Exactly, and this is additionally why it is predatory: you can’t opt out.

It’s similar to Facebook. If you never in your life ever created a profile, well, Facebook has one for you regardless.

The only way you can opt out of bluetooth beacons is to not bring your phone/smart watch/etc, or have either a hardware switch that disables your network functions or put it in a faraday cage. Also, because of data profiles and associations, if you’re walking into a store with your partner, expect that your partner should do the same or else it’s all moot. You’re associated with your partner and thus tracking and profiling occurs anyway.

No tinfoil hat needed. Retail stores are equipped with bluetooth beacons that tracks and monitors customer behavior. This in turn can be sold for targeted advertising. Another scary thought is that the tracking is so precise, it measures the distance your phone is from a product, including height. How high is the phone from the ground? The data points can be extrapolated to influence product placement: what products and prices influenced a customer to bend down and look at/interact with the product? How long were they in close proximity with the product? Based on the phone’s orientation, were they bent down to look at or passing by the product (indicating that they stopped for a separate reason and not necessarily for the product)? Did they buy it? Were they looking for coupons in my “retail store app” while next to the product, or somewhere else in the store? Where do customers often stop or gather in order to browse through coupons? Could we place Y products there? Where should we put the product in stores to maximize sales? What ads can we send to them as they arrive at the store? Based on aggregated data with the rich profile we built for this customer, are they likely to sign up for our rewards credit card? What is this customer’s income level? Have they purchased X product recently? What part of town do they live in? What products are popular there? Et cetera ad nauseum.

Tracking is so predatory. Makes me look at my smart phone with disgust as the years go by, and I periodically grapple with the decision if a smart phone is even right for me or if it’s time to stick to a computer and a truly dumb phone going forward.

Some public info about Bluetooth beacons: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluetooth-wireless-tracking-privacy.html

Want to find Bluetooth beacons? Simply install a Bluetooth scanner app from your phone and head to a store to see them.

Here’s how Shopify engages businesses on how to utilize Bluetooth beacons with their software package. Bought anything online? That site was most likely powered by Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/retail/the-ultimate-guide-to-using-beacon-technology-for-retail-stores

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That’s a good looking keyboard right there mate.

I hear you dude. That 10+ year reputation is what drove me to buy their stuff, along with all the glowing user recommendations.

I heard that you can make the rubber last longer on mice by periodically cleaning them to slow their chance of breaking down, but I never experienced the rubber actually separating. That happened to my spouse’s Razer mouse (heh, that rhymes).

But I suppose that, apart from this whole post’s focus on “as a service”, that possibly Logi products have begun to go downhill quite recently. I wouldn’t know, all of mine have been great. Sucks for your MX mouse, but I feel you on the uncertainty of buying future Logi mice.

Such a shame too because I always recommended the G502. I love the feel, the ergonomics, and the button placement. I love the customizeable weights you can swap in. I used to play with all the weights, but then over the years I took them all out and now use none. My aim got better in FPS games - I went from steaming hot garbage to just regular garbage LOL.

I’m going to watch a couple review videos of the G13 to see if it’s up my alley. And if yes, I’ll add that bad boy to my watch lists and pick up a used one if I can score it for a decent price.

That’s quality right there. You probably would have bought those key caps, but they just sent them to you for free. That’s going above and beyond, and that’s how you keep a customer. Noctua is all about that, and I’ll continue to buy their products and recommend them.

Such a shame, Logitech. You were great but now you’re turning into crap.

Dude, the G502 is such a great mouse. Mine has lived through so many years of gaming and is still chugging!

If you get ~7 years of life out of the M705, I would consider that to be quality since it would last through thousands of hours of usage. Any less and I would consider it a dud product, but that is certainly my opinion only there.

Never heard of the G13 before, so I looked it up and I think that’s pretty cool! This would have been a product I would have to try to see if it would fit my use case for gaming. A mini keyboard with a joystick seems cool, and admittedly I’m hovering my left hand in the air and trying to mimick what that would be like. Hard to conceptualize without actually trying it! I hope you got good use out of it, it does seem really cool.

If Logitech didn’t enshittify, they should’ve made their own version of the Power Glove. 😀 The Power Glove was way before my time on Earth, but man that would’ve been cool to see for PC.

When enough people are burned, that list will arise spontaneously. I’m sure there are some that are out there, but they probably are not well-known yet.

For example in the privacy community, Privacy Guides is one of the golden sources. I expect we’ll see something soon for products that avoid enshittification.

That’s a fair point. It’s interesting because this month I was considering upgrading my webcam to a 1080p 60fps one and certainly was going to consider them. I probably would have lightly researched a new Logi webcam and then bought it considering their track record and how wonderful my products have been.

I want to give companies my money in exchange for good products, but it’s weird! My morals won’t let me for some reason. It’s like I don’t agree with Logitech or something! Oh well! I’ll keep my money in my pocket and save it for a better product that doesn’t treat their customers like cattle.

Hello fellow GOG fan! I own 620 games on GOG, and I license 214 games on Steam. Granted some of those Steam games do not have DRM, so consider that an estimate.

Man you sound almost exactly like me lol. A lot of angry persons who have been burned by companies are becoming like us. What sent me over the edge was when Ubisoft threatened to shutdown their legacy activation servers, which would have led to me losing the DLC I purchased for my physical Wii U copy of Splinter Cell Blacklist. They backpedaled after significant fan backlash, but now I’ve been radicalized. I avoid “as a service” to the best of my ability and am deliberately hostile to these corporations.

Since we’re pretty much all in agreement that Logitech has enshittified with the Great Ones like Ubisoft, Hewlett Packard, and more, let’s talk about our last great products they made that we will no longer recommend! 😃

These are all my products that I love, and have been extremely high quality. All of them work just fine to this day!

• Logitech G502 Proteus Spectrum mice (I own two, bought in 2018 I believe and still using)
• Logitech C920 1080p 30 FPS webcam
• Logitech G613 Lightspeed Wireless keyboard (great keyboard I use for work, hate that the keys are painted and will eventually wear away)
• Logitech G603 Wireless Mouse (for work, works fantastic!)
• Logitech Litra Beam LED lights (I own two)

Oh Logitech. Why can’t you just make products we can own instead of following the greedy “As a Service”? Ah well! Bound to happen one day (Steam, please please don’t ever become public).

Holy crap I barely escaped. I needed an upgrade years ago and settled on the i7-12700k. After I ride this chip out I’m switching to AMD.

I really hope customers get justice in this debacle. We need a lawsuit now.

Apple: “It’s the best LLM we’ve ever shipped. We think you’re gonna love it.”

Happy cake day @ruud@lemmy.world ! Appreciate you hosting all us Reddit Refugees when the Reddit Third-Party API Exodus happened one year ago! And big shout out to you and the other volunteer mods and admins, across multiple instances, that put in their free time to stabilize Lemmy World during the massive uptick in user registration, handling the codebase, the upgrade challenges, the creepy CSAM bad actors last year, and saw us through all the intermittent downtimes we had periodically. Lemmy World has been super stable and reliable since then.

Reminder to all reading this: if you can, chip in and help with server costs for this valuable service. Decentralization FTW

I haven’t read the first run of the Amazing Spider Man comics (1960s) in over a decade, but I remember that Peter gained the knowledge to create webbing from the spider bite, and then applied science to create web shooters and cartridges. There’s so many comics out there I haven’t read any other Spidey comic, and probably got halfway through Amazing Spider-Man v1.

What’s Taters, precious?

I don’t think it’s worth spending the cycles trying to talk about or convince others to join the Fediverse - no one likes an evangelist.

Instead, state the problem and what the Fediverse aims to solve. If one is interested in the problem and is hooked by the solution, that person will seek it out.

Since you’re struggling to provide your own analogy, break things down to basics. Do you know what the problem of social media is? Do you know what the problem of centralization is? Do you know the problem of centralization under corporate or government control? Do you know how decentralization provides a solution to that problem?

If you can break those down and understand it yourself, you can use that as part of the solution. Try facing a mirror and answering the above questions aloud to yourself so you can hear yourself talk. If you can’t explain it, then you’re not ready to explain it to others, and certainly not ready to answer questions when people ask you about it. Analogies aid to the explanation, not substitute it.

State the problem to the person succinctly. Then the solution. It’s important to state those without bias or feelings. You can give anime examples later.

Example posed in a friendly, conversational, and nontechnical manner:

You’ve heard of some of the controversy around Twitter right? The problem with Twitter is that a controversial figure has purchased control over the product, made sweeping changes that are the opposite of Twitter’s mission and values, and has introduced disruptive functionalities that have significantly hurt the user’s experience. In other words, he’s made it much harder for someone to enjoy Twitter, and has made it easier for someone to get scammed or spread misinformation. Twitter users are kind of stuck unless they move to a different platform. But that’s tough because so many people use it.

The Fediverse is a new social media concept that’s come out, and it’s different from things like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. Fediverse is not controlled by any corporation, but by individuals all across the planet that run their own server. An example of a Twitter competitor in the Fediverse is called Mastodon. Mastodon let’s you Tweet, connect, like, share, etc. George Takei from Star Trek is on Mastodon! Since no one controls the Fediverse, the risk of some controversial figure moving in and buying it is extremely small because of how it’s designed. No corporate control, no rich people owning it, no ads, and it is solely focused on the users rather than profits. It’s basically run by volunteers. It’s new and growing, and probably something you should consider checking out if you’re interested. Lots of people started moving over to Mastodon after the recent Twitter controversies.

I don’t see this happening. Our organic bodies begin to dramatically deteriorate before we come anywhere close to age 100. We’ll have to stave off natural cellular deterioration with medicine and special treatments to prolong our lives now. None of those exist today - we only have surgeries to make ourselves look younger, and take certain steps to stay more healthy as we age. We haven’t beaten cancer, Alzheimer’s, etc. Being wealthy today doesn’t solve those problems.

Provided humanity doesn’t kill ourselves off by fighting against ourselves or losing the war against microplastics and global warming over the next 10,000 years, I see us migrating to a new form of existence. That may involve two branches: We become cyborgs, or we merge ourselves into the digital realm, effectively leaving our organic bodies completely behind.

Our advances in robotics and prosthetics is quite likely to be the more preferred approach. If we could keep our brains alive and somehow transplant our synaptic makeup safely into a new mechanical body, we’ll dramatically extend our lives (until natural brain cells begin to break down and we cease to exist or become someone entirely different).

The less likely approach is to upload ourselves into the digital realm, whatever that looks like. We already have a distributed, decentralized, and global internet. We’re experimenting with VR, and we’re starting to begin layering the digital world on top of the physical world via the use of Augmented Reality. Over time, perhaps we’ll be able to terraform the digital world and be able to achieve 1:1 digital likenesses of ourselves (an example would be seen in Sword Art Online, where humans put on a headset that transfers their consciousness into the Digital VR world where you can smell, taste, touch, etc, and would virtually be unable to distinguish the VR world from the human world). The brain after all is electrical impulses of prodigious complexity. We certainly should be able to replicate that ability, but the programming will have to dramatically transform into something we’ve never seen before. ChatGPT and “AI” are precursors to that evolution in our ability to one day emulate, and dare I say replicate, actual sentience. But we’ll need to build a new programming language that computers can understand and execute autonomous instructions that are not based on statistics or logical expressions - it would have to be similar to thinking, or true AI. We are nowhere close to that.

Unfortunately any of us here reading this won’t be alive when any of this happens, but that’s where I see humanity going. We won’t be able to extend our organic bodies due to organic decay. If we do not become cyborgs or somehow migrate our existence into the digital realm, then evolution is the next step. Humans would have to evolve over the next million years in order to have longer organic lives, or we’d have to be able to splice our genes with animals that can live longer like certain tortoises. Then we’d be a new branch of human that moves on from the homo sapien line.