Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
The Machiavellian part of me thinks Ring screwed up by not raising the stakes. Search Party and the way they advertised it makes you go "awww’ when you see the golden retriever and then “wait, WHAT?” when they show all their Ring doorbells going full surveillance mode in locating the missing dog.
A lengthier ad showing a pedophile being tracked down and arrested by law enforcement mid-abduction, their victim rescued, then the nonce being served justice may have had a more positive response.
I mean, “think of the children” has been the perfect strawman argument to justify mass surveillance, after all…
As if this hadn’t been obvious the very moment they started connecting their massive amount of same model cameras to servers under their own regime (aka " the cloud"). And as if nobody told you so.
As a working dad with kids, I like my doorbell cam. My self hosted, non-cloud, local only doorbell cam that is.
My f’ing camera feeds are mine.
What “global backlash”?
If there had been such a thing European citizens and companies would have not have spent the next decade putting their data in America’s hands and now be scrambling to decouple as American goes from Hard Neoliberal At Home Fascist Abroad to Full-on Fascist Everywhere.
For people paying attention back then it was painfully obvious back then that one could not trust one’s data in the hands of American companies or in fact any companies from a 4-eyes (meanwhile expanded to 7-eyes) country and yet the rush for putting personal and corporate data in American cloud systems were insane (not helped by the EU approving the US as a “safe haven” for data, something so outrageous after the the Snowden Revelations that I bet a lot of people involved were either customers of Epstein’s “services” or corrupt as fuck).
In fact, that massive surveillance cooperative operation expanding from 4 countries to 7 is also a pretty good indication that there wasn’t really a “global backlash”, otherwise countries like New Zeeland would be wary of joining it as it would get them cut out of international data networks and agreements.
Only countries like China seem to have taken the whole thing seriously and setup their own local stack of consumer and corporate data sharing and storing, and that seems to have been driven at least partly by wanting to do exactly the same as the 4-eyes countries were doing.
It’s kinda hilarious that propaganda in the US talked about “EU is always watching you” as a part of the propaganda against government regulations. While some places over there are starting to see the rise of fascist parties, I think awareness of the US’s fall into fascism is hurting their cause as people are a little more aware than they might otherwise be.
And while I don’t generally like any government monitoring, if I had to choose, I’d choose EU monitoring over US monitoring any day, considering how our democracy has long been secondary to capitalism (with our own special twist of that old socialist phrase, for us “Taking the resources of the many to concentrate in the hands of the few ultra-wealthy”)
Our oligarchs have corrupted the entire system, and our government allows us just enough to survive while funelling all the resources up to the oligarchs. They have more than they could possibly spend, and they still demand more More MORE M O R E.
Back to cameras: In this case, more data, more control, more intimidation, more fear.
The only place in the EU with surveillance anywhere as bad as the US was Britain and they aren’t in the EU anymore.
And this is just State surveillance.
When it comes to Private Sector surveillance, nowhere in the EU are things anywhere close to as bad in the US since EU countries have far tighter Privacy regulations and even outside the EU-wide regulations most countries have had pretty strict Medical and Banking data regulations for quite a while.
That Propaganda in the US is a mix of straight bullshit about government surveillance in Europe - which in reality is not much of a thing outside dictatorships or Britain - and the insiduious take of, anchored on the Hard-Neoliberal Fable that Public Is Bad, Private Is Good, not even considering private sector surveillance and its impact, when that’s a far worse problem in the US than in Europe.
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 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.
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.
For portability I think I would use an older android phone loaded with your OS choice.
The iPad and phone both have cameras anyway just the phone is lighter. Keep it no sim and in airplane mode
Good advice, Thanks.
I did buy a used phone at the thrift store and put that in the car so I had a clock.
Mind you the issue here is that an old Android phone will likely have an outdated kernel. Even if there is a custom ROM for it. Leaving you vulnerable, which isn’t great.
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.
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.
I’m disappointed that it took seeing that ad for so many people to realize what should have been obvious: ring, along with teslas, and any voice assistant listening devices, or any other cloud-based tech that monitors video, audio, or even other data, can be used to set up an unprecedented surveillance network. Phones are a part of it, too, at the very least as tracking beacons, assuming the mics and cameras aren’t being tapped more often than that little activity dot indicates.
There’s a reason why the venn diagram of people who really understand tech and people who are enthusiastic about most new tech in the last decade and a bit aren’t the same circle. The Snowden revelations weren’t surprising on the “what they are capable of” side of things, though there had been hope before they came out that they weren’t crossing the lines that tech would have easily allowed them to. Just like when zuck bragged about the information fb users just gave him, that wasn’t all new but there was an unspoken (and perhaps naive) rule that admins should respect their users’ privacy.
When I was on the webteam for a gaming community, it would have been trivial to set up the login page to also store all user/password/email combos in a location none of the other team would be likely to notice. We hashed the password in the db, but I could change the source code to do whatever. Even if it was hashed on the client, I could have added a temporary unhashed field and get all the plaintext credentials to check who uses the same password for their email. I didn’t because I respected our users, but from then on just assumed that any site admin could see my credentials and never reuse passwords.
That also applies to Lemmy, btw. At the very least, you shouldn’t use the same password for you email and anything else (though also be aware emails are just sent as plaintext to a bunch of servers while being routed to your email provider).
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!
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.
It is fascinating to me that the FBI desperately wanting to pretend that they’re relevant and doing actual investigative work in the Guthrie case stupidly confirmed that corporations are not only spying on us all, but feeding the data into federal databases for access without a warrant or any meaningful oversight.
Y’all, it’s wild that so much of what your dumbass, Infowars-obsessed grandparents told you is literally true and provable now.
A few people have said it, but I’m really glad my tech is always a few generations behind and I never bought into voice assistants or smart home technology. And I keep my phone in a faraday bag when not in use. That probably makes it somewhat harder for them to spy on me logistically.
My dad rips his name out of junk mail and shreds it. He doesn’t want his name tied to his address, which is ironic in the first place, given that he’s already getting junk mail. He’s been worried about hiding his identity, address, cars, etc from some unknown surveillance entity based around Red Scare beliefs. Still, a few steps short of foil hat types.
Then he went and got cloud-based cameras. He’s clueless about smartphone privacy already. He resembles his friends in his cohort. They protested “leftist government surveillance” and then showed me that they’d will invite mystery surveillance in with the slightest promise of convenience.
Don’t have to force surveillance on people. They’ll literally pay money for it.
Imagine that 🤣
If anyone wonders why there are so many scams, it’s easy! The average consumer is in general are short sighted, gullible and naive. Of course there will be plenty who will to exploit that.
The conditions of capitalism make desperate people, or those after easy money, ripe for plunder. Ahh capitalism, you glorious old whore.
