Good disclosure. If they're offering $20 for a review, that means they must be throwing big money at negative reviews to try and make them disappear too.
> it removes the slightly metallic taste from my home tap water.
you should look into a reverse osmosis unit which has multiple stages of filtering. I recommend Watts [1], easy to self-install under the kitchen sink. The company has been around for sometime and is even publicly traded.
it's only a matter of time before all these threads and those on reddit are ridden with ChatGPT based posts pushing products (and more). It's now possible to write up convincing sounding content and copy with a product placement woven in with little to no effort.
Then the poster just needs a couple of aged accounts to publish the posts, and a handful of botnets to inflate vote counts to boost visibility. It can be extra convincing with some shill bot accounts that post (controversial) replies which spark more organic interactions. These comments may then trigger ranking algos to further boost visibility, to drive more platform engagement.
It's been this way for ages, although for chrome (iirc) this is managed via hyperlink auditing [1] which allows google to track what you're clicking even though the link appears 'clean'.
The click through google redirect also allows them to track things like relevancy of the content and time on site (if you return to google SERP by clicking the back button), in-case the target site isn't using google analytics (unfortunately most sites do).
it's not necessarily the facebook app (if you have it disabled), but most free and even paid apps are 'phoning' facebook and sending up data when you open the app (as part of the FB SDK). This is what became big news recently.
I've noticed it for years and thought it was widely known. There are apps that will try to hit graph.facebook.com before they even connect to their own services. You can install a VPN based firewall to block this behavior.
I would understand if the clock was connecting to a dedicated service to sync the time, but the clock app is just an interface where I can set alarms, use stopwatch etc. The system time is managed (and synced) at the Android OS level and so there is no need for apps to connect to the internet, nor for it to have updates.
For the finder app, the index should be local. There is no way I want my apps, documents and file metadata to be sent to some samsung server to be indexed so that I can do a local search -- that would provide no value and it's also features that I've never asked for as a user.
The calls from most of these apps (especially samsung apps) to facebook servers also serve no purpose other than to try and datamine. I understand there may be cases where telemetry is valuable, but it's unacceptable to have apps (in many cases that haven't been opened) to try and connect to a remote server behind the scenes, especially when you cannot remove them easily.
While I didn't have microsoft apps on my S9, if you install netguard (firewall) [1] you'll see that most samsung apps are constantly trying to get a connection with facebook servers and Samsung HQ.
Apps that have no reason to have internet connectivity, like the dialer, clock app, the finder (search functionality within the stock launcher) are phoning home [!] Unfortunately Samsung phones have locked bootloaders, so there's no easy way to 'take control'.
side note: I recommend installing this on all [un-rooted] android devices. It's an easy way to block most "telemetry" apps & devices collect, from the Amazon Firestick to apps running on any given device, including Google apps.