You'll see them listed at the bottom of the thread. If nothing else, I was happy to bring attention to other good people who are raising the alarm about Big Tech. While it didn't go viral like the thread it's responding to, it still brought back some good comments. I went onto Twitter yesterday and banged out my response in real time (here's my original Twitter thread). I guess I was a little sensitive, having just been called a conspiracy theorist for my Apple column last week. Oh, the poor benighted dear, thinking that a device might be listening in: he's fallen into a conspiracy theory, a rabbit hole, believing the Big Tech companies are doing something sinister. There's a certain condescension in that phrase. What's more, Reeves writes, anyone warning about audio surveillance is promoting a 'conspiracy theory.' Reeves begins with the obvious question - 'Is your phone listening to you?' - and then flatly declares, no. While it's good to see people gaining greater awareness of surveillance, the thread started off on the wrong foot and left a dangerous gap in its explanation. Several people sent it along to me, too: 'Have you seen this?' Over a quarter-million likes, and over a hundred thousand shares. Reeve's thread 'won Twitter,' as the kids say. How did the surveillance gods do it? Reeves gives a clear and accessible explanation of how adtech surveillance can tell who you're with - by shared IP address and GPS proximity - after which the algorithms hammer you with ads for products that your family buys. The ads, for the toothpaste brand his mother uses, started appearing just after his visit. Reeve posted a thread about getting toothpaste ads after visiting his mother. With 'Apple is rotting' freshly published, I was interested to see a somewhat related message go hugely viral on Twitter. I wrote back in January, in Why I'm losing faith in UX, that UX now often stands for 'user exploitation.' Apple's Live Photos fits the pattern perfectly. In other words, Apple is showing all the signs of the user-exploitative design that Facebook, Google, and Amazon have been practicing for years. My point wasn't to criticize anyone who likes the feature, but rather to examine Apple's strangely horrible UI design - it's very difficult to turn off Live Photos - and to show how Apple's business model is perfectly aligned with keeping the feature activated. But I found the negative feedback instructive because it mostly boiled down to one idea: 'But I like this feature.' The column, you may remember, focused on Apple's Live Photos, a default setting on iPhones that captures a 3-second video, with sound, every time you think you're just taking a photo. On the other hand, a number of encouraging notes also came in, and some new subscribers as well (welcome, if you're among them!). (Apparently I need to brush up on computational photography before I'm qualified to question what Apple is doing.) Last week's column, Apple is rotting, drew a surprisingly negative response: a wave of newsletter unsubscribes, as well as emails and social media comments: 'hyperbolic clickbait,' 'conspiracy theory,' and the inevitable 'aaaaactually' guys. I've heard it said before, but this past week I experienced it. Be careful about writing anything negative about Apple.

Iphone listening to me