Comment on Lemmy has taught me that Firefox is the way
doctorcrimson@lemmy.today 4 months agoGoogle using your perceived preferences to sell you underwear and yogurt is not worse than being tracked by the world’s largest hostile militaristic dictatorship.
BobGnarley@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Well say you googled a lot about abortions in a state that will put you in prison for it. Then it becomes a different situation. Or say you grow mushrooms to treat cluster headaches and the DEA now probably knows about it because that buy the data from all of these companies and can see the many searches you made about it the credit card you used to purchase supplies etc. I feel like China will probably just try to steal your crypto or something
doctorcrimson@lemmy.today 4 months ago
Searching for information about abortion isn’t a crime anywhere afaik, at least not an enforceable one. Google and the state governments are separate entities, and to be used in the US Justice System against you they would need to provide the source for their evidence, which would make really bad publicity for Google which does in fact harm their profits. So the State would have to make a pretty damn good offer to accomplish that. Doubly so for wannabe authoritarian admins like DeSantis, since those are exactly the type of people to turn around and try to restrict the company’s rights and freedoms.
Pretty much the same for the Mushrooms, although self-medicating with full dose mushrooms seems a little over the top to begin with, but I can’t blame the victim in a system where opiates are handed out readily by doctors.
Crypto would probably be harder for China to take than bank funds, but if they did steal a bit from hundreds of millions of Americans then the total loss would be catastrophic for many lives. The USA has no way to fight back in that scenario because while China does utilize American tech brands and products, those companies are not a direct arm of the military the same way that TikTok is for China.