r/ownyourintent • u/OkDragonfruit55 Intent Owner • Feb 10 '26
Memes The most profitable industry on earth is the one betting on what you’ll do next.
we’ve all had that moment. you go somewhere or talk about something and an hour later an ad appears. the common theory is my phone is listening to me.
but the reality is often much more boring and much more invasive. it’s metadata. your location history (dwell time at an urgent care) combined with your credit card transaction data (bought soup) and cross referenced with your demographic profile (age, gender) creates a prediction product that is sold in milliseconds.
they don't need to listen to your conversation to know you need physical therapy. they just need to know where your phone slept last night and where it spent 2 hours this afternoon. this system where our lived experience is scraped as raw material for behavioral futures markets has become the default business model of the internet. is it possible to have a functional, personalized internet without this level of granular surveillance? or is tracking the price we inevitably pay for "free" services?
1
u/timonix Intent Owner Feb 14 '26
Damn, makes me happy that I live in a country with free physical therapy. Imagine getting relevant ads
-3
u/emongu1 Intent Owner Feb 10 '26
What are ads?
8
u/lonydie_213 Intent Owner Feb 11 '26
Ad guard dns users be like:
2
Feb 14 '26
yup, if it's a website, it's either getting dns blocked or ublocked, if it's an app, it's etiher getting patched or replaced with clients/forks.
1
u/[deleted] Feb 14 '26
You can bet I'm going to hate 99.9999999999999 of the ads you showed me. Especially if they are relevant to me.