Last week, I got hit by a car while riding my bicycle. You won't believe in how many colors an upper arm can shine. Anyhow, I took a picture of the arm, shared it to a friend on WhatsApp and promptly got a newsletter from Pinterest promoting tattoo posts. I do not have the Pinterest app on my phone, barely use it otherwise and would never search for tattoos since I'm just not interested.<p>I've been trying to find out since then where and how Pinterest might have gotten my blue/red/yellow/green arm picture from to analyze it, interpret it and link it to my account. They might be able to search my friend's phone's pictures (in case he's got the app which I'm not sure) and link the picture back to my account. Spooky though.
I had a related thing happen a couple of months ago: I started getting some lower back pain that I thought might be kidney stones based on a couple of Google searches. Went to my doctor, who prescribed a muscle relaxant, which I got at the pharmacy across the street. It went away.<p>Over the next few weeks I got several robocalls on my cell phone from a pain clinic offering me relief for my "chronic pain", so it was either triggered by my online searches or my doctor's office or pharmacy sold off my private information.
> Indeed, large sections of the site's privacy policy were updated overnight.<p>So basically you get caught, so you change the rules. Companies shouldn't be able to violate their own privacy policy, or say they can change it at any time without any warning, especially retroactively - which usually these things are covered in the privacy policy. What use is that?! Why bother having a policy at all?
One of my "wake up" moments was when I searched for the phone number of a local physical therapy office on Google. Within the day, I started getting Youtube video recommendations for massage techniques to relieve shoulder pain.<p>Google and all of its employees who make products like this are on the absolute wrong side of history. Society will only take so much before breaking; they need to figure out their business model, and fast.
Further proof, as if any was needed, why other countries require something like the GDPR, backed up be significant penalties, and well-resourced enforcement.<p>It won't happen in Australia though, as we are governed by fools who barely understand technology, and if they need to, rely on the representations of business to make any decisions.
I use DuckDuckGo, XMPP, ownCloud, Firefox with bunch of privacy enhancing extensions... My main phone is Maemo based, and I keep one with LineageOS and microG (so no Google Play Services) around as well. I access Facebook and Twitter only via webapps, with isolated wrappers like FaceSlim on mobile. Not only I feel somewhat safer about my data - battery usage, speed and user experience is so much better! Win-win :D