f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
I am always fascinated by digital activity related paranoia to this extent. Most of the time it betrays a ignorance of how computer systems work. And bad fermi estimation abilities.
How you would get put on a list is if a certain website is considered a congregation place for the types of people who are usually added to lists, people coming into the site will be added to the list.
This is orders of magnitude less compute/bandwidth-intensive than checking every internet search. That would be markedly insane, and I doubt the world has enough CPU power/money/political will to pull that off.
Think of it this way, there are thousands of pipes leading to thousands of buckets. It's infinitely cheaper to monitor one specific bucket to find what you are looking for, as opposed to monitoring all the pipes.
This is orders of magnitude less compute/bandwidth-intensive than checking every internet search. That would be markedly insane, and I doubt the world has enough CPU power/money/political will to pull that off.
I don't think this is even close to being true. It'd be relatively trivial in terms of compute power for google to, say, generate a list of everyone who ever searched the word "tor". The trickier part would be correlating with your real-world identity, but google is already doing that just so it can advertise to you better, so I'd say not only is this not insane, I'd say it's already being done: you're already on that list as soon as you do the search, and it's just a question of who has access to it, and whether "The list of everyone searching for tor" would be too many people to be useful. If some federal agency wants a list of everyone who ever searched for "tor", it's only a matter of whether they can get google to turn over that information. The compute power required is trivial.
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Notes -
I am always fascinated by digital activity related paranoia to this extent. Most of the time it betrays a ignorance of how computer systems work. And bad fermi estimation abilities.
How you would get put on a list is if a certain website is considered a congregation place for the types of people who are usually added to lists, people coming into the site will be added to the list.
This is orders of magnitude less compute/bandwidth-intensive than checking every internet search. That would be markedly insane, and I doubt the world has enough CPU power/money/political will to pull that off.
Think of it this way, there are thousands of pipes leading to thousands of buckets. It's infinitely cheaper to monitor one specific bucket to find what you are looking for, as opposed to monitoring all the pipes.
I don't think this is even close to being true. It'd be relatively trivial in terms of compute power for google to, say, generate a list of everyone who ever searched the word "tor". The trickier part would be correlating with your real-world identity, but google is already doing that just so it can advertise to you better, so I'd say not only is this not insane, I'd say it's already being done: you're already on that list as soon as you do the search, and it's just a question of who has access to it, and whether "The list of everyone searching for tor" would be too many people to be useful. If some federal agency wants a list of everyone who ever searched for "tor", it's only a matter of whether they can get google to turn over that information. The compute power required is trivial.
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