this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
757 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
72933 readers
2835 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How does a AI know whether you're rich or not?
Welcome to surveillance capitalism buddy
They buy aggregated data from every other company and organisation in existance. That includes your purchase history and behaviour in great detail. Of course they will also have the data of your relatives and friends, which they will take in to account.
That’s a field in data science / marketing that’s been active forever… assume that companies at large have a rating of their prospects & customers & ex-customers alike which includes a notion of wealth. Either derived from consumption habits or acquired through data brokers or both usually.
But what if I'm searching flights through a search tool like Kayak? I'm not logged in for that, and possibly using a VPN.
Depends of a lot of factors. Best case that’s enough. VPN isn’t generally doing much beside obfuscating network of origin and that’s not accounting for leakages. There’s stuff of the nightmares with pixels and cookies cross feeding data from a session to another… And tools like kayak might themselves have incentives to profile you as well. I don’t know that one particularly but in the end if you’re not giving money you’re likely giving data to someone…
Your employer likely uses TheWorkNumber, that place lets anyone have all your data. Previous employers, W2s, dependents, SSN, salaries, bonuses, benefits, address, marriage status. Its given freely to corporations because fuck you this is America and this what we voted for.
Good thing I live in Europe then
There are no borders on the internet ;)
Credit check.