Yesterday my older brother sent me a text about a new gadget he recently acquired in his ceaseless (and annually very justified) quest to perfect his hurricane preps…
We had a little back-and-forth about it, and then I forgot about it and went on with my day. Later in the evening, though, I went on Amazon about an unrelated matter, and…
I’m reasonably sure I never saw the name “Jackery” before yesterday, so it caught my eye when I otherwise might not have noticed that some bot somewhere is reading my mail over my shoulder. Not surprising but I can’t say I appreciate the attention.
A few years ago, my neighbor was operating a rented track hoe for hire when a drive pump died. While standing around discussing it, the customers smart phone went off. He checks it to find advertisements for track hoe drive pumps! (((They))) are ALWAYS listening!
I’m hoping my flip fone is too retarded for spying.
Joel, if you have an Apple smartphone, yes it is listening to you. That’s because the virtual assistant your phone has, works by waiting for a wake word (Hey, Siri!) and then answering your question. Also, Third-party apps like Amazon use the mike to listen to you, and the app will make suggestions based upon what it hears.
You can stop this by going into the app settings and turning off the mike permission for the Amazon app, and you can also disable the virtual assistant at the same time.
I think your brother made a good choice in getting a Jackery BTW. I’ve had a Jackery for the past several years and love it.
Dont know by which device you back-and-forthed with your brother, but unless you are using a privacy email service (eg Protonmail), your emails are indeed being read, processed, and sold to all comers. I dearly hope that some day someone strings up all these subhumans responsible.
He’s right, use protonmail for more (not complete) privacy. And I use Brave browser with Nord VPN. Every bit helps.
My wife scans the intertubes on Apple devices for clothing and accessories all the time, I never do yet every morning it is I who am deluged with offers on my mail system which is android/Thunderbird/Firefox.
Best we can figure is that the snoops get our IP from the router and flood every device that uses said router.
Making a darned good case to pay (ugh!) Nord VPN to set up a non-traceable or foreign IP. Might just do that next time my youngest (IT manager for good size University) comes to visit. Sigh!
You’re just now realizing this?