I’m sure that’s part of it, the bot just pulling from some of those sites and summarizing it in the results. Though I’ve never seen one that includes political party. That part threw me off.
I remember Facebook can determine your political affiliation, but my relative has never had a Facebook account.
I ran into something like this the other day. I know one of my relatives’ birthday is in February but didn’t know which day and he won’t tell me because he doesn’t want me to send him a card (even though he always sends us cards on special days).
I googled his first and last name, the state he’s from, and “birthday”. The first “result” was one of those AI generated results that gave me his first and last name plus middle initial, the city and state he lives in, and even what political party he is affiliated with, plus his birthday. I was just hoping to get a quick link to a White Pages site to figure out which one was his and then get his birthday, but this fucking thing doxed the hell out of him without me even asking.
He has no social media and spends his time just watching YouTube as his only form of web browsing. How they have all this information on him is beyond me or why they’d allow their bot to dox people so easily like this.
From what I’ve read, it’s the companies/people behind the OS, not the end user. But I said “people” because my concern isn’t for the Microsoft’s and Apples but the guy who makes my favorite Linux distro or me compiling my own without this nonsense.
It also makes me wonder what happens if I do things to circumvent this like using a VPN to trick a site into thinking I’m not in California so I can specifically get an ISO that doesn’t include this.
I fully understand that and it doesn’t make me feel any better about this.
It’s still a violation of privacy at its core and serves no purpose except continuing a dangerous slope of getting people adjusted to this overreach and leading to worse laws.
At best, it’s government overreach greed to extort money from people for not properly following yet another arbitrary law.
I realize this is “old” since this news comes from October 2025, but I am just learning about this after reading about the Colorado bill. I thought I was lucky to be in California…fuck me.
You could say that about any law they propose. 90% of the time, the law won’t do what they say it will.
I don’t think he has an account there either. He needs help doing anything on his phone.