imho that is just a hoax, the fb ai would need to be written in such a way that it can relate food change to pregnant products

It's based on meta-data, and millions of data points to find similarities. Tim pool goes over this in one of his podcasts talking about pattern recognition.

If it helps any. Facebook and google know when you sleep and when you poop.

Hell no. Yes, they're different companies, but there's a reason why this happened. Companies that do business with china are obligated by chinese law to be willing to spy for them. Enjoy more here. But, i would assume you're likely familiar with this moreso than me or my sources.

To what?

You asked in the title if we can trust Epic Games. I say, by virtue of the Chinese connections, "Hell no." You can't really trust many, if any, corporations, but there are some huge red flags that one should look for in identifying ones you most certainly should not even give the benefit of the doubt. Too many of these have their priorities pulled, twisted, etc in so many ways that identifying what they both can and are willing to do is unreasonably difficult.

The "I have nothing to hide" argument is faulty.

Firstly, you have something to protect. In the Knowledge Economy, your (meta-) data is your capital. It may not be worth a lot on its own, but in aggregate it is extremely valuable. (We need digital unions to protect our means of digital production.) It is used primarily to train AI, but it has provided Cambridge Analytica, for instance, with sufficient information to deduce who a person voted for in a recent election (based on actual voting patterns and matching this personal information cross-referenced with registered voters).

Also, companies already rank you when you call their service department. If you are a "good" customer, you will get better service. If you are a time-waster they will lose your call.

Secondly, it relies on the safety of the free internet. (The Russian internet is owned and operated by the government, for instance, and they can intercept anything they want. Everybody has heard of the Chinese firewall, behind which citizens cannot read such divisive sites as Wikipedia.)

If you have the misfortune to live in an authoritarian state, you will be subject to interventions based on association; any conversations you have (e.g., in-game chat) can be monitored for subversive clues. The independent journalist who revealed the virus outbreak in Wuhan, for instance, was arrested this week for alerting people.

If you remember the beginning of the Arab Spring, it was an individual at a Tunisian market stall who self- immolated in protest of the corrupt authorities confiscating his wares. The political movement (that brought down the government) spread through the social media. Nowadays governments are very wary of social media and monitor it to ensure such events are less dangerous to their rule. (India shut down social media during the recent farmers' protest against the changes to the law that removed the guaranteed purchase price for their stock.)

Indeed, which is why decentralization is important. On one hand, your society and way of life can be turned upsidedown by subversion from the outside. On the other hand, a society that doesn't have as much monitoring and control is alot harder to turn over than one that already has control mechanisms in place.

Well said.

Here's a paper from law professor Daniel Solove, critiquing those same faulty underpinnings that tired saying.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565

I mean obviously if you live somewhere without free speech laws and whatnot then that changes things when it comes to google and whatnot. If we're still talking about Epic Games though, they have literally nothing that comes close to vulnerable information. They have a list of games I own, an older email address, and that's it. I just don't think it's a concern, even in a stricter society assuming Epic don't sell banned games, and don't blame others for not caring.

In a more general sense I do agree you obviously need to watch what you're doing online in general if you're "up to no good" by the standards of your country. However I think we were mostly talking about things like Google learning your consumer habits and using that to figure out how to manipulate consumers better, like your AI example. Again... I don't think people care. I get that you care, but I don't think your arguments would persuade my wife for a hot second to care about Google tracking her clothing store searches.

You'd say "they're using your info to better learn how to make you buy X or Y in the future!!!" and she'd say "so what?"

exactly
some wants to see more into this ,but epic games only knows my games list and play time , they can have it and do whatever they want with it

Authoritarian govs exploit our data,yup but they exploit everything else anyway.
That's mainly not the problem of they're getting our data but their actions. And no matter what kind of data protection do we have they would just ignore it and use the data anyway.
If you don't want them to exploit it then don't let an authoritarian government get into power.

So imho limit this talk to Epic and what info they can share, and they do it or not.
And how that is exploiting the users.
I assume they don't give out our info, and even if they would that info is harmless to us.

What guarantee do we have that this is the only information that they have acquired?

what other info can they gather?

Well, remember, google managed to gather alot of info through google earth, it is said. Something about using it to scan the files on your computer looking for data. Not sure what data, nor how much of the story is true, but just look at how Discord will automatically identify programs you're running and advertise it to everyone in the "server" (namespace) without so much as telling you that it regularly does this. What all info do these things take without us knowing it? Do they also track programs you run that are not under their jurisdiction as well? What kinds of info are they gathering on these processes? Once you have ring 3 access to a computer, you have alot of access. Steam was actually trying to access my ring 1 or 2 the other day, i think ti was, and complained when it wasn't granted said access.

Mind you, ring 0 is the OS' level of info, and ring 3 is "userland."

How did you block that?

I assume what happened was steam attempted to get administrator privileges but completely forgot to actually ask windows for those privileges, so it essentially bugged out. I assume this was because i haven't started steam in a long time, so the update where they would've installed the service without the bugged installer was already passed, so they likely don't know about it. You should be able to disable it from your OS' services menu, but good luck finding it. It argued that it needed to do this for preventing cheating. Not a problem, as i don't cheat, and it's really up to the developers of a game to make it so that cheats can only be client side, which significantly limits their ability to make cheats.