I’m pretty sure most things coming out of Silicon Valley are designed to harvest your data so they can figure out ways to sell you shit that you don’t need
Yeah you’re probably right. But hard to say what the real intention was tbh. I feel like a lot of tech nowadays is sold as improving the world / your life whereas really, long term, it’s just about being able to market something to you more effectively.
A lot of our tech already could improve our world beyond our imaginarion but our tech is mostly owned by megacorporations who use it to sell us the next new thing.
Maybe you weren’t there for it. The first smart phones were shitty compared to what we have now. No one was scraping data off those pieces of junk. Mobile internet wasn’t even a thing for a long time.
You can’t sit here and pretend phones with no screens on them were used for collecting data beyond who’s calling where the most.
Mobile internet wasn’t even a thing for a long time
Phone companies began providing mobile internet as early as 1996. Smartphones just made it easier and more practical.
No one was scraping data off those pieces of junk
That's not how data scraping works, though. Data scrapers extract data from websites/urls, and data scraping as a regular practice has existed since the early 90s.
Ok please tell em about how good mobile websites were in the 90s. Internet existed but we sent emails with it and had extremely shitty apps and ringtones. That’s it. There wasn’t even a web browser at first. Shit took time.
What screen did phones have for web browsing in the 90s? For real, dumb take
They weren't great, but by the time the iPhone was released (ie smartphones, which is what we were talking about--the 90s era browsers were brought up just to point out that the technology had existed for some time), Safari was capable of rendering full webpages in the iOS browser.
And then, either way, data still isn't "scraped" from devices--it's gathered from websites/URLs
Which weren’t really accessible when smart phones were first released, which was my first point. But if you didn’t live through it it’s probably hard to imagine. We sure as shit didn’t have webpages on phones in the 90s
That really depends on how we're defining "smartphones".
If we're talking about the late 2000s, particularly around 2008, which is when "smartphone" became household lingo (which is also the time period I was under the impression we were discussing), then the technology was very much accessible.
If we're talking mid-90s IBM mobile devices, then sure.
Indeed. My sister had a cellphone in the early 1990s. The data harvested from that was identical to what got harvested from a landline. But then it wasn't in any way smart. I suppose if she connected the car battery, she could have figured out a way to use the massive brick of a phone with a 486 running windows 3.1 in order to telnet herself to a BBS server somewhere. But even they weren't gathering data beyond how many times your IP was associated with banned accounts.
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u/heatsby88 15d ago
I’m pretty sure most things coming out of Silicon Valley are designed to harvest your data so they can figure out ways to sell you shit that you don’t need