I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks.
Understanding this Google se...
Ad companies earn money by selling your attention.
Other people in your lives, like friends, absorb a lot of your attention and that’s a potential source of revenue.
All they need to do is replace your friends with a chatbot and they have a new way to sell access to you.
“Hey I’m here if you need someone” responses to searches indicating a potential emotional vulnerability are incredibly slimy and manipulative for blatantly financial purposes.
Google isn’t much different than romance scammers trolling the Internet for vulnerable people to groom for cash.
Ad companies earn money by selling your attention.
Other people in your lives, like friends, absorb a lot of your attention and that’s a potential source of revenue.
All they need to do is replace your friends with a chatbot and they have a new way to sell access to you.
“Hey I’m here if you need someone” responses to searches indicating a potential emotional vulnerability are incredibly slimy and manipulative for blatantly financial purposes.
Google isn’t much different than romance scammers trolling the Internet for vulnerable people to groom for cash.
Pretty gross
The CEO of the biggest French TV channel said in 2004:
Shitty translation but source in French (it has its own article FFS!): https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temps_de_cerveau_humain_disponible. He explicitly said that he was not selling to viewers but to advertisers, before the internet became mainstream.
For further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy