You must log in or # to comment.
This was so obviously a bad idea from day one, I was shocked at how widely adopted these were right away. In retrospect I shouldnt have been surprised but somehow I just always expect people to be smarter.
All you have to do is not tell any of the customers that it continually listens, by the time the ones who didn’t know find out, it’s already in their homes, they’ve already got the app installed, and they’ve said “I dreamt about something and then saw an ad for it the next day” more than once.
The CIA openly admits to spying on people around the world and everyone’s reaction is now ‘Oh you’
Somehow (constant media propaganda most likely) they’ve convinced people that to do ANYTHING you have to get your hands dirty; that ‘ANYTHING’ however is rarely or only slightly in our benefit, it’s of a bigger benefit to an elite few instead. Even if you ascribe to ‘the ends justify the means’, the ends aren’t worth it and the means are just getting more and more horrific and we’re assuming the imperial boomerang isn’t on its way back.
The vast line of imperial boomerangs have been slamming against our jaws for years now
From what i gather from talking to people is that
A: they don’t care Or B: I’m paranoid and it doesn’t matter.
I do not understand how people just give up their privacy for nothing
It’s fucking wild to me how so many people willingly signed over their privacy so blatantly.
They’ve been conditioned to not care or even desire it. Smartphones had Siri and Google Assistant as a selling point, which led to ever more intrusive tech that was marketed as a convenience. Facebook took it a step further and had you label people in pictures uploaded to them and you sign away your privacy in their terms and conditions. Advanced marketing techniques were irresistible to social media companies and so consumer profiles of everyone they could get became a thing.
Jokes about seeing ads that smartphones can overhear made the intrusive spying all the more accepted as just a part of life. Android marks your calendar and reminds you of appointments made using your Gmail account when you never asked it to. Ring doorbell cameras quietly sell their video feeds to the highest bidder, often to law enforcement as a convenient means to circumvent the 4th amendment. And now the latest trend is to have your car do everything your phone already does but take it a step further by monitoring your driving habits so insurance companies can justify raising your premiums.
The average person isn’t tech savvy enough to understand they’re being sold as a product even after paying for their own surveillance gear. They just want modern conveniences without thinking the price they pay beyond the original sale.
Has there actually been evidence of Alexa or Google homes being used for government surveillance?
Ring doorbells now give their footage to Flock, which can give/sell it to anyone. No warrant necessary. Not exactly what you’re asking about, but along the same lines.
Ring, also owned by Amazon, shares their video surveillance with Flock, which contracts with local LE agencies who share it with the feds.
0 warrants required, and ICE is actively using the data against people.
Shhhh, the pitchforks are out, who needs evidence. In all reality, if you were to be wiretapped, an Alexa wouldn’t be the best option. Most people already have an internet connected microphone they carry around with them everywhere. And it has multiple cameras too, which are regularly brought into the bathroom with them.
It’s more than that honestly, or less, depending on the perspective. Most people share their data with “only our 900 bestliest partners” or more everyday. Every tweet, login, whatever metadata can be more valuable and easier to compute than voice or video, depending on what you are looking for.
Which is basically what Snowden revealed btw (phone metadata collection, internet traffic interception, data access from tech platforms, fiber-optic cable tapping, smartphone location and metadata)
If somebody wants to hack my camera and watch me cut a turd, who am I to deny them?
If the data is there a fascist government will absolutely use it. Of course in a democracy that won’t happen … unless you vote for fascists, ooopsie.
The data isn’t there. At least not in the way some of the biggest fearmongers talk about it. Everything you say to the device, you can assume is there. But it listens for the wake word locally and doesn’t send information to the server until after it receives the wake word.
It’s can hallucinate the wake word and streams everything after. And that’s assuming you trust the manufacturer which, why would you?
Alexa is wildly popular. What has Amazon done to gain everyone’s trust? They just offer the cheapest version.
Depends on the company. Apple uses a very specific type of chip for the wake word that cannot change the wake word. Alexa is able to change the sound wake word to almost anything, iirc.
That might be true, I honestly don’t know. But it doesn’t matter to the point I’m making, which is that however the device does it, it’s the device, locally, that determines whether a wake word has been said, before it starts transmitting what comes next.
deleted by creator
Care to clarify your meaning? Or are you just disagreeing because it feels good to go along with the conspiracy theory?
I just don’t trust corporations 🤷🏻
deleted by creator
I’m specifically talking about Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices, not anything else your phone or apps are doing. So the only one of those articles even remotely relevant is the third.
And the third talks about “false wakes” being the cause. Which goes along with what I said before that until it hears the wake word (even if it’s mistaken in doing so), it’s not sending back recordings.
deleted by creator
Authoritarians learned that 1984-style totalitarian control doesn’t work anymore; so they tried Brave New World’s control through psychological pleasure, and it is more successful than ever imagined.
Really it’s a mixture of both. Brave New World to keep the masses sedated, 1984 for the people who start to question the system.
deleted by creator
Truly amazing how many breaches of privacy people are willing to put up with if the propaganda says that questioning the tracking means you’re hiding something and deserve to be tracked.
Or to protect the children! Child abuse is the trojan horse, also age restrictions a trojan sheep they have several on offer, to surrender to Tech. Social scores by half baked ai deciding everything secretly, in a way no one can know and challenge. The entire west is trying to surrender their citizens to Tech giants last year for a cut of the info and personal exemptions for politicians and security services.
Past generations would tar and feather these assholes something is wrong.
We need another secession of the plebians. Let these tech bros try and carry on without their main profit vector
That is a great idea. I think we should re-establish the Tribunate. With the veto on government actions and the rest, ability to offer sanctuary, being sacrosanct. Peoples’ tribunate. 500 bc and 350 bc the plebs did a general strike and got that and other concessions and expanded it, simply by decamping to a large hill and refusing to do anything until demands were met. I think they got written laws from that too, the 12 tables, before that the rich just made shit up as they went.
I don’t take VACCINES because the GOVERNMENT puts TRACKING CHIPS in them! You can’t trust ANYTHING made by SCIENCE anymore!
- Sent from my iPhone
The scariest part is when you just think about pancakes and then start seeing ads for flour and maple syrup 10 minutes later. They don’t even need the wiretap anymore.
Yeah because they know you like pancakes and can serve you ads to start that train of thought so when you are served the pancake ad you feel like it ‘got you’ instead of the real fact that you were manipulated into thinking about pancakes so the pancake ad has more possibility of getting engagement from you. This is why you should have ad block on everything you interact with.
yeah people don’t realize just how insidious advertisement really is.
your phone isn’t “reading your mind,” advertisers have such a comprehensive model of you that they’re able to predict your thoughts with an incredibly high degree of accuracy before you even have them. There’s also obviously a bit of confirmation bias in play, you only remember the times they got it right as opposed to the times they guessed wrong.
I suddenly feel a sharp craving for some ad-block software…
Alexa Home Microphone. They mis-named it as a “home speaker” but actual home speakers have been around for 100+ years. They originally looked like this:
I actually use mine as a disability aid. My motor control isn’t the best so it’s good just to call out for light and heat adjustments.
But I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that if ICE or whoever wanted to come bust me down, there wasn’t anything stopping them before I got what is essentially a home aide, and there’s nothing stopping them now.
How many of you are responding to this post from your cell phone?
When phones were still tied to a cable, people were freer.
Your phone is probably worse. Yes, even with GrapheneOS.
Please explain?! Is GrapheneOS a honeypot in your opinion?
Hey wiretap, I was hitting on my wife’s friend in the elevator, I have issues with my wife anyways about that 2k she spent from my account last week if you remember, am I the asshole?
Hey validation machine, can you tell me I am right?
You’re absolutely right!
