>And nevermind the conspiratorial thinking required to believe whole teams of engineers are developing and maintaining this capability across several giant companies, but nobody ever puts it on a resume. Apparently the thousands of people working on this are all personally committed to complete secrecy, forever. Uh-uh.

Bro it doesn't matter how much evidence you provide people with that this IS happening. They usually won't accept it. If they do accept it, half the time they shrug it off with "I've got nothing to hide anyway" kind of cope.

I seriously think I'm arguing with employees of these companies on HN because all you people do is deny everything and smear people who talk about this stuff. I hate to break it to you, but conspiracies are real. Noticing that people are conspiring to do things that nobody likes is not unreasonable in any way.

I agree with most of this, but have to take note that

>thousands of people working on this all personally committed to complete secrecy

Basically describes a LOT of government spying programs or horrific abuses that have happened, for instance.

Secrets can absolutely be held, and I wouldn't be surprised by even thousands of NDA'd engineers (who already have been doing this sort of thing for a loooong time) opting not to leak anything in a way that would be credible.

I'll reiterate that I'm skeptical of the overall conspiracy claims even though I usually believe in mass spying claims or institutions/corps/etc. being awful. I just think your argument there is pretty flawed, at least that aspect of it.

In fact, on why I'm skeptical: I just can't shake this profound sense that it's like the "Frequency Illusion" phenomenon that I've demonstrated to people while driving or walking outside.

Or more likely a mix of it with people also getting prompted with what they "want" in the first place by all the advertising and targeted media and their various search history data.

The traffic would obviously be encrypted. Obviously.

That doesn't say what you think it does.