The good news is that we finally got insurance for our future retirement house. They offered us a discount to add our car on the policy, so we agreed.
That was last week. Today I was greeted with the following package in my mailbox.
In it was the “Drive Safe & Save” gizmo. It is a Bluetooth device that they want you to pair with your phone and keep in your vehicle. Yep, they want you to voluntarily let them track your every movement in exchange for an auto insurance discount.
Sorry fellas but I’m not playing. It’s bad enough that Big Tech is tracking me, and I didn’t volunteer or agree to that, but they make me do it to get a cell phone. Oh, as a bonus, China gets to track me too and gets copies of my text messages and address book on a regular basis, oh, notice that Tim Cook, et al., don’t block the Communists from having the same data on me that they have. Our government is next in line and getting us to agree to this Bluetooth device is just an incremental step in imposing a mileage tax on us because who wants their odometer read?
Oh, on the subject of privacy, why is it that it takes a daily newspaper in Texas to inform us that UC Davis is monitoring all their student’s social media activity?
DAVIS — An investigation by The Dallas Morning News revealed UC Davis is among several schools across the country using social media-monitoring software to keep track of students’ online posts.
UC Davis police using software to track students’ social media posts
The Dallas Morning News reports that “Detect” can also allow campus police to surveil student protests. The surveillance strikes a chord with UC Davis students as they remember the impact of an incident over a decade ago. In 2011, student protesters with the Occupy movement were pepper-sprayed by campus police.
The software can track student email, movement, friends and associates, posts, and more. The software vendor claims to have thousands of schools in 36 different states as customers.
The article appears in many places such as these:
Tracked: How colleges use AI to monitor student protests
Tracked: How Colleges Use AI To Monitor Student Protests
An older but similar story
Texas schools are surveilling students online, often without their knowledge or consent
I promise this information will be abused but anyone with a brain will not admit how they use it. Perhaps we are seeing a glimpse into what gets you into the college when they don’t use SAT or other academic criteria.
Oh, even without all the above, here’s what I call “an admission against interest” from a hiring manager that was reposted on GAB a few days ago.
