I don't use facebook but HN has censored many of my comments over the years and shadow-banned multiple accounts. Information is dangerous.

Primary source: "persons familiar with the matter".

Ahh, well I don't know or care who would be familiar with your observation skills. Im asking for data, do you have that or not?

Do you think you'll be able to opt out of location tracking with google's smart glasses?

This was actually one of the first times/places Google really upset me from a privacy standpoint, back in 2012 or so: I had Google Glass, Explorer Edition, and it's software was written to upload any photo you took to Google Photos. As an Android device with USB support, you could download the photos direct on a PC, and delete them before it did so. However, if it had Wi-Fi and power and it had photos, Google uploaded them without consent.

They repeatedly refused to offer an option to disable photo sync, even when they added a whole settings bundle to manage the sync settings. (Essentially, they started letting you tell it to upload photos even over cellular data, but still neglected to add a "just don't upload the photos automatically" option.)

Google is already tracking my location through my phone (which I don't mind, I love looking at my location history and stats).

The general dismissal of "conspiracy theories" as being categorically untrue and the realm of insane people is such a tired notion. Happily for the power structure, it is the very notion they hope we all parrot. Countless comments here and in similar threads start with some preamble about not believing in conspiracy theories, but...

People all over the world are engaged in conspiracies. A theory is an attempt to understand a complex reality. Anybody who thinks that governments ever cover up wrong-doing is a conspiracy theorist. Do you believe that your government ever lied about something? This whole insistence on not bearing the "label" is so mind-numbing. Can we get past the superficiality of name-calling and talk about reality?

Of course, we sit around and say conspiracy theories can't possibly be true because of vaccine+autism and flat earth. End of story. Well it turns out there are links between vaccines and developmental disorders, but maybe those fears are overblown by scared parents (yeah, don't look too closely). You can argue that it's a worthwhile risk to take for the preservation of civilization. But to say there is no link is false.

The world is full horror being perpetrated by powerful people. But we were taught by the evening news that conspiracists are whackos. One thing I've learned is that if the media repeats something over and over again in order to imprint it into your brain, it's probably because there is an agenda behind it and not because it's the good old truth.

I think that's the biggest issue: these devices intend to remove every moment of contemplation and critical thought we might otherwise employ to pull ourselves out of the desperately worsening situation we face. At least the television stayed in your living room and you were compelled to leave that room and interact with people in order to remain a living person. Now we just carry the TV around with us and it's more addictive than ever.

Not necessarily, since we now live in a world where your every movement, action, relationship, and communication is intercepted and analyzed. Your thoughts are next. We don't need microchips because our phones are our microchips, but we may get them anyway, for "security" (that's security of government against its people of course). Things change when we have autonomous drone swarms flitting across our cityscapes and nanobots picking away at our insides. Do you believe it is possible to control a person's will? These are different times, and the life that "keeps ticking along" is not necessarily for any of "us".