Mainstream headlines confirmed every panic the conspiracy theorists had voiced

Evidence

On and on. Drip. Drip. Drip. “Alexa Has Been Eavesdropping on You This Whole Time,” read a 2019 headline in The Washington Post. “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret,” went one in The New York Times in 2018. “You’re Not Paranoid: Your Phone Really Is Listening In,” said USA Today. Drip. Drip. Drip. We heard about the “nanny cams” taken over by hackers and turned into surveillance devices; the Ring doorbell footage handed over to police; Uber’s “God View” software, allegedly used by employees to spy on passengers as well as ex-girlfriends; the billions of personal photos scraped by facial recognition companies to train their software; the period-tracking apps that could be used to prosecute people who choose to end their pregnancies in any of the states that have rushed to criminalization. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 270

Categorization

• SEED: The period-tracking-apps line is a devastating detail: mainstream coverage literally confirmed the most invasive imagined abuses, including weaponized data.