I’ve heard several people tell me that they were not using their phone, but it was in the room while they were discussing something with another person (in person). Then, I have been told by others, they started getting advertisements relevant to that in-person conversation. I have no insight into this. I don’t know based on any personal information whether this is true or even possible. Then along came this interview off of Erik Prince. His background includes the following according to Wikipedia: American businessman, former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, and the founder of the private military company Blackwater. He served as Blackwater’s CEO until 2009 and as its chairman until its sale to a group of investors in 2010. Prince heads the private equity firm Frontier Resource Group and was chairman of the Hong Kong-listed Frontier Services Group until 2021.

Tonight I heard this excerpt from Prince’s conversation with Tucker Carlson. At the time I first heard the interview I didn’t know who Prince was. I looked him up and then I noticed the comment by Elon Musk following the Tweet-video of Prince. Holy Shit.

We’ve been doing a study, following our device, a Google mobile services phone, or iPhone, and at about 3am, we’re seeing a spike of data leaving the phone – about 50MB.

That is basically that phone dialing home to the mothership, exporting all of Pillow talk, whatever.

Zuckerberg paid $20B for WhatsApp – why?

Because every everything that goes through there is diced, and analyzed, and used to sell advertising to that customer.

If you’re not paying for something, you aren’t the customer, you’re the product.”