Its fascinating that the way advertizing and apps work right now is simply how computer viruses, adware, spyware, and all manners of malware has ALWAYS worked. Growing up as a teen in the 2000s there used to be a program called Weatherbug that was pretty much considered unthinkable to ever have installed because of the way it knew your location and essentially EVERY adware, spyware, and antivirus software flagged it for removal immediately. It was considered best practice to never install anything. Never install toolbars, mever install anything without consulting a professional or unless you were ad advanced user. I was trained in Comptia A+ for the windows xp era and the best practice as a repair tech was to never allow the customer to install anything themselves if it could be helped.
And now just. Everything does this. Your fucking calculator wants your location data and business ghouls want it to ve illegal to use a simple adblocker because not advertizing to you hurts their feelings.
And now we have generative AI filling the internet witg slop that can have SEO and more ads slapped on top of it? Google is breaking on purpose so you make more searches?
The viruses have won, everything is malware and everything is a scam. To use commercial tech is to be voluntarily mugged