This cannot be turned off, and the new phone can't be used in the first place until you set up credit card billing. It also seems to trigger "automatically" and "by accident" very frequently.
Fortunately we got a refund from customer service the first time. The second time, I saw the email soon enough to cancel within the 2 hour deadline. (This was after removing all our payment info from the phone, which was the only way I could see to enforce that he couldn't do it again, but then someone made a payment and ended up saving the payment method again.)
I feel like it's only a matter of time before it happens again; at least the address is correct now so we'd actually receive the item if we were unable to cancel/refund.
They're the ones that will click on ads and "browse" a site. They interact in a much richer way than I do.
I've often heard that a sites most "active" users seem to be women in their mid 30s. That's because those stats include the woman and the toddlers she hands the phones to.
I've been frequently flabbergasted how these obvious observations come across as novel to people I talk to, as if 2 year olds have their own email address and password.
I even heard someone say unboxing and cartoon videos "somehow" are popular among women in their 30s.
I mean come on now...
Even though we're way below what seems to be average in terms of exposing kids to digital content, at this point my wife's digital activity on Spotify, YouTube, Netflix and Storytel is actually between ~30% (YouTube) to 95% (Spotify) the activity of our kids. Spotify only plays music they like to sing or dance to. Storytel is pretty much only ever playing kids' stories (to the point that even with kids asleep, we sometimes let those stories play as background noise). YouTube much less, plus I tend to yt-dlp any music/show we intend to play to kids often (which probably generates its own interesting telemetry stream, as we play those files from my wife's previous phone). Netflix... Netflix has Paw Patrol.
I bet that her advertising profile is in half really an advertising profile of our kids. And I imagine the effect is much, much stronger with moms that hand their phones to their toddlers (we don't).
On that note, I remember "learning" more than a decade ago that apparently casual games are a huge market, very popular with adult women. I kind of accepted it as fact, even though it went entirely against my life experience ("they must be right and I must be wrong, after all they've measured it, they're doing Data Science!" - thought the naive me, not yet aware just how much bullshit this "data science" is). But now I'm reconsidering - it would make much, much more sense if those results were actually coming from kids (up to teenage years) playing those games on their parents' computers / phones, logged in to their accounts.
EDIT: interesting corollary - IIRC, the thing about causal games and adult women came up around the time Zynga became a big deal, and was quoted to explain and justify investing in/developing these kinds of games. But if it's really just a misclassification - i.e. the market is real, but it's not the women after 30 that play those games, but their kids, then Zynga and all the follow-up companies were effectively targeting kids, while thinking (or pretending) they're targeting adults.
Holy shit, you just blew my mind. This explains so much of the mainstream internet's degeneration into a family-friendly dumbed-down version of it.
The dangers of having big corporations raising a new generation of people (instead of their parents doing it) are even more concerning. I bet that's the exact reason we are moving towards a woke authoritorian dystopia.
I would not know about unboxing videos, but there are several cable channels that seem to show nothing but hours and hours of close ups of hands fondling more or less tasteful necklaces, and I'm pretty sure those do not cater to toddlers.
Christ, man, I can literally see it, seen it tons of times, and yet ... just wow.
- The fridge had both front and back cameras
- It had a microphone
- It could play music, which maybe was important if you considered it for a glorified kitchen tablet
- It could install regular android apps
- It could sync photos and notes
- It was compatible with the Uber app, so I have to assume you could actually have payment info in there
I have never bought a nice fridge and I will go out of my way to avoid pointless smart, so it really came as a surprise to me, but the situation seems posible and probably will happen to someone at some point
But I do find it interesting to compare with my own upbringing. Seems kids are given relatively unfettered access to phones/tablets these days, proper ones with a regular OS. I suppose the upside is learning/becoming familiar tech stuff sooner, downside as they enter tween/teen years is probably social media :(
Mainly he would watch photos and videos of himself and his big brother. We did not install any kid-specific apps and did not allow YouTube at that age.
He did enjoy Wordle - at his peak he knew how to type in around 8 different valid five letter words, which I thought was pretty impressive at age 2! His favorite was TRAIN.
When it comes to durability, I have little trust in companies today, and the quality of techniques and materials they use - not in a hyper-optimized economy we have now. Especially when we're talking about prints ordered through a button in an app made by an advertising company, one that wants you to stay subscribed to their digital playground (instead of focusing on physical ownership of media, such as photo albums), one "products" (services, really) have a half-life on the same order as digital print/ad shops.
Nah, the very presence of this "feature" actually pushed me away from Google Photos. In a perfect world, it would make sense. In the real world, it's just first-party user interface spam.
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