alt Hacker NewsIt reminds me of the claims that your phone's microphone is always on and feeding your conversations to Facebook so they can serve you ads, even when the app is closed.
Anyone who has experience with apps, permissions, or even basic reverse engineering or network activity monitoring would realize that this couldn't be true without someone having found evidence.
Yet even on HN you find die-hard believers that it's true. I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true. If it's true, it means they were smart enough to see through the facade unlike the other sheep in the world.
> I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true.
It's more than just that, there's also the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, i.e. we talk about something and then notice it mysteriously suggested to us on YouTube or whatever. And then assume this was causal rather than coincidence.
I got that yesterday, though I can't even remember now what the video or the topic of discussion was.