Ronald Rihoo

Thanks, Cory. You've opened up a conversation with just the right talking points. This is great.

(W.r.t the book: Enshittification.)

Privacy capitalism is set to boom in the United States.

Yes, it will produce a lot of cash flow. It's practically going to reinvent the tech industry.

It probably won't result in much loss for most, as investors will likely just hop over.

But I could see it causing a lot of hurt feelings in tech.

Nowadays, when we talk about surveillance, half the time we're not even talking about any government entity. Ain't that some s***?

When people feel so safe using apps like Signal, it makes me cringe a bit.

Your OS is pwned.

But sure, reduce the exposure surface... That's not a bad idea.

The encryption options, import/export mechanisms, design patterns around obfuscating the procedures, and so on.

None of that does anything when the problem is at the OS level.

The OS literally handles the content that the user views/produces.

My startup's apps are related to:

- personal healthcare
- productivity

So it's not the user that's the problem here. It's the device -- its capabilities and automated background activities that serve the manufacturer's best interests, not the user's.

4 years ago, it would've been real convenient to know that I wasn't going to contribute to Android's relevance in the market.

I found out along the way that it would probably not be good for the user, if I influenced them to use my startup's apps on Android.

No, they probably don't have the right birthdates.

No, there's not much of a way to verify that.

I don't know. Just target people of some sign/month in general.

Hey, thinking about using data from a data broker?

Well, you might get better results from horoscopes.

As I declared ~2 months ago:

I do not recognize data brokers as credible sources of information.

Any entity using their data is engaging in a malpractice with which I disagree, as should everyone else.

In my perspective, data brokerage is a parasitic malpractice that does no good. And in fact, it has probably done much more harm than we'll ever know.

The free Internet is NOT funded by data brokerage money. That's a bs one-liner they use to scare people into submission.

Nobody gives a damn about anything that comes from that. Social media? We can pay for that, too.

Does it pay for Wikipedia? Amazon Prime? Netflix? Spotify? Podcasts? AAA games?

This is likely why they're so unwilling to give data access to consumers.

I post about my experience requesting the data they sell about me.

Data brokerage is pretty much a scam.

And if they show the data to the consumer, then the consumer will see this fact and inform others about it.

Challenge the credibility of data brokers.

Request the data they have about you and see for yourself that it's garbage.

That should be even more horrifying than them selling real data about you, because high-impact businesses and gov't entities could be using it to make decisions about you.

Even when you erase/discard something that you had typed in the new post screen, it gets recorded, then you see the algorithm feeding you things related to what you had written.

There are multiple ways to do this.

lol! I wonder from which culture(s) and geographic region(s).

In the US, we tend to have garlic bread and other food with garlic in it at restaurants that have more of an Italian-core menu.

It can spark a sort of family comfort vibe -- or maybe even luxury.

4/ If you feel almighty and powerful because you can probably win like this legally, then you should be concerned that you'll lose like this in the market.

While you may have set yourself up for success in the courtroom (for now), you have certainly set yourself up for failure in the market.

3/ Furthermore, they likely have its analytics covered in legal language such that a setting like this is not absolute -- without having to inform user about it on the settings view, because they may have in the policy.

This is part of the trends that will be met with aggressive market disruption.

2/ One can't make a case out of this sort of data due to complications in proving that the common user:

- did not disable the background mobile data usage right before taking the screenshot(s), and

- did not use Wi-Fi -- or only used it once for a few minutes -- in the shown period(s).

... ->

Screenshot of mobile data & Wi-Fi stats for Google's Photos app on Android for the period of September 26 to October 25, 2025. The date of this screenshot is November 3rd, 2025. The app's background data usage is disabled for mobile data. Foreground data usage is 4.64 MB. Background data is 9.12 MB.

Screenshot of mobile data & Wi-Fi stats for Google's Photos app on Android for the period of October 26 to November 25. The date of this screenshot is November 3rd, 2025, only about 1 week into the period shown. The app's background data usage is disabled for mobile data. Foreground data usage is 1.98 MB. Background data is 2.23 MB.

False promises?

I've had background data usage off.

Not using cloud. No backups or anything. No Wi-Fi in one period. And the other, only a short instance.

Must be pure analytics. So even if I don't use the app, it'll probably OCR/analyze and tag images on the device, then send reports regularly.

Ship now, rig later. That's the Microsoft standard for ya. 😂

It worked, though. And it was configuration-friendly. Could do what you want to it.

Yeah, the virus scanner should technically detect and quarantine itself, or at least warn the user of potentially-suspicious data collection activity.

Too bad. Windows used to be the best OS up to XP/7.

Yeah; although, some Americans even hire strippers as nannies, but that's because they can't pay a trained, professional nanny.

So maybe there's a market there, but they have to work that price out well, and it better make meals for the kids.

(Data collection issue aside, as it is its own beast.)

This is not going to go well. Oof...

Unlike the mobile tech era, there has been a preexisting surveillance economy for 2-3 decades building a market against itself for ~1-2 decades. This has triggered a new type of capitalism, naturally. And the new era of surveillance capitalism (via ambulatory mobile devices) will be short-lived.

That's why consumer adoption rate will be dangerously low for the industry.

So at first, they'll take it easy (or act like it -- activities hidden in ambiguity). Then, slowly they'll increase privacy-invasive practices.

This time, though, they'll lose the market to privacy capitalism.

Robots will be the most privacy-invasive tech we've ever had, especially since not only will they be moving around and capable of seeking best conditions for various data collection activities, manufacturers (and hackers) will be able to remote in.

(My own info, not article's since it's paywalled.)

It's probably gonna get worse in a bit.

Yea, I keep it vague. I know some are not into vague statements, but I'm in a position where competitors can do just about anything I can, if I say too much and it gets picked up. So, just enough to amuse anyone who makes something of it, while logging where I've been. Could be interesting later.

Analysis of the residual gradients in the graphs. It's more difficult than it should be, but it might show the difference between magic and phenomenon.