I used Linux back in the 90s as my primary OS. They were simpler times. Since then I have used BeOS, various versions of Windows and (primarily) MacOS.
I am seriously thinking of going over to Linux as my primary OS because of all the TechBro “AI” bullshit that Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Google are trying to ram down our throats.
The bottom has dropped out of the OEM software licence market. Microsoft have to find a different way of making money. Their loss-leading hardware sales have not borne fruit so they are getting desperate.
All they have left is services, which means that the only way the can actually make money is selling out their customers private information.
There are legitimate uses for vehicle telemetry being stored by the vehicle and uploaded to the manufacturer.
Identifying unexpected behaviour under certain driving conditions and being able to contact emergency services in an accident are two important examples. Remote diagnosis in the case of a breakdown is another.
None of these uses include selling the data to third parties or using the data to create a profile of the vehicle owner.
They all do. Google search is one big primitive Digital Assistant. Apple’s Siri is less functional than its predecessor Voice Control. Amazon’s product recommendation algorithm and Alexa are also successful digital assistants.
Meanwhile the YouTube algorithm, Netflix, and Metas recommendations are notoriously frustrating, pumping out irrelevant recommendations and obfuscating constant that you actually want to consume.
Microsoft haven’t had any effective Digital Assistants to date and must they feel like they are being left behind. Their attempts to emulate successful product from other companies are either unnoticeably irrelevant or laughably bad. Even the terrible content recommendations of Netflix and YouTube keep people hooked.
‘Data Detectors’ in MacOS are just as bad. Just like how sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes a string of numerals is just a string of numerals.
It is not a phone number or a flight number or a ticket number, it is just a string of text that happen to all be numerals.
I asked Apple Support how to disable data detectors in Preview (MacOS’s native PDF and image viewer) so I could highlight some part numbers without MacOS trying to make a FaceTime call and they told me to use Adobe Acrobat instead! The problem is that Acrobat is worse.
The problem is that they are not actively asking permission.
They are technically legally asking permission through the EULA, but nobody reads these.
Apple do this differently, they require the user to opt in for each of their services, and except for a pitiful amount of storage, the user has to pay for a useful amount of storage. This makes the user the customer, instead of the product. They could make it easier to roll-your-own “cloud” storage by NAS, but I assume that it isn’t worth their effort.