I honestly can’t tell if that’s a passive-aggressive swipe at me or not; but just in case it was: stats mean very little w/o context. I believe the quote was “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”. I simply pointed out a few errors with the foundation of these “statistics”. I didn’t need to quote my own statistics because, as I was pointing out, this is a completely apples to oranges comparison. The AV companies want at the same time to preach about how many miles they go w/o accident while comparing themselves to an average they know doesn’t match their own circumstances. Basically they are taking their best case scenario and comparing it against average/worst case scenario stats.
I’d give more weight to the stats if they where completely transparent, worked with a neutral 3rd party, and gave them access to all their video/data/etc to generate (at the very least) proper stats relative to their environment. Sure, I’ll way easier believe waymo/cruises’ numbers over those by tesla; but I still take it with a grain of salt. Because again, they have a HUGE incentive to tweak their numbers to put themselves in the very best light.
There’s a certain (understandable) mindset that if the service you are using has some form of “gate” to it that prevents the information from being easily scrapped on the web that there are certain privacy expectations. Discord for instance requires you to make an account, find a server, and then either join or be invited to the server. So there is an expectation that what you post (even within private messages) to only be for the people that have “access”.
But the reality is (and has been proven many times now) that so long as a company has access to your data and can read/understand the data, they will sell that data to whoever wants to pay them for it (most often advertisers). This is true across websites, apps, and even operating systems.
Privacy is hard, and there aren’t a lot of apps/sites/OSes that truly support it. Thankfully though, as people have started to take it more seriously more companies have started providing options to support the demand (my personal favorites are Signal and Proton).