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.
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.
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
it IS a wonder. i’m actually pretty curious how they accomplished this.
like i know how they harvest our data to figure us out, but i’m a computer guy. the psychology of brainwashing that sophisticated must be crazy.
My hypothesis is that it’s a frog in a pot of water scenario. Western Union started the first charge account in 1914, so we’ve had a long time to get used to the water heating up. It probably did start with honest intentions to make things work a little smoother, but I remember the early days of digitizing records, and there was a LOT of loose data just there for the taking.
I remember that I used to work at RadioShack in the late '00s, and I had to escalate up to district because we discovered a treasure trove of old paper store credit applications that had been cached somewhere in the backrooms, and my manager wanted to just throw them in the normal garbage and not risk the cost of the extra shredding coming out of her bonus.
These things had SO MUCH INFO, handwritten out onto a paper form; name, birthday, SSN, mailing address, street address, then all that info of the spouse/cosigner that wanted to be on the account too. I could have made so much money on the black market, looking back.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
When phones were still tied to a cable, people were freer.
Your phone is probably worse. Yes, even with GrapheneOS.
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.
And police departments have absolutely bought that information, especially given their notoriously inflated budgets (at least in many cities).
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.
An autistic teenage hacker banned from having a computer used a fire stick in a hotel room to hack Rockstar games. I think any given 14 year old war driver can hack these devices and listen to your conversations. If the government will work their butts off to install a tap on a landline, how can they not use an Alexa.
At the very least, there’s a teenager in your neighborhood listening to every damn thing you say. If you have cameras in your home, they’re watching you.
Pretty sure it’s illegal for them to confirm that this has happened. Most of the spying is to manipulate your shopping patterns and learn how to make the most profit from you.
Think Las Vegas casino levels of manipulation and then some.
Yes I think the Cloud Act forbids telling the customers that an agency has accessed their data. Not that Google or Amazon would want to tell anyway
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.
If somebody wants to hack my camera and watch me cut a turd, who am I to deny them?
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:
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…
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?
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!
Fuck. I just made apple butter pancakes last night. This is me, except way hotter.
