For those of you who are not familiar with “newspeak”, it is an artificial language idea described by Orwell in his book 1984
The specific purpose of newspeak is not only to provide a means of expression that would replace the old worldview, but to homogenize the thinking of the people.
A cornerstone of newspeak was “doublethink”, which consists of accepting as true either one hypothesis or its opposite, whichever the party considers appropriate.
Google and Apple are notoriously excellent at conditioning the worldview (for apple we speak of the “reality distortion field” as described in wikipedia)
Now they also excel at doublethink with respect to privacy by selling the idea that giving them all your information is a privacy enhancement: “we’ll take care of protecting your privacy by taking all your data.”
Doublethink.
Famous are Apple’s advertisements with the slogan “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” when in fact the deafult is that what happens on an iphone does not stay on the iphone, it is uploaded to Apple’s servers and while the data on the iPhones is encrypted with a key not in Apple’s possession, by default Apple has the keys to what is stored on iCloud. (There is an option to change the settings to make it so that Apple does not allow access to the data, but how many people do ?)
Since July, Google has begun updating a new technology for advertising describing it as “enhanced ad privacy” whereby, essentially, websites have access to the history of sites visited by the browser and can use this information to target advertisements.
A way to cut out the middlemen of data collection and ad personalization based on Chrome’s absolute dominance in the browser market.
Again, the default is for your browser to allow websites to do this. There is an option to change Chrome’s settings to make it so that it does not allow data access , but how many do/will do that ?
Besides, why doing it ? they are the good guys protecting us from the bad guys, right ?
