Some years ago in the Netherlands, I was cycling home through a pitch black cycling path covered by trees (so not even moonlight) with my very decent bike light illuminating the path ahead of me.

Before I could even process that there was another cyclist coming towards me, a dark figure zips past so closely that I feel their jacket brush my left hand. It startled me so much that I needed to stop and catch my breath. I could only imagine what would have happened if I had hit him head on with us both going 25 km/h.

I’m curious to hear how that incident was my fault.

People are insufficiently conscious of their visibility. Last night, in the dark and rain, a jogger came running full speed to cross a crosswalk from a dark wooded area between buildings who was completely wearing black. I would have hit her if it weren’t for the two inches of white socks that extended above her black sneakers which allowed me to slam the brakes just a moment before.

I know it can be hard to introspect about your own visibility. My partner has pointed out to me how to be better visible when I go out on my bike. More people should think about it.

The non-stop chimes and beeps and spoken alerts in cars in South Korea is absolutely maddening. With these constant distractions, there’s absolutely no way this makes driving safer.

Imagine passing a speed limit sign that warns of an upcoming speed bump. It will immediately start loud beeping because you’re now speeding as you roll out, while simultaneously speaking out loud what the new speed limit is, while simultaneously also saying there’s a speed bump, all while your music and navigation play as well.

Thank goodness this was vetoed.

Isn’t that exactly what OP’s screenshot is depicting?

Connecting a classic (non-Google TV) Chromecast to a new WiFi (or heaven forbid a hotel WiFi with a capture portal) was always such a pain. And casting over networks without mDNS is flaky at best and otherwise downright impossible.

By contrast, I’ve loved taking along my Chromecast with Google TV to hotels, along with:

• A VPN client installed it already,
• An Android phone that can create a WiFi AP while connected to the hotel WiFi,
• A Bluetooth speaker and my Bluetooth headphones paired to it so I get great audio as well.

This has been a complete gamechanger and a genuine upgrade over yesteryear’s Chromecasts.

Maybe Wise? I suppose it depends on your needs as not a whole lot of people use Wise.

Apple doesn’t care about your privacy. They care about their image of caring about your privacy.

What do you do with CDs? Genuinely curious about how they can be used in 2024 and surprised artists still have any printed.

I absolutely love Windows with the Linux subsystem. Coming from Mac it’s genuinely terrific to not have to mess around with homebrew. Incredible to see how Windows came from being comically inferior to surpassing Apple as there has been absolutely no progression there in the last decade.

It would be better if direct sales were allowed, but unfortunately dealerships are required by law in almost all US states. The shady bit is how Tesla got one of the few exceptions and continues to be exempt despite being among the leading car manufacturers in the USA. All other leading manufacturers are required by state laws to sell their vehicles through dealerships.

Tesla’s NCAS chargers only began to allow non-Teslas to use it from 2019, so this is kind of recent history in terms of car ownership and network coverage.

That hasn’t been my experience, but perhaps regulations are stricter in the EU.

Regarding the sales process: in Tesla’s early days, they received an exception to the requirement for needing to use dealerships. Generally this is very shady and is outright unfair towards other car manufacturers—even Rivian didn’t get this same special treatment because lawmakers saw how Tesla abused it.

Tesla’s growing monopoly on charging networks isn’t something to be proud of, in my opinion, and neither is their proprietary charging cable. We need open standards.

Also, Tesla’s mileage estimates are notoriously exaggerated. Perhaps technically you can get the claimed range if the entire trip is downhill…

The brakes broke, so I guess technically it could be a “break failure.”

Whoa, the owner acknowledged that the weather was to blame, not Tesla?!

Allow me to clarify:

• Limited support for AirTags has been added to Android, that is the context of the posted article and the experience you are describing.
• Apple neither supports account access on Android devices or provisions access to their tag network on behalf of linked accounts, so unless you have an Apple device, you cannot stipulate that a tag that belongs to you.

Consequently, the solution offered by Google appears to have been effectively built without Apple’s support. Goggle’s added support for AirTags despite Apple’s cooperation—and support for other tracking devices—is a net positive for privacy.

Yes, users have begun to be alerted of trackers—this is the recent change by Google as it relates to this post. An ongoing issue is, to my knowledge, that there’s no way to identify what kind of device it is. Goggle’s instructions literally suggest taking a screenshot of the serial number for later reference.

Android has no way of knowing if a tag is “unauthorized” because Apple does not provision access to their tag network. You could, in principle, ignore tags that you know about, but you’d have to do it by identifying it by some arbitrary hexadecimal GATT ID.

As always, Apple wants to keep it that way, because it gives a poor experience on Android.

Theoretically (and I might be wrong about this), without attempting to reverse engineer how Apple assigns these codes, there would be no to differentiate AirTags, AirPods, iPhones, etc.

We’re up in arms about the discontinuation of a 12-year-old security camera? I think 12 years of support is more than reasonable.

There is a much more sinister issue that Google is trying to resolve with this: it’s currently possible to stalk somebody by placing a tracker fob in their bag or on their car, so long as you know the victim’s device doesn’t support it.

Suppose some creeper with an iPhone is stalking a victim with an Android phone. So long as they use an Apple AirTag, the victim will never know they have a tracker trailing them wherever they go. And in reverse, the issue is the same.

Apple isn’t concerned about this, because they hold a monopoly in the market they care most about and can leverage this as an iPhone-only feature. After all, so long as you have an iPhone, you’ll be warned about an AirTag you don’t own following you. Apple wants to leverage this as an exclusive safety feature and have no intention of allowing other devices to do the same.

Apologies for providing this background as I know that this goes against the circle jerk of accusing Google of infringing our privacy. Feel free to disregard this context of it being beneficial to our collective privacy.

As somebody who is very deeply integrated with ad integrations that include the ones listed in the article—AdWords and AdMob—there are no insights provided to me as an advertiser or any other bidder regarding individual data. Perhaps the EFF would like to research this topic in some more detail.

There is simply no data for me to obtain, no insights for me to dig into, no aggregated collections for me to unpack, no anonymized groups for me to attempt to drill into. With honest sincerity, I just don’t know what the EFF is trying to accomplish with that article. I genuinely feel that this article is taking a native approach to the creative use of “sale” and undermines their credibility.

If an advertiser like me can’t obtain this data that’s supposedly for sale, then where is it being sold? We instead begin to navigate down a path regarding the choice of the user: do you prefer personalized ads or non-personalized ads? If you have chosen for personalized ads, then it will be Google and Google alone that will bucket you into groups to perform bidding towards interests that you group into.

Then coming back to the original question: where exactly does Google sell your data?