Intelligent Machines #867: “The Ketchup Effect” is now available.
Ian Bogost explores why technology’s real value comes from friction and sensory engagement rather than frictionlessness, and how AI might paradoxically pull us away from screens. The episode examines compute capacity crunches forcing pricing changes at Anthropic and Microsoft, new chip releases from Google, and partnerships with Amazon and SpaceX. Additional coverage includes the NSA’s use of Anthropic’s Claude despite Defense Department restrictions, humanoid robots outpacing humans in races, and growing concerns about AI training on employee communications and copyrighted content.
Over here, it is illegal for an employer to spy on their employees, when they are using a computer. It is illegal to record conversations on the phone without consent, and you have to explicitly state the purpose of the recording. If you say it is for training purposes, you can’t use it for anything else, such as proving a customer or business partner said one thing and did another.
Well that means you can never use a 3rd party app on your phone. Which sounds fine to me personally, but many people would say it defeats the point of having a smart phone if you can’t have a weather app, or shopping app, or taxi app, or anything like that.
Why? I have dozens of third party apps and they all run fine. I just block around 2.5 million known tracking and advertising, spam and malware sites at the DNS level. The apps all still work fine, just no tracking and no ads.
You should really watch the video. If you allow apps to collect your location (say because it’s a transit app and you want to know when the bus will be by soon) then these self-same apps are reselling your location as an additional way to make money (or that’s certainly the implication from the video.)
Sam said something interesting on TWiT yesterday regarding this: don’t want to be tracked, don’t carry a smartphone. It feels true. I have a Pixel 9 with GrapheneOS on it and NextDNS blocking trackers on my other phones. But can I be sure I’m not being tracked by apps? Apps have to phone home to work, who’s to say they’re not transmitting PII back to their servers then selling that info. I can’t block that without blocking the app’s functionality. Even the simplest weather app phones home regularly.
