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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Five years from now:

    Apple spokesman claims reports that eye-tracking Accessibility feature usage was sold ‘exaggerated’

    A spokesman for Apple dismissed reports that the company’s eye-tracking accessibility feature—designed assist impaired users with using their device by detecting eye movements—was also tracking their interest in potentially sensitive topics and selling the data to advertising partners and law enforcement agencies, calling the allegations “grossly exaggerated” and stating “the term ‘sell’ demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the structure of Apple’s partnership agreements as detailed in the Terms of Service”. Whistleblowers claim the software runs constantly even when not enabled, and allegedly checks reading speed and pupil dilation to gauge interest in products and services, but also in “sensitive topics”. According to data mined by researchers from the University of [Blue State], this allegedly includes topics such as race relations and white supremacy, protesting and civil disobedience, firearm ownership, industrial sabotage, anti-corporate activism, abortion, environmentalism, police brutality, and political movements. Apple declined to comment further after the conclusion of their press release.














  • It’s costing 4.5M a year to keep those documents

    I cannot stress this enough, that is nothing. You’re hand-wringing over an amount of money that falls under the scope of a rounding error in any first-world country’s budget. If you want to talk about proper use of resources, a properly-functioning legislative body shouldn’t even be able to afford to think about it, let alone discuss it, they should be dealing with a full session’s-worth of projects that cost 100—100,000 times as much. If you want to talk about proper use of the taxpayers’ money, it doesn’t involve elected officials derelicting their actual duties to hem and haw over something that costs under $50 million on the national scale. For a government to have taken any action on this at all is a greater wastage than any potential savings. Seriously, imagine being paid by the public to ensure things are run properly, and then spending your time on the clock discussing whether or not the government should save $4.5M per year by switching brands of floor wax in all of the public schools. People have been tarred and feathered for less.




  • Why? Better in what sense? Better for whom? I think spending the money on ensuring that paper records are preserved is worth it solely because it monkeywrenches tampering and fraud, so diverting that money would always be worse no matter what it goes to. Money spent on maintaining public parks would be better spent on curing cancer, does that mean we defund parks? Money spent on a necessity is not a waste just because there are other necessities.

    Also, even assuming you’re right, who cares? I just spent $1.50 on a cup of coffee. That money could have been put to better use, but it wasn’t, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s $1.50. This was my original point, functional states don’t have to even think about this cost, they can literally afford to forget it.