Comment by ren_engineer
3 years ago
1984 was overly optimistic about people, government didn't even need to enforce putting spying devices in homes. Instead a huge chunk opted in voluntarily with doorbell cameras, Alexa, and other smart devices
3 years ago
1984 was overly optimistic about people, government didn't even need to enforce putting spying devices in homes. Instead a huge chunk opted in voluntarily with doorbell cameras, Alexa, and other smart devices
1984 and Brave New World weren't exclusive. We can have both at the same time.
I like how much of Brave New World is being created in SoMa.
> SoMa
Looks like the newspeak got you.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the technology, and it obviously makes peoples lives better to have it. I think the issue is that there are only a handful of vendors that happily operate like the monopolies they are and provide you with zero differentiation or choice within the market.
The government isn't particularly interested in ending this problem either, I suspect this is due to a combination of industry capture and intelligence agency interest in these products.
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with the technology
Oh, but there is. It's subservient to the manufacturer, not to you.
I'm still annoyed that no country decided to classify "selling" things where the manufacturer keeps complete control and denies you access as fraud. But just because no legal system decided it's a crime, it doesn't mean it's right.
You say there is nothing wrong, but then go on to list things that are in fact wrong.
You think the problems are a mistake or otherwise something to be "fixed" the products are working exactly as both the government and the manufacturers want them to, and it has nothing to do with "intel agencies"
Having your entire life "cloud connected" and them complaining about privacy, is like opening a window then complaining that the house is drafty.
I love home automation, not a single component of my home automation is cloud connected, if more people would accept, learn and support non-cloud systems, services and protocols everyone would be better off
> You say there is nothing wrong, but then go on to list things that are in fact wrong.
They say there is nothing wrong with the technology, but then go on to list things that are in fact wrong with the not-technology.
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> I love home automation, not a single component of my home automation is cloud connected, if more people would accept, learn and support non-cloud systems, services and protocols everyone would be better off
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This is not limited to Alexa or seemingly unnecessary tech gadgets.
This includes ALL your data. Gmail, Google, Android.
So unless you're opting for iOs (provided they're not doing the same as Google here) and not using Gmail or Google you're still falling under "Surveilled by the gov via tech company who serves their interests and not yours, even if you pay money for their services".
OR you can opt for a version of Android without the proprietary bits like GrapheneOS.
How accessible is that to your grandmother? Can you walk her through the process? (Are you willing to, given that now you'll be called if anything goes wrong?)
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This is why Apple is going to continue to crush it. They can build a subpar equivalent to google services and a large portion of the tech world will adopt it for its privacy benefits. The 'tech world' is a large influencer to the general public, leading to further penetration.
It's a great strategy as Google makes 80%+ of it's revenue from Ads, and their ad model does not work well with a privacy first mindset.
Apple designs with privacy in mind. Google designs with invasiveness.
> Apple designs with privacy in mind.
I find that hard to believe when so many of their devices' functionality depends on you sending data over to them. Unless you go out of your way to make sure you're blocking all your devices from phoning home or sending any data over to Apple, then any supposed privacy benefit becomes a lie.
Either you're the only owner of your data or your data is not, by definition, private to you.
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> Abstract — We investigate what data iOS on an iPhone shares with Apple and what data Google Android on a Pixel phone shares with Google. We find that even when minimally configured and the handset is idle both iOS and Google Android share data with Apple/Google on average every 4.5 mins. The phone IMEI, hardware serial number, SIM serial number and IMSI, handset phone number etc are shared with Apple and Google. Both iOS and Google Android transmit telemetry, despite the user explicitly opting out of this. When a SIM is inserted both iOS and Google Android send details to Apple/Google. iOS sends the MAC addresses of nearby devices, e.g. other handsets and the home gateway, to Apple together with their GPS location. Users have no opt out from this and currently there are few, if any, realistic options for preventing this data sharing.
Leith, D. J. (2021). Mobile Handset Privacy: Measuring The Data iOS and Android Send to Apple And Google. URL: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
Apple is the only one of the "big tech" to actually operate a datacenter in China, whose contents are entirely subjected to the whims of the regime.
I'm afraid your conviction in Apple is the product of a well-crafted fantasy by their marketing department, instead of based on some deep rooted philosophical belief regarding the rights and privacy of their users.
It should be noted that Apple also has an ad wing that brought in $4 billion in 2021 [0].
0: https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-revenue-ads-516478777...
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Apple would "crush it" if they would combine their privacy focus with a commitment to individual ownership instead of Apple Ownership of the product they "sell"
i.e Right to repair, Side Load Apps, no draconian app store policy, etc etc etc
Embrace both privacy and user freedom. that would be great
It's hilarious. Freedom/privacy-loving Americans voluntarily give it up for minor gains in comfort.
Google's ToS is 16 pages with what appears to be about 50+ hyperlinks, including several hyperlinks to "additional service-specific terms" which itself has ~50 links to other terms which are all multiple pages.
Perhaps instead of pinning all of the blame on users, we could have the companies producing labyrinthian ToS contracts written by top-grade lawyers and full of legalese (that no layperson should be expected to understand) shoulder at least some of the blame?
This doesn't even touch on the fact that many topics (as related to data aggregation and privacy) are highly technical and require at least a few years of post-secondary to even begin wrapping your head around (e.g. de-anonymization via large sparse datasets is not something I can reasonably teach my 85-year old parent, nor to my child, both of which use Google services in some capacity).
But, yes... Let's blame it on Average Joe, who just wants to watch their dog for a few minutes while at work and saw an ad on TV about a convenient way to do so. Shame on them for not being both a lawyer and a CS graduate.
I don’t understand why aren’t there any standard terms of service which are generally applicable and companies can make minor adjustments to them if they can justify it
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A solution to this is for courts to limit what is applicable in a ToS to a certain number of words, and have overly broad statements always favor the entity who has to agree.
This, in effect, nullifies all but the most important components of a Tos.
Due diligence is expected among a mature population. But you're right it's not entirely on individuals. There should be ways to disseminate information about the threats these products pose to personal liberty, especially in a nation that uses the word "liberty" so freely in its foundational documents.
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Eh, it's exactly what you expect from America though. Ie the embodiment of short term thinking. Economy, environment, politics, etc - not that America is entirely unique here, just that the population seems to embrace this as a foundation in my experience.
Privacy to tech like this is very hypothetical till it happens, and it'll rarely happen. If it's not in our faces we won't vote against it.
>Eh, it's exactly what you expect from America though. Ie the embodiment of short term thinking.
I think this is the entirely wrong framing. My other comment covers some of it, but specifically in regards to your comment: it's a lack of education, not the embodiment of short-term thinking.
And really, we can't expect every person that uses Google (or whatever other large tech company) to thoroughly understand all of the bits and pieces of technology that could be used to fuck them. Or how things that we've been told are anonymous/private become non-anonymous/non-private when combined with other sparse data. These are complex topics that even many technologists don't understand (or are outside of their field of expertise).
These companies hire top lawyers to write complex ToS, use as many dark-patterns as legally possible, do illegal things until they get caught doing so, evolve their terms frequently, etc. Yet somehow they've convinced everyone to blame the layperson. It's remarkable, really.
What would be really swell is if we could, you know, not have companies spend millions of dollars on how-to-fuck-your-user initiatives.
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It's hilarious.
That's an odd take, I honestly don't find anything about this article, or the broader topic of privacy and overreach by companies and law enforcement, amusing in any way.
Fahrenheit 451 has a part where they get the entire city to go to their doors to try and spot a fugitive, this action is coordinated by the radios that everyone wears.
With these cameras and recognition algorithms, you don't even need people to go to the doors. Just pull the feeds.
I think Larry Brin's "The Transparent Society" is the best read on the topic. Not predictive of all outcomes, but many aspects of modern surveillance he did see coming.
This is confused. The Transparent Society is by David Brin[0]. Two of the founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The confusion is understandable given the name collision.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
Thank you; good catch on the name error.
His novel 'Earth' also predicted glassholes.
In the West, Orwell was wrong and Huxley was correct.
Comparisons to 1984 are hack, but I seem to remember that in the book the telescreens were described as something that people willingly bought.
right!?
TikTok could be a spyware (lol) that requires your SSN and people would STILL download it and defend it just because it brings them mindless 10 second videos. I remember reading 1984 as a kid and thought it was so far fetched, that nobody would willingly let society get to that point... but it just only made more sense as I got older... people really just don't care...
I mean, you carry a listening device with you almost 100% of the time. Why would you even worry about the Alexa in your home?
For me, the difference is that the phone (with voice assist turned OFF) is not supposed to be listening all the time, while a device like Alexa is supposed to be listening. I don't want devices listening so I turn that feature off when I can and avoid the device when I can't.
Is the phone listening anyway? Maybe, but that violates a privacy expectation, and there may be recourse if someone discovers it's doing that.
I work on Alexa and for whatever it’s worth, I can confirm that Amazon is telling the truth about how Alexa listens and about what is done with your data.
This is all publicly available info, and perhaps there’s no reason why you should trust me any more than you trust Amazon as a company, but as one privacy-conscious engineer to another, I promise that your ambient conversations are not being stored or sent to Amazon and that any data you delete in the app (either by specifying an auto-delete period or manually deleting it) is actually, really, truly deleted.
A process running locally on your Alexa device listens for the “wake word”.[0] This audio is only processed locally within a constantly-overwritten memory buffer, it is neither stored nor transmitted. Only once the wake word is detected does Alexa begin to transmit an utterance to the cloud for processing. I’ve worked with the device stack and it really isn’t transmitting your ambient conversations.
Within the Alexa app[1], you can see and hear all of your stored data and can delete any of it. You can also control the duration after which it is auto-deleted. From working with ASR datasets, I can confirm that deleted audio (and the associated text transcript) is really deleted, not just hidden from your view.
I never owned an Alexa or other smart home device before I worked on it, and I’m not sure I’d buy another company’s device where I lack the same ability to “trust but verify”, so I’m not sure how much weight my word should carry. But I can give my word that Alexa is not transmitting your ambient conversations or just setting “deleted=true” in a database when you tell it to delete your data.
[0] see page 4 of https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/A4B/White%20Paper...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23608614011
I definitely understand your point, but I think the greater issue is why should this have to serve as a rationalization in the first place? Why can't we expect our phones to serve us rather than the other way around?
That's a fallacy. The average "listening device" it's not constantly recording and uploading audio. We would notice if it did.