I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable, so the number of spammers/scammers has increased dramatically.

The number of spam calls, texts, emails, iCloud account unlock requests, etc I’ve received in the last year is insane.

If I put on my tinfoil hat, it seems to be something deliberate, to push us all towards accepting hardware / software attestation and better "online id" stuff - "Don't you want to identify and stop the spammers and phishers?".

Email scanning and file scanning (on our computer) became acceptable when the level of spam and malware became intolerable. But it was at cost of our privacy. Today, Gmail scans all your mails and makes money from it. Both Windows and macOS have built-in anti-virus or malware scanners, and file indexers, and thus know all the applications and files in your system (which provides for more data on your profile with them). Now with both OSes, and even browsers like Chrome and Firefox, including AI, they will now use our own computers to not only collect our personal data, but even process it on our system and use it to build even better profiles to more profitably exploit us.

Gmail spam filtering is so bad that I believe it has to be intentional. I think they see email as a long term ad revenue opportunity and want to desensitize people to the spam.

> pretending to be a tracking service for something you supposedly ordered

There’s a leak or someone is selling the data in a lot of the delivery companies in my country. I order something then without fail the fake text message pretending to be the delivery service. Only thing they screw up is claiming it’s failed to deliver too soon and the weird urls.

Messed up these companies are either selling it or being irresponsible with data.

I'm not seeing any of this, and I've have been using the same email address that forwards to gmail for decades at this point, and it's in every major email data breach.

I get, maybe, one actual spam email per year through gmail's spam filters.

I get more actual spam at my work email, which is not hosted by gmail, even though the email volume of emails sent from outside of my employer's network is orders of magnitude smaller than my personal email volume.

Spam is now AI powered. Let that sink in for a bit.

> like sending you a bill through a legitimate bill-creation site

Why aren't these things opt-in? Ditto for every other thing that sends you email. I reflexively mark anything I didn't sign up for as spam on principle.