Lazycog

Agreed, it's a good book.

My personal criticism is just that the author, at times, fails to look at the topic objectively due to his own personal grudge with the four from the time he had his own company.

But it doesn't ruin the book, the book is indeed good.

E: And good point about the downvotes

I had a similar experience. Some niche local groups only exist on facebook and that's why I had an account that I never deletes since making it like 15 years ago.

My feed was filled with sketchy ads and recommendations so I didn't use it. Kept in contact with some old friends via messenger and only used groups pretty much.

That all changed few months ago when facebook locked my account for "suspicious activity" and showed me a prompt after logging in stating I need to upload a government issued ID to unlock my account. I checked and made sure this is actual facebook and not some fake site I accidentally would have somehow entered.

"Suspicious activity" was me logging via the web browser on my phone using another teleoperator while traveling.

When I returned from traveling I suddenly was able to unlock my account with just my email. Took the chance and deleted my account.

Facebooks groups are amazing, but yeah, the price is your privacy. And I don't mean just email and your personal preferences, shits wild what they know about you and what/how they gather information about you.

If you are interested in reading about it:

The book "The Four" from Scott Galloway. I personally didn't like the authors bias on the matter but he summarizes it pretty well how/what facebook knows about you.

Edit: why would people downvote OP's question? It's a good question imo.

Appreciate the thorough explanations, thanks!

The last part is fucked up, yikes...

Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense for targeted ads for sure. Still a bit worried about hashtags being used for ads since I follow a lot of hashtags on mastodon and usually have a quite a nice "organic" feed compared to other social media.

Might be a stupid question, but can't threads just post ads as "posts" via activityPub? On mastodon they would appear as toots?

Was just remembering how reddit introduced ads as basically promoted posts and recall facebook doing the same.

I sure fucking hope not.

I believe so aswell, but there is lemmy.ml for example, which apparently is meant to stand for "marxism-leninism" in that specific instance (.ml is Mali's country TLD).

Definitely, good way to put it.

I switched from controls engineering to information technology - in industrial automation interviews not once was I asked to prove my knowledge about PLCs or anything like that, they trusted my education and experience.

The interviews in information technology were like "make us a working app for free before we have a second round of interviews" even after few years of previous experience in their specific field and a repository to show off my free-time projects.

I switched because I got tired of traveling, but holy shit I miss the job market of industrial automation. I still feel like I got more respect working in automation field than I have ever gotten working as a software developer.

This happened in Finland, but I didn't want to specify it to spark a universal conversation, which succeeded!

I know people from all around the globe deal with privacy issues and hoped that others would share their experiences.

This is another great idea. Similar to having extra email for spam.

That's the advice I've gotten here pretty much, and will probably deal with it in that way from now on!

It is sad that we have to do that, but don't think this will change any time soon.

Haven't looked into VOIP phone numbers before, thanks for the tip!

Could have been that too. I was polite and didn't fuss about it thankfully!