So I joined a new gym last year and was pleasantly surprised. They gave me a smart card to get in and out, that’s it, no app, no accounts, no nothing. Well, today I got to the gym and saw the announcement that they are phasing out the access with the smart card and starting to use, you guessed it, an app.
Now, I know this is not such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But I’m just tired of this trend of replacing perfectly functioning systems with apps (public transport tickets come to mind). Just more ways to harvest people’s data, I guess…
Ah and by the way, in my previous gym they not only required an app for accessing the place, they also incentivized people to track their workouts, meals and bodyweight using the gym’s app (of course I never used any of these features).
This desperately needs to become an illegal industry. Perfectly legitimate businesses are letting their real business fall to the wayside as they convert their profits to a fucking consumer spying business. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of all the tracking, and I’m sick of ads popping up in new places all the freaking time. You go to pump gas and a commercial starts blaring in your face. You can’t escape it. You can’t get a moment of peace to sit with your thoughts. It’s negatively affecting our entire society, yet every business is pursuing it with zeal and the politicians aren’t doing jack shit to protect the people. Matter of fact the government is buying the data too. I never imagined this is what the future would look like when I was growing up.
Well ads themselves aren’t that big of an issue for me (though they can be a pain for people with photosensitive epilepsy which can be used as an argument for restricting them btw) but other than that I agree. Unfortunately governments won’t shut it down because it’s not just an amazing data source and optimization of human resources (because they can just buy data instead of hiring a lot of agents) but also a lot of income in taxes when the data is sold