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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36063172
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Corporations have been already making profiles of various types for a while now in the form of adtech, social media, data brokers, people search websites, credit scores, devices and services that harvest sensitive and intimate data (e.g. mobile phone apps, watching habits from smart TVs, driving data from cars).
Our society has been set up for mass surveillance in a thousand different ways as a form of social control and dominance by those who wield power.
It's time people realize that privacy is a right instead of normalizing abuses of consent.
Yep.
And if anyone doubts this, 15 years ago I had made a tool that created these types of profiles as a proof of concept.
I had scraped tons of subreddits, then you could pass in a user and based on both their subreddits and key words would categorize users across a few axes. That was just using naïve bayes, but worked pretty well.
The AI is just much much better at natural language processing to pull out more detailed info about patterns.