31 ms·

Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

178 points by edejong 8y ago

zby 8y ago
I am surprised that it is only 300 times - but this is probably because these devices are now bought by wealthy people who don't commit too many crimes or felonies.
- spaceribs 8y ago
  I'd wager white-collar crime happens more than street crime. It's known that it costs us between 250 billion to 1 trillion dollars yearly, but pursuing the crimes isn't prioritized by the FBI/IRS because of the costs of litigation, the possibility of destabilizing the markets, and the war on drugs/terror.
  - zby 8y ago
    Interesting point - maybe they don't need home surveillance in these investigations that often? The case mentioned in the article as the first one was a white collar crime: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/10/12/how-an-amateur-rap-crew-stole-surveillance-tech-that-tracks-almost-every-american/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/10/12/how-a...
    - tedunangst 8y ago
      That doesn't really say much about what the prosecution learned from nest.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- drasticmeasures 8y ago
  You don't have to commit a crime to be targeted, spied on, harassed and have your life destroyed by the government. When the government spies on innocent people en masse -- because they say they should have nothing to hide --, the government is the one doing harm to an innocent person, and it's the government who has something to hide. Without accountability, and given the secret and anonymous nature of their interference, we can't trust that the government only spies on guilty people, because they will circularly claim that they are guilty because they are spied on. And you shouldn't take solace that comparatively only a few innocent people get their lives destroyed, not just because it can happen to you, or because it shouldn't happen in the first place, but because not being accountable for their crimes gradually emboldens the government, and given advances in automation, to scale it up and encompass more of society until one day they come for you or your children.
  - zby 8y ago
    I agree - it starts with criminals - because it is an obvious target, but once the capabilities are built then they are used in whatever way the government likes.
Sharlin 8y ago
I think the time has come for a The Wire reboot. Anyone else? Edit: Downvotes, why? The Wire was a critically acclaimed series whose major themes included abuse of power, the use of technology to both surveil and evade surveillance, perverse incentives, and failure of institutions, among other things that are as relevant as ever in the post-Snowden era. But instead of pagers and burners we'd get tech circa 2018.
- rdl 8y ago
  A series where people used technical surveillance using devices like these (IOTINT? IDK what the term of art is yet), OSINT from online things like FB, various forms of legal process (civil, LE, NS, and extralegal), etc. to go after "terrorists" down to criminals of various crimes down to "enemies of the Party" down to "people who slightly antagonize employees of the Agency" to "for the lulz" would be interesting. More like Homeland than The Wire, though. Or, uh, Black Mirror.
  - Shorel 8y ago
    If you want a total surveillance show, there's Person of Interest.
yardie 8y ago
If your data is not end to end private key encrypted, then you are inviting the government in to look at all your shit; photos, documents, logs, everything.
- wstrange 8y ago
  We tend to view this as a technology problem. The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior? Fighting a technology arms race with the government is a losing battle. They can ask for private keys to be handed over - on threat of jail time if you don't comply. We need to start at the ballot box.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    It's drastically easier to roll out a new technology than change a government policy which all major political parties are more or less comfortable with. Governments take time to adapt to new technology, so keep the new technology moving faster than the government knows how to deal with it........
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    >The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior? Not many care anymore about privacy except basically, us, the tech power user community and then a few stragglers. This new generation just doesn't care because they never really grew up with any in the first place, just shoved right into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. They probably didn't go too depth into privacy laws, why your privacy matters in their grade school either.
    - yardie 8y ago
      Just from observing my kid and his friends I think they are amazingly adept at privacy even if they don't realize it, yet. They are more concerned about trolling, being trolled, and in extreme cases, swatting. They share stuff on FB-IG-SC-YT but are conscious to give out just enough information. No real names, no addresses, no phone numbers. Now the older generations (boomers, GenX, Xillenials) share way too much information, in my opinion. They get on FB, tag everyone in the photo, even those without a FB account. And share their phone number and directions to their house.
randyrand 8y ago
I'm a little surprised google does not use the user's password for encryption. Seems like they are inviting a very bad data breach in the future.
- tyingq 8y ago
  I imagine it's encrypted over the wire, but since the model is "processed in the cloud", it has to be decrypted to do anything useful with it. I suppose they could not log anything that could allow correlation to a user/ip, but that creates a different security problem. I don't see a real technical solution here other than doing all the processing locally.
- QuercusMax 8y ago
  So if you forget your password, your data is just gone? That doesn't seem like a good solution. I worked on a system in a previous life that encrypted data based on user passwords, and we had to add a backup encryption key (tied to security questions) because we had so many issues with people forgetting their password and losing their data. Google does now allow you to supply your own encryption keys for some offerings: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/customer-supplied-encryption https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/customer-supplie.... This is probably a better option for those who are clueful enough. (Disclaimer: I work for an Alphabet company.)
- Johnny555 8y ago
  If this surprises you, you must not understand Google's business model at all. They give you services for "free" (or cheap) so they can use your data for marketing analysis. The thermostat tells Google when you're home and when you're not, tells them when you go to bed and when you wake up. Tells them when you go on vacation, and with the Nest Mobile App, where you went for vacation. Tells them how frugal you are with energy. This is a lot of valuable data to a marketing company, so of course they aren't going to lock themselves out of it.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
My hope is that this is another push toward on-prem data management. One of the things that the "computer revolution" spawned in the 90's was that there were a lot of "extra" computers around because everyone upgraded every 18 - 24 months. After a couple of rounds of upgrades, if you had kept the old parts, you had enough parts around to make another computer. In my house this typically became the "kids" computer and we would build it, them image it, and then use the image to restore it back to what ever it had been built to originally when the kids did something to make it non-functional. Of course after a still longer period you had upgraded that "previous" gen computer and now you had a left over previous previous gen computer. And typically what I did was put Linux on it and have it for running this that and the other thing. These days a RasPi 3 is about as powerful as that generation -2 computer was. Like a lot of people as my Internet speeds increased I started leaving computers on all the time as servers that I could access from anywhere. This was made easier (and without paying extra for a fixed IP) with dyndns, although these days it is easier still with IPV6 (no dyndns required if your ISP will give you an IPV6 prefix (so far this has been pretty easy). So I think a number of services you use "in the cloud" might be implementable as local services where it is harder for the Government to get its hands on your data, (or at least it would have to serve you with a warrant and so you would know they were looking at you, an NSL doesn't work if the person being served is the person being observed :-)
- oulipo 8y ago
  This is exactly why we are building on-device private AI at Snips (https://snips.ai https://snips.ai, disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) We believe that the only way to have people trust AI is when we will make it possible to have privacy-respecting AI, we believe it is not only feasible, but it is our duty to build AI which respects people and is able to scale without presenting a danger to our societies
  - brian_herman__ 8y ago
    Sorry man your site lost me at the token based app store...
    - 8y ago
EdSharkey 8y ago
> The company also noted it has never received a National Security Letter. Such NSLs are typically filed by intelligence agencies looking for company data. They also normally come with a gag order preventing businesses from revealing their very existence. That means that if Nest ever removes its disclaimer that it hasn’t received an NSL, it likely has been sent one. Whenever I read copy like this, I read it as "no dragnet this time, nothing to see here! Keep buying Nest and other great products from Alphabet, Inc!" But is it possible that no NSL was ever sent and Google simply provides a data feed of all relevant info and video to their national security partners? (A generously paid-for feed, of course.) I guess what I'm asking is, is an NSL required for Google to legally surveil its customers on behalf of the host government? Beyond sheer EULA license legal weasel-wording, I'm wondering if the fourth amendment restricts the US government from arranging for a dragnet-style data feed from some willing corporate partner.
- cryoshon 8y ago
  > I'm wondering if the fourth amendment restricts the US government from arranging for a dragnet-style data feed from some willing corporate partner. it doesn't. NSA has had room 631 at AT&T for over a decade now. and, of course, everywhere else. there's almost certainly an API for government agencies that they can query without any new warrants -- think facebook, google, amazon, etc. i remember back in the day people used to say that these things were just conspiracy theories.
lloydde 8y ago
The weekend submission of this article had a comment with a marketing to law enforcement video linked https://www.dropbox.com/s/x83gyclt497fi8t/Ring%20Neighborhoods%20Portal_1.mp4?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/x83gyclt497fi8t/Ring%20Neighborhoo... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18215293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18215293
- IshKebab 8y ago
  Seems like a well designed system. Note if you don't watch the video - the police can only send requests to users for video. The users can say no.
  - boxfire 8y ago
    That is some "think of the children" legislation away from a rubber stamp subpoena system. Oh well, I don't assume privacy outside my bedroom anyway. Maybe not even in it soon enough.
- judge2020 8y ago
  An alternate link in case Dropbox disables the link because of high traffic https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468851579487780905/501508313897369641/Ring_Neighborhoods_Portal_1.mp4 https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468851579487780905/50...
yters 8y ago
It's interesting how many hardware and software services are "in the cloud" now. For example Slack monitors the conversations of thousands of businesses, and there's no telling what they do with the data behind the scenes.
- ibeckermayer 8y ago
  How do you know that they’re actually monitoring conversations? Is there nothing in the TOS saying that they won’t view your actual conversations?
  - yters 8y ago
    Hopefully they are trustworthy, but there is no way to really certify they are not monitoring conversations. And even if the company as a whole does not, that does not negate the risk of the insider threat, which is the source of many of the huge data breaches these days. At least in the government classified systems have to go through a rigorous accreditation, regular audits, contain all sorts of logging, and there is some modicum of external oversight by congress. As consumers, we have zero visibility into Slack. I really don't understand why using Slack is not perceived as a risk.
- SquareWheel 8y ago
  People who are concerned about privacy should read the policies which are designed specifically for them. https://slack.com/privacy-policy https://slack.com/privacy-policy
  - janvidar 8y ago
    Without being too cynical: There is what they say they do, and what they actually do. I'm not picking on Slack specifically here, but this is just healthy skepticism when dealing with cloud services all in all. All bets are off with governments involved. There are lots of compelling reasons for secretly disregarding the already set privacy policy. Including but not limited to patriotism, anti-terrorism, child abuse, human rights, crime or flat out regime criticism, political reasons such as opposition. Pick your providers carefully. You trust them more than you think.
calimac 8y ago
The 4th amendment has been trampled in our ever encroaching technocracy. This is why I refused to buy a nest.
collias 8y ago
I was recently looking for some security cameras for my house. I was considering Nest, but the fact that they are owned by Google makes me a bit weary, privacy-wise. Does anyone have experience with other brands that you might recommend?
- slantyyz 8y ago
  I recently installed a Ubiquiti Unifi Video system and am happy with the product so far. It is a walled garden, but it was easy to set up and the NVR software is better than most of the others I've tried.
- CaptSpify 8y ago
  I personally looked around and couldn't find much, so I built my own with a raspberry pi running Motion. It cost ~$100 iirc.
- twinge 8y ago
  Ubiquiti's cameras are rock solid, both in terms of hardware and software. And if you don't like their software, the cameras provide a raw RTSP feed you can integrate with other open source alternatives. They're not too hard to hack on (official API docs are lacking but their forums are quite vibrant); I've integrated mine with my OpenHab control/display. I've got a couple cameras that have been running outdoors for years in rain, snow, and heat. At this point I'm just waiting for them to die so I can finally upgrade to the latest and greatest models.
  - collias 8y ago
    Interesting! I wasn't aware that Ubiquiti even made cameras. I'll check them out. Thanks!
  - xoa 8y ago
    This post is late, but I definitely do not recommend Ubiquiti cameras following their decision to go back on their promise (and previous company focus) of having end user flexibility and instead tying their UniFi Protect offering exclusively to their own proprietary cloud key. They made it worse by having a marketer PR guy come in to a thread of the community offering concerns and spouting a bunch of transparently garbage excuses. UniFi Video is basically in maintenance mode at this point and will probably be EOL'd soon, Protect was what everyone was expecting (and has mostly been positioned as) the successor. And nobody objects to the existence of support in "Cloud Keys" (Ubiquiti's own little all in one computer/controller offering, think like a POE raspberry pi type deal) of course. But making something like this exclusive to CKs is a new and extremely unwelcome thing for them, and should be a real red flag even if it's not tied to the cloud.
StavrosK 8y ago
I love the Sonoff series of smart switches/plugs. They're super cheap, well-made and flashable with open source firmware (ESPurna, for example) that's secure and very featureful.
neumann 8y ago
Reading the article, wtf is a rap crew? And why do half of these sentences not make sense? Back in my day, journalism in forbes was still shitty but at least with coherent sentences. edit: A link in the article does inform me of 'rap crew' "O n a June day last year, a skinny, dreadlocked 29-year-old rapper known as Tony Da Boss lay in bed in a redbrick apartment on a tree-lined street in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was not the kind of place you’d associate with a million-dollar criminal conspiracy. But Da Boss (real name Damonte Withers) was a leader of the FreeBandz Gang, an amateur hip-hop crew of twentysomethings who were into much more nefarious activities than laying down tracks." jesus christ. get out of journalism and go write that pulp novel kicking around in your head.
- tyingq 8y ago
  Well... http://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/charlotte-area-hip-hop-group-indicted-after-12m-scheme/666868910 http://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/charlotte-area-hip-hop-grou...
- stephengillie 8y ago
  I didn't see any mention of the rap crew in the article... That blurb mentioning the rap crew was really an advertising blurb for another article. It just happens to be strategically placed between paragraphs of this article.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Between this and sites where scrolling past the end of an article loads the next one, media companies are really fucking with people's ability to understand what they're reading.
- owlninja 8y ago
  Old man yells at cloud.... 'Rap crew' seems pretty self explanatory in 2018
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Home..where you pick your nose, scratch your crotch, walk naked, have sex with the lady next door, get angry at your kids and so on. Why would I want all this stuff backed up at Google.com? No thanks, unless it has end-to-end encryption and only I have the key. Also I'd delete all items older than x days (unless on vacation, I'd know that I was robbed, no need to store months of "tape")
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
KaranRaut 8y ago
does google have a choice when authorities come knocking down? Maybe they should encrypt the data in such a way that only the user can decrypt it. We need to think about privacy as a design requirement and not something that is optional. Companies wouldn't do it because that is the only way they can monetize thier profit seeking craze.
- azadal 8y ago
  Reading the above comments, it seems that companies don't have much say when the government comes knocking.. Which is precisely why I think privacy should be a requirement and not an option in the design stage. The company heading towards that right now with the most advancements in technology is Snips. Data is stored on the device primarily. To help with AI(As an option), your data will be encrypted and sent to the developer along with all the data from other users as a whole big data(Data generating).

178 points by edejong 8y ago

zby 8y ago

I am surprised that it is only 300 times - but this is probably because these devices are now bought by wealthy people who don't commit too many crimes or felonies.

spaceribs 8y ago
I'd wager white-collar crime happens more than street crime. It's known that it costs us between 250 billion to 1 trillion dollars yearly, but pursuing the crimes isn't prioritized by the FBI/IRS because of the costs of litigation, the possibility of destabilizing the markets, and the war on drugs/terror.
- zby 8y ago
  Interesting point - maybe they don't need home surveillance in these investigations that often? The case mentioned in the article as the first one was a white collar crime: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/10/12/how-an-amateur-rap-crew-stole-surveillance-tech-that-tracks-almost-every-american/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/10/12/how-a...
  - tedunangst 8y ago
    That doesn't really say much about what the prosecution learned from nest.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
drasticmeasures 8y ago
You don't have to commit a crime to be targeted, spied on, harassed and have your life destroyed by the government. When the government spies on innocent people en masse -- because they say they should have nothing to hide --, the government is the one doing harm to an innocent person, and it's the government who has something to hide. Without accountability, and given the secret and anonymous nature of their interference, we can't trust that the government only spies on guilty people, because they will circularly claim that they are guilty because they are spied on. And you shouldn't take solace that comparatively only a few innocent people get their lives destroyed, not just because it can happen to you, or because it shouldn't happen in the first place, but because not being accountable for their crimes gradually emboldens the government, and given advances in automation, to scale it up and encompass more of society until one day they come for you or your children.
- zby 8y ago
  I agree - it starts with criminals - because it is an obvious target, but once the capabilities are built then they are used in whatever way the government likes.

Sharlin 8y ago

I think the time has come for a The Wire reboot. Anyone else? Edit: Downvotes, why? The Wire was a critically acclaimed series whose major themes included abuse of power, the use of technology to both surveil and evade surveillance, perverse incentives, and failure of institutions, among other things that are as relevant as ever in the post-Snowden era. But instead of pagers and burners we'd get tech circa 2018.

rdl 8y ago
A series where people used technical surveillance using devices like these (IOTINT? IDK what the term of art is yet), OSINT from online things like FB, various forms of legal process (civil, LE, NS, and extralegal), etc. to go after "terrorists" down to criminals of various crimes down to "enemies of the Party" down to "people who slightly antagonize employees of the Agency" to "for the lulz" would be interesting. More like Homeland than The Wire, though. Or, uh, Black Mirror.
- Shorel 8y ago
  If you want a total surveillance show, there's Person of Interest.

yardie 8y ago

If your data is not end to end private key encrypted, then you are inviting the government in to look at all your shit; photos, documents, logs, everything.

wstrange 8y ago
We tend to view this as a technology problem. The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior? Fighting a technology arms race with the government is a losing battle. They can ask for private keys to be handed over - on threat of jail time if you don't comply. We need to start at the ballot box.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  It's drastically easier to roll out a new technology than change a government policy which all major political parties are more or less comfortable with. Governments take time to adapt to new technology, so keep the new technology moving faster than the government knows how to deal with it........
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  >The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior? Not many care anymore about privacy except basically, us, the tech power user community and then a few stragglers. This new generation just doesn't care because they never really grew up with any in the first place, just shoved right into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. They probably didn't go too depth into privacy laws, why your privacy matters in their grade school either.
  - yardie 8y ago
    Just from observing my kid and his friends I think they are amazingly adept at privacy even if they don't realize it, yet. They are more concerned about trolling, being trolled, and in extreme cases, swatting. They share stuff on FB-IG-SC-YT but are conscious to give out just enough information. No real names, no addresses, no phone numbers. Now the older generations (boomers, GenX, Xillenials) share way too much information, in my opinion. They get on FB, tag everyone in the photo, even those without a FB account. And share their phone number and directions to their house.

randyrand 8y ago

I'm a little surprised google does not use the user's password for encryption. Seems like they are inviting a very bad data breach in the future.

tyingq 8y ago
I imagine it's encrypted over the wire, but since the model is "processed in the cloud", it has to be decrypted to do anything useful with it. I suppose they could not log anything that could allow correlation to a user/ip, but that creates a different security problem. I don't see a real technical solution here other than doing all the processing locally.
QuercusMax 8y ago
So if you forget your password, your data is just gone? That doesn't seem like a good solution. I worked on a system in a previous life that encrypted data based on user passwords, and we had to add a backup encryption key (tied to security questions) because we had so many issues with people forgetting their password and losing their data. Google does now allow you to supply your own encryption keys for some offerings: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/customer-supplied-encryption https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/customer-supplie.... This is probably a better option for those who are clueful enough. (Disclaimer: I work for an Alphabet company.)
Johnny555 8y ago
If this surprises you, you must not understand Google's business model at all. They give you services for "free" (or cheap) so they can use your data for marketing analysis. The thermostat tells Google when you're home and when you're not, tells them when you go to bed and when you wake up. Tells them when you go on vacation, and with the Nest Mobile App, where you went for vacation. Tells them how frugal you are with energy. This is a lot of valuable data to a marketing company, so of course they aren't going to lock themselves out of it.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

My hope is that this is another push toward on-prem data management. One of the things that the "computer revolution" spawned in the 90's was that there were a lot of "extra" computers around because everyone upgraded every 18 - 24 months. After a couple of rounds of upgrades, if you had kept the old parts, you had enough parts around to make another computer. In my house this typically became the "kids" computer and we would build it, them image it, and then use the image to restore it back to what ever it had been built to originally when the kids did something to make it non-functional. Of course after a still longer period you had upgraded that "previous" gen computer and now you had a left over previous previous gen computer. And typically what I did was put Linux on it and have it for running this that and the other thing. These days a RasPi 3 is about as powerful as that generation -2 computer was. Like a lot of people as my Internet speeds increased I started leaving computers on all the time as servers that I could access from anywhere. This was made easier (and without paying extra for a fixed IP) with dyndns, although these days it is easier still with IPV6 (no dyndns required if your ISP will give you an IPV6 prefix (so far this has been pretty easy). So I think a number of services you use "in the cloud" might be implementable as local services where it is harder for the Government to get its hands on your data, (or at least it would have to serve you with a warrant and so you would know they were looking at you, an NSL doesn't work if the person being served is the person being observed :-)

oulipo 8y ago
This is exactly why we are building on-device private AI at Snips (https://snips.ai https://snips.ai, disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) We believe that the only way to have people trust AI is when we will make it possible to have privacy-respecting AI, we believe it is not only feasible, but it is our duty to build AI which respects people and is able to scale without presenting a danger to our societies
- brian_herman__ 8y ago
  Sorry man your site lost me at the token based app store...
  - 8y ago

EdSharkey 8y ago

> The company also noted it has never received a National Security Letter. Such NSLs are typically filed by intelligence agencies looking for company data. They also normally come with a gag order preventing businesses from revealing their very existence. That means that if Nest ever removes its disclaimer that it hasn’t received an NSL, it likely has been sent one. Whenever I read copy like this, I read it as "no dragnet this time, nothing to see here! Keep buying Nest and other great products from Alphabet, Inc!" But is it possible that no NSL was ever sent and Google simply provides a data feed of all relevant info and video to their national security partners? (A generously paid-for feed, of course.) I guess what I'm asking is, is an NSL required for Google to legally surveil its customers on behalf of the host government? Beyond sheer EULA license legal weasel-wording, I'm wondering if the fourth amendment restricts the US government from arranging for a dragnet-style data feed from some willing corporate partner.

cryoshon 8y ago
> I'm wondering if the fourth amendment restricts the US government from arranging for a dragnet-style data feed from some willing corporate partner. it doesn't. NSA has had room 631 at AT&T for over a decade now. and, of course, everywhere else. there's almost certainly an API for government agencies that they can query without any new warrants -- think facebook, google, amazon, etc. i remember back in the day people used to say that these things were just conspiracy theories.

lloydde 8y ago

The weekend submission of this article had a comment with a marketing to law enforcement video linked https://www.dropbox.com/s/x83gyclt497fi8t/Ring%20Neighborhoods%20Portal_1.mp4?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/x83gyclt497fi8t/Ring%20Neighborhoo... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18215293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18215293

IshKebab 8y ago
Seems like a well designed system. Note if you don't watch the video - the police can only send requests to users for video. The users can say no.
- boxfire 8y ago
  That is some "think of the children" legislation away from a rubber stamp subpoena system. Oh well, I don't assume privacy outside my bedroom anyway. Maybe not even in it soon enough.
judge2020 8y ago
An alternate link in case Dropbox disables the link because of high traffic https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468851579487780905/501508313897369641/Ring_Neighborhoods_Portal_1.mp4 https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468851579487780905/50...

yters 8y ago

It's interesting how many hardware and software services are "in the cloud" now. For example Slack monitors the conversations of thousands of businesses, and there's no telling what they do with the data behind the scenes.

ibeckermayer 8y ago
How do you know that they’re actually monitoring conversations? Is there nothing in the TOS saying that they won’t view your actual conversations?
- yters 8y ago
  Hopefully they are trustworthy, but there is no way to really certify they are not monitoring conversations. And even if the company as a whole does not, that does not negate the risk of the insider threat, which is the source of many of the huge data breaches these days. At least in the government classified systems have to go through a rigorous accreditation, regular audits, contain all sorts of logging, and there is some modicum of external oversight by congress. As consumers, we have zero visibility into Slack. I really don't understand why using Slack is not perceived as a risk.
SquareWheel 8y ago
People who are concerned about privacy should read the policies which are designed specifically for them. https://slack.com/privacy-policy https://slack.com/privacy-policy
- janvidar 8y ago
  Without being too cynical: There is what they say they do, and what they actually do. I'm not picking on Slack specifically here, but this is just healthy skepticism when dealing with cloud services all in all. All bets are off with governments involved. There are lots of compelling reasons for secretly disregarding the already set privacy policy. Including but not limited to patriotism, anti-terrorism, child abuse, human rights, crime or flat out regime criticism, political reasons such as opposition. Pick your providers carefully. You trust them more than you think.

calimac 8y ago

The 4th amendment has been trampled in our ever encroaching technocracy. This is why I refused to buy a nest.

collias 8y ago

I was recently looking for some security cameras for my house. I was considering Nest, but the fact that they are owned by Google makes me a bit weary, privacy-wise. Does anyone have experience with other brands that you might recommend?

slantyyz 8y ago
I recently installed a Ubiquiti Unifi Video system and am happy with the product so far. It is a walled garden, but it was easy to set up and the NVR software is better than most of the others I've tried.
CaptSpify 8y ago
I personally looked around and couldn't find much, so I built my own with a raspberry pi running Motion. It cost ~$100 iirc.
twinge 8y ago
Ubiquiti's cameras are rock solid, both in terms of hardware and software. And if you don't like their software, the cameras provide a raw RTSP feed you can integrate with other open source alternatives. They're not too hard to hack on (official API docs are lacking but their forums are quite vibrant); I've integrated mine with my OpenHab control/display. I've got a couple cameras that have been running outdoors for years in rain, snow, and heat. At this point I'm just waiting for them to die so I can finally upgrade to the latest and greatest models.
- collias 8y ago
  Interesting! I wasn't aware that Ubiquiti even made cameras. I'll check them out. Thanks!
- xoa 8y ago
  This post is late, but I definitely do not recommend Ubiquiti cameras following their decision to go back on their promise (and previous company focus) of having end user flexibility and instead tying their UniFi Protect offering exclusively to their own proprietary cloud key. They made it worse by having a marketer PR guy come in to a thread of the community offering concerns and spouting a bunch of transparently garbage excuses. UniFi Video is basically in maintenance mode at this point and will probably be EOL'd soon, Protect was what everyone was expecting (and has mostly been positioned as) the successor. And nobody objects to the existence of support in "Cloud Keys" (Ubiquiti's own little all in one computer/controller offering, think like a POE raspberry pi type deal) of course. But making something like this exclusive to CKs is a new and extremely unwelcome thing for them, and should be a real red flag even if it's not tied to the cloud.

StavrosK 8y ago

I love the Sonoff series of smart switches/plugs. They're super cheap, well-made and flashable with open source firmware (ESPurna, for example) that's secure and very featureful.

neumann 8y ago

Reading the article, wtf is a rap crew? And why do half of these sentences not make sense? Back in my day, journalism in forbes was still shitty but at least with coherent sentences. edit: A link in the article does inform me of 'rap crew' "O n a June day last year, a skinny, dreadlocked 29-year-old rapper known as Tony Da Boss lay in bed in a redbrick apartment on a tree-lined street in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was not the kind of place you’d associate with a million-dollar criminal conspiracy. But Da Boss (real name Damonte Withers) was a leader of the FreeBandz Gang, an amateur hip-hop crew of twentysomethings who were into much more nefarious activities than laying down tracks." jesus christ. get out of journalism and go write that pulp novel kicking around in your head.

tyingq 8y ago
Well... http://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/charlotte-area-hip-hop-group-indicted-after-12m-scheme/666868910 http://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/charlotte-area-hip-hop-grou...
stephengillie 8y ago
I didn't see any mention of the rap crew in the article... That blurb mentioning the rap crew was really an advertising blurb for another article. It just happens to be strategically placed between paragraphs of this article.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Between this and sites where scrolling past the end of an article loads the next one, media companies are really fucking with people's ability to understand what they're reading.
owlninja 8y ago
Old man yells at cloud.... 'Rap crew' seems pretty self explanatory in 2018

onetimemanytime 8y ago

Home..where you pick your nose, scratch your crotch, walk naked, have sex with the lady next door, get angry at your kids and so on. Why would I want all this stuff backed up at Google.com? No thanks, unless it has end-to-end encryption and only I have the key. Also I'd delete all items older than x days (unless on vacation, I'd know that I was robbed, no need to store months of "tape")

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

KaranRaut 8y ago

does google have a choice when authorities come knocking down? Maybe they should encrypt the data in such a way that only the user can decrypt it. We need to think about privacy as a design requirement and not something that is optional. Companies wouldn't do it because that is the only way they can monetize thier profit seeking craze.

azadal 8y ago
Reading the above comments, it seems that companies don't have much say when the government comes knocking.. Which is precisely why I think privacy should be a requirement and not an option in the design stage. The company heading towards that right now with the most advancements in technology is Snips. Data is stored on the device primarily. To help with AI(As an option), your data will be encrypted and sent to the developer along with all the data from other users as a whole big data(Data generating).