Recent comments in /f/todayilearned

SCMtnGuy t1_j6evf77 wrote

Reply to comment by BigJayPee in TIL that modern store mannequins can now record video, sound and automatically analyze demographic data and customers reactions to products from facial expressions analysis by human8264829264

You mean the online shopping that collects and aggregates more data on you than even the most advanced spy mannequin could ever hope to do?

I guess if you decide you can't win, you might as well surrender...

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SCMtnGuy t1_j6eus5i wrote

Reply to comment by human8264829264 in TIL that modern store mannequins can now record video, sound and automatically analyze demographic data and customers reactions to products from facial expressions analysis by human8264829264

These beacons are also sometimes used in window displays, seasonal displays, end of row displays, and other non-mannequin ways, so it's not just mannequins you have to worry about. Shopping malls and grocery stores are also turning into marketing panopticons. Basically, everyone in real life wants to imitate the level of customer spying Amazon can achieve, and it gets buzz with senior management because it promises enhanced revenue. I suspect it's actually mostly useless garbage data, honestly, but I do my best to deny data harvesting from me anyway.

It sucks, though... I shouldn't have to be at war with my own consumer electronics products, yet I am. Keeping up with the ways in which advertisers and marketers, and all their middle men, abuse access to my information is tiring, and many days I feel like just chucking my phone into the nearest ravine and telling everyone if they need to get ahold of me, write me a letter, the ancient on-paper kind.

This is especially depressing to me, personally, because I was on the team that developed the first successful fully integrated digital cell phone controller IC. All of us engineers were enthusiastic about it and imagined a future of information at your fingertips, the greatest library of human knowledge in every pocket, and the positive effects that this democratization of information access would have. But, this was before the rise of surveillence capitalism, before gatekeeping on technical knowledge (go fuck yourself, Elsevier) and before the new cold war of social media driven disinformation campaigns.

Now it's all garbage, just a big, sad pile of bullshit information being jacked from everyone and uselessly twaddled with "AI" and "Machine Learning" algorithms to produce dubuous marketing information that primarily serves to justify legions of bullshit jobs, in the Graeber sense of the word.

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human8264829264 OP t1_j6etho0 wrote

Reply to comment by BillTowne in TIL that modern store mannequins can now record video, sound and automatically analyze demographic data and customers reactions to products from facial expressions analysis by human8264829264

The same as putting security cams, so just a sign at the entrance that the store is under surveillance. It would depend on the jurisdiction but for Canada that's what they said in the course.

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GatoradeNipples t1_j6etcwi wrote

Reply to comment by shutz2 in TIL in the 1980s Monty Python got much of its exposure to the US through PBS, because of CBS censoring parts of "The Holy Grail" in a 1977 broadcast. This upset the comedy troupe, prompting them to withdraw the broadcast rights. by AnthillOmbudsman

>The original version (which is also seen in the "And Now, for Something Completely Different" movie) has the prince die of cancer, but for some reason, a censor at the BBC decided that was unacceptable, so the Flying Circus version, has an obvious overdub saying "gangrene" instead of cancer.

Cancer used to just be sort of generally taboo to talk about, for whatever reason.

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