Samsung Brings Ads to Us Fridges

see Amazon's Sidewalk™ (e.g. essentially every Siri, echo, and internet doorbell)

A few larger retails participate in beacon tracking patrons (i.e. tracking their mobile devices' bluetooth/WiFi pings). This requires no active participation/agreement from the users/devices — if you have those services' antennae `ON`, they are constantly `announcing`.

There is even a massive network of crypto currency nodes, which uses geoscarcity to award tokens by relaying LoRa traffic (e.g. Helium [0]). A popular current use of this is for inventory tracking in-transit as well as stolen tool monitoring (e.g. Bosch).

It's not far-fetched that these technologies will continue their un-opt-out-able expansion (e.g. all the roadway vehicle scanners, which track you even if you don't have a license plate visible and don't carry a cell phone).

[0] https://world.helium.com/en/network/iot

It’ll get bought, hence people “want” it.

Not a sociologist but I don’t think this one is a big mystery. Off the top of the head I think of two reasons; people who buy things without research based on how a thing looks — you can bet the “demo” in-store isn’t constantly running ads, which should be false advertising — or because they want the thing in spite of the ads to show off to friends, to brag, because their {insert person} got one, etc.

Humans are just jealous moths who lack self-control.