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> Also, the 1984 comparisons just don't bear fruit. We're not living in a violent, single-party totalitarian regime. ... But we could be one day, and some peop

> Also, the 1984 comparisons just don't bear fruit. We're not living in a violent, single-party totalitarian regime. ... But we could be one day, and some people are. The transition to cloud listening devices in every house and the transition to totalitarianism each only need to happen once. The thing Orwell missed was that these devices could be made useful enough to consumers for that transition to be first.

Mtinie 9y ago
It has been said many times before by commenters here on HN, and is worth repeating. Cloud-enabled listening devices already have saturated society and are nearly omnipresent. They have a form factor that fits in your pocket and also includes discrete surveillance-enabling conveniences such as: GPS tracking, always-on microphones, high resolution cameras, target-specific network graph data, and access to very large (and inconvenient to monitor) data storage. If a person is concerned with the practical security implications of Amazon's Echo or Google's Home, I expect they should be terrified of the potential vectors for misuses that their mobile phone allows. The future state of government regulation and the ability for those in power to use the digital tracks I've left do concern me, but I've found it very difficult to decide how to combat it without fully disconnecting and moving off-grid. There are ways to mask and obfuscate certain parts of that record, to be sure (Tor, proxies, not using Echo or Home, no connected devices, etc.) but I like the benefits that technology brings to me life and I don't really want to move into a remote, signal-free location to live a spartan life.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  For sure. My argument is that, in general, consumers have found all of those listening devices more useful than terrifying. I don't think Orwell imagined that universal surveillance would happen due to consumer demand rather than imposition by the totalitarian state.

Mtinie 9y ago

It has been said many times before by commenters here on HN, and is worth repeating. Cloud-enabled listening devices already have saturated society and are nearly omnipresent. They have a form factor that fits in your pocket and also includes discrete surveillance-enabling conveniences such as: GPS tracking, always-on microphones, high resolution cameras, target-specific network graph data, and access to very large (and inconvenient to monitor) data storage. If a person is concerned with the practical security implications of Amazon's Echo or Google's Home, I expect they should be terrified of the potential vectors for misuses that their mobile phone allows. The future state of government regulation and the ability for those in power to use the digital tracks I've left do concern me, but I've found it very difficult to decide how to combat it without fully disconnecting and moving off-grid. There are ways to mask and obfuscate certain parts of that record, to be sure (Tor, proxies, not using Echo or Home, no connected devices, etc.) but I like the benefits that technology brings to me life and I don't really want to move into a remote, signal-free location to live a spartan life.

InitialLastName 9y ago
For sure. My argument is that, in general, consumers have found all of those listening devices more useful than terrifying. I don't think Orwell imagined that universal surveillance would happen due to consumer demand rather than imposition by the totalitarian state.