this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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"Incidental"—this is Meta we're talking about, and you can exchange them with any other technofacist and it still applies.
But I wholly agree with you that they know exactly what they are doing. This is how they get people to "participate" in their platforms and algorithms, whether they want to or not.
I don't disagree. I meant for users it is incidental. Most users probably wouldn't buy them with spying as the main purpose(they just also don't really care that it can spy). making them much more widespread than something where spying was the main use-case, making the problem worse.
And as someone else mentioned, once you did get it, the temptation for using it for spying is there for a user. Making it worse than e.g. a spy pen imo, as with that you'd need the intent to spy first, and then buy it, but with this, you buy it for whatever reason and then think "oh, I could just spy now" since you already own the device, which I'd argue leads to more overall spying, so to speak. Maybe you see a video online and go "oh, I can just do that, right now, no effort on my part, since I already own this device".
And for Meta it's like tracking cookies on crack