These beacons are also sometimes used in window displays, seasonal displays, end of row displays, and other non-mannequin ways, so it's not just mannequins you have to worry about. Shopping malls and grocery stores are also turning into marketing panopticons. Basically, everyone in real life wants to imitate the level of customer spying Amazon can achieve, and it gets buzz with senior management because it promises enhanced revenue. I suspect it's actually mostly useless garbage data, honestly, but I do my best to deny data harvesting from me anyway.

It sucks, though... I shouldn't have to be at war with my own consumer electronics products, yet I am. Keeping up with the ways in which advertisers and marketers, and all their middle men, abuse access to my information is tiring, and many days I feel like just chucking my phone into the nearest ravine and telling everyone if they need to get ahold of me, write me a letter, the ancient on-paper kind.

This is especially depressing to me, personally, because I was on the team that developed the first successful fully integrated digital cell phone controller IC. All of us engineers were enthusiastic about it and imagined a future of information at your fingertips, the greatest library of human knowledge in every pocket, and the positive effects that this democratization of information access would have. But, this was before the rise of surveillence capitalism, before gatekeeping on technical knowledge (go fuck yourself, Elsevier) and before the new cold war of social media driven disinformation campaigns.

Now it's all garbage, just a big, sad pile of bullshit information being jacked from everyone and uselessly twaddled with "AI" and "Machine Learning" algorithms to produce dubuous marketing information that primarily serves to justify legions of bullshit jobs, in the Graeber sense of the word.

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