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..just one of a few really good lines in this:

https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/08/merry-surveillance/


-and it's all true.

Lets see, I have my cheap cell phone,a Kindle, computer, and a laptop, and no smart appliances.

whm1974 wrote:

Lets see, I have my cheap cell phone,

Enables "The Man" to know where you are 24x7 (unless you turn it off when you're not using it). TLAs and malware writers can probably turn the microphone on at will too, to listen to whatever's going on around you.

whm1974 wrote:

a Kindle,

Amazon knows what you read (and probably when you read it), and can sporadically track your location by logging IP addresses of WiFi access points the Kindle connects to and looking them up in a geolocation database.

whm1974 wrote:

computer, and a laptop,

Google knows your entire web browsing history and all of the physical locations where you've used the laptop (unless you connect to the internet through a proxy when not at home).

whm1974 wrote:

and no smart appliances.

Surveillance is less of a concern with those. The bigger risks are that they'll get hijacked to participate in a botnet, or that exploits in systems that affect physical security (e.g. smart garage door opener) will be used to break into your residence.

Eh. Seems like FUD to me. We've been at this point for awhile, imo. There's no such thing as privacy anymore, but there is anonymity.

Devices collect data all the time but with the exception of bad actors or state actors, no one would want to tie all that data back to _you_ specifically. Unless you're doing something illegal perhaps.

Heck, in the cable industry, they go as far as to anonymize the mac address of your settop box before sending it to advertisers. No one cares about you! They care about your habit data that gets tied to some arbitrary ID. You are not a human being surveilled by another human. You are a bunch of habits tied to some number in a database for advertising robots, and while it may be uncanny at times, robots don't judge.

By buying into any major tech ecosystem you become one in a billion. Yes, companies make money off the data you generate. But you get all their services in return, and your anonymized data lets robots develop even better future services.

There may be some truth to that, but I find it hard to consider the ubiquity of surveillance being "good" or "ok". There's nothing I can really do about it unless I want to toss the cell phone and credit cards, start growing all my own fruits and veggies, and become that crazy dude up on the mountain, but I still don't like it. It's not even as bad here as it is some other places in the world.

I can't complain too much. I use one of the products of that reduced privacy on a daily basis and it has saved me at least 10 hours of sitting in traffic in the past few months. Google maps traffic is calculated from android phone location data. I have successfully avoided two twelve mile backups, and countless smaller ones by just glancing ahead on the map.

Oh, and what apppeared to be something like a 40 mile cluster **** during a holiday on 95 north.

Duct Tape Dude wrote:

Eh. Seems like FUD to me. We've been at this point for awhile, imo. There's no such thing as privacy anymore, but there is anonymity.

Devices collect data all the time but with the exception of bad actors or state actors, no one would want to tie all that data back to _you_ specifically. Unless you're doing something illegal perhaps.

Heck, in the cable industry, they go as far as to anonymize the mac address of your settop box before sending it to advertisers. No one cares about you! They care about your habit data that gets tied to some arbitrary ID. You are not a human being surveilled by another human. You are a bunch of habits tied to some number in a database for advertising robots, and while it may be uncanny at times, robots don't judge.

By buying into any major tech ecosystem you become one in a billion. Yes, companies make money off the data you generate. But you get all their services in return, and your anonymized data lets robots develop even better future services.

Tell that to the sex workers who got outed by Facebook.

And it's not like these people weren't being careful. These people know how to use totally separate accounts, sometimes even completely different devices, and yet big data algorithms trace them back to the same person. Those seemingly-innocuous little buttons present on every site feed back huge amounts of data, so much so that the likes of Facebook and Google almost certainly know not just our real names, but also those of our online alts.

Check out Episode 2 of the BBC documentary 'Secrets of Silicon Valley'. It starts off interviewing some of the (super smart) people who ran the Trump campaign, and shows a glimpse of what Facebook is capable of. Despite having to work with limited information (such as what beer, or which musicians someone has liked), it is able to estimate someone's personality, right down to their intelligence, religious leanings, and political inclinations.



And yet as you say we happily give them our information. The convenience afforded by Google's services are such that we choose to be spied on, but that choice may have been made in underestimation of the capabilities of big data. Time to re-read Cyril's editorial, I guess. Can't believe it's been four and a half years since then.

just brew it! wrote:

whm1974 wrote:

Lets see, I have my cheap cell phone,

Enables "The Man" to know where you are 24x7 (unless you turn it off when you're not using it). TLAs and malware writers can probably turn the microphone on at will too, to listen to whatever's going on around you.

Don't forget cell location data is stored for up to five years, if not longer depending on the carrier. It's pretty crazy how specific the records can be due to tower triangulation for building up a long duration record of a person's habits.

just brew it! wrote:

whm1974 wrote:

a Kindle,

Amazon knows what you read (and probably when you read it), and can sporadically track your location by logging IP addresses of WiFi access points the Kindle connects to and looking them up in a geolocation database.

I'm not entirely sure about that. I don't have to sync my Kindle, and I almost always just direct copy files onto it even if I do buy the ebook from Amazon. With the wifi off the 5 year old battery still lasts weeks. Not that I really care all that much if they knew every single ebook that touched the device, though to tie into Jihadjoe's point such book list data would really make it very easy for the big data's analytic software to produce accurate user profiles.

Kougar wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

whm1974 wrote:

a Kindle,

Amazon knows what you read (and probably when you read it), and can sporadically track your location by logging IP addresses of WiFi access points the Kindle connects to and looking them up in a geolocation database.

I'm not entirely sure about that. I don't have to sync my Kindle, and I almost always just direct copy files onto it even if I do buy the ebook from Amazon. With the wifi off the 5 year old battery still lasts weeks. Not that I really care all that much if they knew every single ebook that touched the device, though to tie into Jihadjoe's point such book list data would really make it very easy for the big data's analytic software to produce accurate user profiles.

Well I've gotten a bunch of free books from Amazon, and I am the type of person who tries to be widely read. I have in the past tried to read everything including stuff I'm not going to agree with, and I still do.