This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Don't forget Amazon and Google also have smart speakers with microphones....
Big Brother doesn't just watch, he listens too.
I'm not allowed to have a smart speaker of any kind in my home office (work from home requirement), but especially Alexa. All my homies are required to hate Amazon.
A state that should have been obvious to everyone FFS. The cameras are pointed at neighbourhoods, the audio is poly directional, which includes inside the home, and are hooked up to wifi to transmit the data. We have facial recognition, speech recognition, even gait recognition, AI object identification, license plate readers, audio filtering, all automated and analysed for review and every smart device has cameras and microphones.
Yall are fucking morons for embracing all this shit and normalizing a surveillance state that none of us have any control of and doesn't benefit society at all. It's been a slow moving car accident for 20 years that the masses are too fucking stupid and too arrogant to see until the wreck happens.
Yall are fucking morons
I don't think you're insulting the right audience here.
I loved that ad, it instantly brought the point I've been making for years home to the whole Super Bowl party.
Just wanted to point out one oddly written passage:
Numerous media outlets sounded the alarm. The online privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned Ring’s program …
Many private citizens who previously used Ring also reacted negatively. “Viral videos online show people removing or destroying their cameras over privacy concerns,” reported USA Today
I was hoping to see that this story had gone national and wasn’t just a buzz in privacy centric circles, so my ears pricked up when they said “numerous media outlets.” But then the example they gave was a quote from was EFF, which I would not exactly call a “media outlet.”
Below they go on to say that “private citizens” also cried out, and then they use a quote from a USA Today article. USA Today - now that’s a media outlet. 🤷♂️
Next they say that even scum sucker fish are against all this, using a quote from JD Vance to back it up, and that part was all right.
the thing 1984 got wrong is that people are willingly buying their own (multiple) telescreens and happily submitting their entire life to the party
We didn't see how we got to 1984. We just see one person living with consequences of what society has become. We're building our own 1984 right now!
1984 and brave new world ass world
relevant webcomic contrasting 1984 and brave new world, which is insightful, but doesn't include the reality that we're literally living in both novels' universes
Unfortunately most people just don't fucking care, or even consider it an issue.
Someone in my local HA community proudly shared how they had been able to use AWS face recognition with their own cams so they didn't need to run face recognition locally...fucking absurd to experience someone tech-savvy willingly hand over these things and recommending others to do it too.
They are starting to care, Amazon got a huge wakeup call when they dropped the creepy Milo ad and people destroyed their products. But now they know the line and will slowly creep past it instead of plowing past. We just need to keep pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding, we have made some great victories against AI in the last few months.
People buying cameras to destroy them is still a win for Amazon.
Let us know when they actually stop buying this shit.
We need legislation with teeth before they manage to get this in every house. It's going to happen. Your phone, TV, doorbell, car, crosswalks and street signs are all going to be recording and tracking you eventually. Just recognize that's going to happen no matter what, and get real oversight and rules into place now. If we wait until it's all locked, the ruling party will never let it end.
We need legislation with teeth
He said, while living under a dictatorship.
I don't use anything cloud based and much of my shit isn't even allowed out to the internet.
It's a drop in the ocean, for too many say "But it's sooooo convenient and I've got nothing to hide" and open up all they got. Share camera's with amazon, email address book with facebook etc. not realizing nor caring I make an appearance in their instances too and I DO mind.
I was looking for a new TV last month, the salesman said it was "sacrilege" when I told him I had no intention of connecting the TV to the internet or using its online functions since I will have a media PC connected to it. I was just interested in the quality of the screen.
I had to revert the firmware on a TV because it effectively bricked itself when the software was no longer supported. I don’t connect these things to the Internet. They will simply display what I tell them to.
What a twat
I was looking for a phone that didn't have a camera. I told him I already have a camera that is NOT a phone.
He was aghast.
They definitely make them, but it's mostly for the government. I don't know if you can get and use one outside of their contract.
Did you find one?
Well, sort of. I'm now using Google Voice as a land-line.
For portability I have a personal Hot-Spot and an old iPad that is NOT chipped for phones. I can use the iPad's browser, with my Hot-Spot, to get to my Google Voice account.
I can get voice and pictures and text but for the most part it's at HOME.
“I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie. A colloquial fib we feel compelled to utter as a mock defense, like asserting innocence will assuage suspicion.
We all have something to hide. Probably many, many things to hide. Even just in the narrow context of the law, there are hundreds of thousands of laws that apply to any one of us at any given time, and you are almost certainly breaking some of them without even knowing it.
Personal security through privacy is so very, very important. I wish more people could see that.
“I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie
And easy to debunk. Take their phone, ask the pin. 9 out of 10 won't. Open bank app ask pin again. You won't get that far.
Every time I hear that I always say the same thing.
It isn't enough that you have nothing to hide.
All that's required is that the general public think they have access to information that someone might want to hide.
Once the public thinks that data can exist or is accessible all that's required is for them to lie or fabricate the required data.
"It would be very unfortunate if there was questionable content 'found' on your phone"
In a little town in the Netherlands life was good. The planning committee actually had smart people who made sure to plan the town according to the people’s needs. Kosher butchers, for instance, were placed near Jewish community centers. They could do that because the town had kept records on who lived where, including the people’s religion. It really was a utopia.
Then the nazis invaded, got their hands on those registries, and with utmost efficiency cleared the town of all jews.
I don’t know if this story is true. I read it (probably much better worded) a few years ago. But it honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true.
But it honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true.
It's plausible and that's enough.
The point is whether or not it happens, as a parable it's validity is sound. Point is, if even if the current government has nothing but good intentions and would never use the information to do anything you don't agree with, and you are in perfect agreement with the current government. There is always the risk of either the government changing or someone stealing the information from the government that could weaponize it in ways you would never want.
what's crazy to me is the people who defend this type of stuff, are the ones that are also terrified of gun registration... because you know if one day a gun ban were put in place, having a list of where all the guns are would make confiscation easy and legal. But they don't realize that it's just as likely for them to hunt people who spoke out against the government, or were the wrong race.. or hell, just possibly see that you have a gun because you took it home on a ring cam.
100%.
When I was a kid in the 90s, there used to small fringe groups talking about global warming and everyone else rolled their eyes. Now when it's too late, people have started caring.
Privacy, security and anonymity are at that place now. Anyone talking about how fucked up it is that even your TV and fridge is mining all the data it can, is considered to be a fringe alarmist. People are going to wait till the world is on fire before taking this seriously. There was an uproar when WhatsApp changed its terms of service a couple of years ago and that died down and nothing changed. The uproar from this (and Discord) will also die down and nothing will change. Maybe one day people will see this as relevant to their lives and take it seriously.
people that tell me "they have nothing to hide" understand where I am coming from in terms of privacy when I ask them to write down their social security number on a piece of paper with their debit/credit card information
Assume either Trump will go after anybody saying anything critical about him and the party, or imagine AOC takes over the government and going after anybody saying something positive about Trump. Without privacy, you're f-ed either way.
Recent tv's became thin client's. Turn it on and it first need to download the app('s)
It may seem like a drop in the ocean now, but if things ever got to the point where we're being divided up into groups, you might be oddly left out of every group. It's not hard to de-Google, de-Meta, inconvenient at times, but maybe it pays dividends down the road.
The trouble with living in a panopticon is that becomes suspicious to not be on a list.
We're already seeing that where people are suspicious when you don't have Facebook or whatever.
I was gonna make a joke how confusing it must be to see a guy appear between houses and seemingly never go home.
But then I realized I have a smart phone that listens to everything I say and tracks where I am.
