Imagine your car playing you an ad based on your destination, vehicle information—and listening to your conversations.
Ford has patented a system that, per the filing, would use several different sources of information to customize ad content to play in your car. One such information stream that this hypothetical system would use to determine what sort of ads to serve could be could be the voice commands you’ve given to the car. It could also identify your voice and recognize you and your ad preferences, and those of your passengers. Finally, it could listen to your conversations and determine if it’s better to serve you a visual ad while you’re talking, or an audio ad when there’s a lull in the conversation.
If the system described in the patent knew that you were headed to the mall on the freeway based on destination information from the nav system and vehicle speed, it could consider how many ads to serve in the time you’ll be in the car, and whether to serve them on a screen or based through the audio system. If you respond more positively to audio ads, it might serve you more of those—how does every five minutes sound?
But what if the weather’s bad, traffic is heavy, and you’re chatting away with your passenger? Ford describes the system using the external sensors to perceive traffic levels and weather, and the internal microphone to understand conversational cadence, to “regulate the number (and relevance) of ads shown” to the occupants. Using the GPS, if it knows you’ve parked near a store, it might serve you ads relevant to that retail location. Got passengers? Maybe you get an audio ad, and they get a visual one.
Given how consumers feel about advertising and in-car privacy, it is difficult to imagine an implementation of this system that wouldn’t generate blowback. But again, the patent isn’t describing some imminent implementation; it just protects Ford’s IP that describes a possible system. That said, with the encroachment of subscription-based features, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before you’re accepting a $20/month discount to let your new Ford play you ads on your commute.
Things were better because people would "go to a different brand" and sue morons more often. They'd also be more confident of their own knowledge in various technical things.
Things becoming more complex was used to gaslight a lot of people into questioning their own knowledge about what they need. Such gaslighting first and foremost works via people being ashamed to be stupid and pretending they know it all.
Most (even technical) people are like this - they feel that they don't understand the world around them, it's stressing, spying, rigged, chaotic in the wrong places and ordered in the wrong places, - but they are ashamed and pretend. And what they pretend to think specifically and what they try to follow is communicated to them via ads, via movies, via corporate bullshit. Because they have nothing else to turn to.
It's a bit similar to the way some autistic people do imitation - they too imitate ads and movies more than people around them (well, maybe also imitate people they are romantically attracted to, or those they consider cool).
Or to the way state propaganda works in atomized societies - people don't have good horizontal ties, but pretend to have them, while taking the material from what they hear on TV.
20 years ago would you use something like an Android phone with no buttons or would you crush it with a hammer? Would you use something like Windows 10 or would you ignore that crap? Would you buy a car that spies after you?