sure what you mean.
What exactly is the problem as an adult male?
OP's point is that there's no benefit to living in the suburbs as a single adult male and nothing to do. Is your rebuttal "that's not true, you can drive half an hour or more to a place with something to do, what's the problem"?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
9hr ago
Nobody checks any notifications bars when your phone is in your pocket or sitting on your table.
On Android, apps can't turn on the microphone at all while running in the background. Accessing it while running in the foreground requires a permanent notification while the foreground process is running. To start a background process, the app must be open, so it can't start a background process while the phone is at rest.
In any case, Android maintains an audit log of all microphone accesses. It would, again, be trivial for people to demonstrate that the Facebook app is accessing the mic while the phone is locked or at rest. Somehow, nobody has produced such evidence.
A tiny green dot is hard to miss.
I agree it's hard to miss, especially because (at least on Android) everything in the notification bar is monochrome (except I guess a low battery indicator).
Also, I am not entirely convinced there's no way to turn on the microphone (hardware) without showing the green dot (software).
This is the second time this week that someone has responded to my comment with an objection that I already covered in a grandparent.
This claim requires that Facebook et al have a backdoor that's never been detected in all these years.
I expect not reading from plebbit but I feel the bare minimum of engagement on this forum should be reading the conversation you are joining.
It's especially perplexing since you thought I was talking about granting microphone permissions at first, but somehow that's not a load bearing part of your argument and your confidence that I'm wrong seems unaffected.
It's be very easy to lay all these doubt to rest - make a hardware microphone mute switch, that physically (electrically) disconnects the microphone hardware. I'd trust that.
Hmm, so you don't trust the microphone notification because you're not able to look at your notification bar, but you do trust a switch which may not do anything (when's the last time you disassembled your phone?) and that might get switched while your phone is in your pocket. Let's say, that's not a typical perspective among consumers.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
14hr ago
If you've got a green microphone chip in your notifications bar because Facebook is listening to you, then it's not really a mystery if Facebook is listening to you or not and this conversation would be over.
However, this doesn't happen and nobody has produced an explanation of how it could happen without the OS notifying the user that the microphone is enabled.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17hr ago
Or when Obama and Bush told Europe the same about defense spending.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17hr ago
That was a clever use of Internet permissions, which were requested by the apps, rather than a covert usage of permissions that the apps weren't supposed to have. There's a difference between using a permission creatively and using a permission that you're not supposed to have.
If we're cherry picking just the nice suburbs, we're gonna have to cherry pick the nice urban neighborhoods too.
In my suburban neighborhood, the nearest park is nearly a mile away and requires crossing a five lane state highway. That park is about 150 feet square.
Correct. Where do you think you find such adults? They move to the suburbs.
How old are you and where are you from? The situation is very different today. I know there are young kids on my street because I see them with their parents, but they do not play outside. My parents live in a neighborhood a few teenagers on the block and they are similarly never seen. The suburban reality today is phones and extracurriculars.
Assuming "bikeable" means that you can get somewhere you want to be, I wouldn't be so sure. The suburban housing division I grew up in was bikeable in the sense that you can bike around the subdivision and the streets are pretty quiet, but if you even wanted to get to the mall you'd have to bike on a 45MPH road without a bike lane. Urban cores don't even have roads with speed limits like that these days.
More options
Context Copy link