Guys, what is the worst thing that could happen if you don't take measurements against big tech companies spying about what you are doing?

Some SWAT team breaking into your house at 6AM, confiscating all of your IT gear that you'll never see again until it's totally outdated.

That in turn might happen because some automated scanner thought you were storing some illegal material. Such as in the case of a father taking pictures of the private parts of his toddler to send them to a doctor for assessment of some unusual swelling.

The thing is.. as much as i dislike what they do, most of the times it doesnt matter. Incase ur a high target person though, the gouvernement could get all your information probably even location upto a some metres any time. Other problem is if the company gets hacked and ppl use ur information to imitate you or view your private stuff. Then again maybe the companies sell the data to the insurance company and they charge u differently according to it.. i think for the average Joe it is not soo important though because you will always have to think about avoiding any companies saving data of you and that can be bad on your mind aswell.

📏take measurements 📐

Just in case someone doesn't remember, what @Fast-Nop said is a real story and it happened relatively recently.

pretty big deal if you ask me. Human error, but on the scale of an entire government department. That's at least one of the things that could potentially happen. 1/100 000 chance, but still... not 0

@Hazarth The problem is that it was AI error, not human error, that no humans are involved in the loop, and that Big Tech refuses any sort of human support contact for clarification. That's because it would cost them money, and they prefer ruining their customers' (or rather victims') lives over that.

Your browser could slow down and YouTube could start spitting the same clips of game of thrones at you ?

Personalized ads. No probs? Sure, try explaining your wife how a misclick on a pop-up ad caused sex dating ads showing up on your screen for weeks, and how it's surely not bcz you are constantly using such services.

Also, ads of christmas trees for sale torturing you until mid-february, because you bought a christmas tree in some store at the beginning of Dec. No other ads - only christmas trees. Bcz if you bought one, you must be into this stuff and likely to buy a dozen more

You'll be arrested off the back of a neural network analysing your behaviour and algorithmically deciding it's suspicious, regardless of whether you're actually doing anything wrong.

@netikras I turn off personalization on all my accounts. I never see targetted ads from google. They may be doing some, but I don't see the missclick issue at all.

How to prevent such threats then? what you do to protect yourself?

@dIREsTRAITS Treat any non-OSS computer or smartphone as already compromised. Defend your browser maxing out uBlock Origin with anti-"social" filter lists. Don't use Facebook, Twitter and the like. Avoid any cloud storage that isn't end-to-end encrypted using OSS SW. Assume that unencrypted email isn't private.

For me and even most of my family non-IT end users, Windows turning into spyware was reason enough to abandon it in favour of Linux.