Youtube (and many other free video hosting services) also serve pirated TV series and movies this way. It's pretty commonand old tactic and not unique to TikTok.
It sounds like you've had an awful experience with CBT. Whatever be the therapy, the skill and experience of the therapist matters a lot too. From what you've said, I get the feeling that you think (or experienced) that CBT is all goals, task and work without being properly heard or understood. That is absolutely not so. CBT is built upon the older "talk" therapies, including Behaviour therapy. And listening and empathising with the patient is very much an important part of it too.
Yes, it is important to understand the "current state of affairs" and "desired state of affairs" for goal setting (again, something common in most "talk" therapies, and definitely not a new feature of CBT). But that doesn't mean that the moment you meet a CBT therapist, they give you a pad and ask you to write down these things - good therapists actually spend the first one or two sessions talking to you to understand your issues, figure out your personality, explore your problems to diagnose you, clarify your concerns, and try and establish a rapport and boundary with you. (The whole basis of "talk" therapies is that talking and listening does qualitatively help people - and hence it is an integral part of CBT too).
> I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people who seek therapy don't really have any major psychological issues, but are simply in need of some advice and support - CBT would be greatly exploiting that because there isn't even a test whether or not you need CBT - it's just assumed that it's a one-size-fits-all solution.
Depression and anxiety are the "common cold" of mental health - everyone of us experiences it more than once in our lifetime. So yes, you would be partly right in saying people who are mildly to moderately depressed and anxious "just need some support and advise". Luckily, this is where CBT really shines - it can cure depression and anxiety without any medication (and that's been validated in many studies - in fact, it was found that not only is CBT equally as effective as anti-depressants, it is also more long-lasting than anti-depressant medication - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15809409/ ).
> CBT would be greatly exploiting that because there isn't even a test whether or not you need CBT
While CBT has recently gained popularity as a self-help treatment mode, note that it is actually an empirically investigated systemic psychological treatment with various "schools of thoughts" including ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy), DBT (dialectic behaviour therapy), ST (schema therapy) CT (cognitive therapy). And there are CT diagnostics tests, like the Burns Depression Checklist or the Burns Anxiety Inventory test, that are used to determine depression and anxiety (respectively) to determine if someone needs CBT. On the more advanced issues, a psychiatrist has to diagnose if there are other serious issues (like personality disorders) at play before the treatment modality is decided. So yes, while you are absolutely right that CBT is not a "one-size-fits-all" solution, only an unethical therapist would try and treat you with CBT without proper diagnosis.
While the media may portray that therapists want to keep you dependent and talking with them forever (to earn money) the reality is that a good therapists will actually recommend you to someone else if they feel you aren't progressing under their care.
Oh, Apple Siri absolutely listens to your conversations and targets you too. I have personal experience of this in India where Siri on my friend's iPhone "overheard" our conversation about apps on app store and started showing very specific ads on my mom's iPad (on which Siri was disabled) app store. (This was around the time when Siri was first launched. And I suspect that they are more brazen about this in countries with lax to no privacy laws - both my friend's and my mom's iDevice was bought and activated in the middle-east).
>I have personal experience of this in India where Siri on my friend's iPhone "overheard" our conversation about apps on app store and started showing very specific ads on my mom's iPad (on which Siri was disabled) app store. (This was around the time when Siri was first launched
According to wikipedia siri was launched 11 years ago. If this is happening on a serious scale surely you'd be able to provide a more recent anecdote than from "around the time when Siri was first launched"?
Not the original commenter, but here's a more recent anecdote:
My wife and I were staying at a family farm outside the US for several weeks during Covid lockdowns. We had data turned off since our plans would charge us hefty fees for international roaming. One day we took a walk outside WiFi range and I was explaining how grain augers operate, since we were walking to a few old rusted ones. About a half an hour after we get home, she shows me some advertisements on her iPhone for new grain augers.
Could it have been the IP address we were on? Perhaps, but the owner of that family farm no longer farmed for a living and hadn't been looking into purchasing new machinery for more than a year; to add to that, we had been there two weeks prior with no farm equipment advertisements.
Apple will use location services to serve ads to you.
If you were walking near old ones, and others had searched about them before (not you) the graph database would create an association between location and grain augers.
You assume that I continued using Apple devices. After that experience, I disabled Siri, iCloud, etc. on my mom's iPad and personally have never bought any new Apple devices.
Are you sure that wasn’t simple IP-based targeting because you or your friend was browsing the App Store? When suspecting conspiracies, it’s usually the dumb simple answer that is correct.
I worked in AdTech for a while, and this happened all the time. 1. People are more predictable than they think they are, and 2. People remember the times the ads were well targeted and forget the other 10,000 irrelevant ads.
I am talking about specific PR campaigns based on our conversation, not ads about specific apps. Please see my other comment. (And while I haven't worked in AdTech, I have experience with Print and Internet advertising.)
Yes, 100% sure because we weren't discussing any specific apps.
We were discussing in-app purchases in games and how it is unethical of Apple to encourage such kind of games on the App Store simply because they make more money for them. Suddenly I find Apple is promoting the "buy / pay once" (don't remember the exact PR campaign) games on the App Store. (What an amazing co-incidence!). It was, I am sure, one of the many PR campaigns created - after spying on people through Siri - to get people to actually buy apps on the App Store instead of only using the free apps. (I am one of the few who has never been attracted to giving Apple App Store mine or my mom's CC as India has so many better digital payment options that better protect our rights legally, and am loathe to the whole concept of "App Store").
There were two more incidents like this when we were subjected to very specific Apple PR campaign that were very suspiciously based on conversations I had with some Apple fans in my family (the kind who immediately call me up to find out when I am going abroad next so that I can buy them the latest iDevice).
> Suddenly I find Apple is promoting the "buy / pay once" (don't remember the exact PR campaign) games on the App Store. (What an amazing co-incidence!)
I get those promoted in the app store, too. Probably because they can tell from my purchase history that I don't like microtransaction based games.
Seriously, when I was in AdTech I saw how the proverbial sausage is made, and listening to your conversations would be been way less effective than predicting your habits based on other data and geographic location.
I honestly wasn't even aware this was an issue. But someone who works with browsers would obviously encounter such issue that they have to address, and that's why I quoted the specific excerpt from Pale Moon release notes. A search for "BigInt" in their forum does display a lot of complains about it - https://forum.palemoon.org/search.php?keywords=bigint ... Angular is mentioned (and it is popular) but it could be that the release notes may not be talking about the popular frameworks but just generic "web framework" in general.
It don't know why it would be "an issue" — it's a part of the ECMAScript standard. Do they only implement new language features when something breaks and then wonder in release notes why somebody would use these features? Seems like not a good way to develop a modern browser.
It says Arabic is the hardest language to learn for English speakers - I thought Chinese was the toughest? Is Arabic more cumbersome to learn than Chinese?
A common use case for maximized browser window - tab-bar on the left- or right-side of the browser, and websites set to zoom to more than 125+ % to read it comfortably ... With higher resolution and bigger screen monitors everything seems to be getting tinier and tinier on screen. :)
Fair warning. But wasn't Waterfox sold to System1 - "an advertising company that tries to "make advertising better and safer, while respecting consumer privacy" - https://www.ghacks.net/2020/02/14/waterfox-web-browser-sold-... ? I'd feel a lot safer to use a browser that is not owned by an ad company ...
And System1 are an “ad-tech” company but the term should be used loosely. The ownership made sense as they are a search engine aggregator and they own a bunch of old school search engines like DogPile, InfoSpace etc. Nothing to do with what people associate ad-tech with, i.e. tracking you across the web or collecting personal data.
