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Less 1984 and more Fahrenheit 451. There is no central authority imposing this to exert control on the masses: consumers are imposing it on themselves willingly
by bregma 5y ago
Less 1984 and more Fahrenheit 451. There is no central authority imposing this to exert control on the masses: consumers are imposing it on themselves willingly and industry is just giving them what they want. Juvenal redux.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago> consumers are imposing it on themselves willingly Without reasonable alternative and without consent is like a LEO version of 'willing'.
- dopidopHN 5y agoI never own a tv, I don’t plan to own one ever.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y agoI tossed out my OTA TV in 1992. I've never had Cable TV.
- gruez 5y agoYou can buy commercial displays (ie. the ones used for signs). It's worse and more expensive, but it's still an alternative.
- ryukafalz 5y agoTVs without smart features used to be priced like TVs still are now; the one I'm still using cost me something like $300 several years ago. Those commercial displays are priced for businesses to afford. It's not something the average consumer is going to reasonably buy - especially not lower-income people. (As an aside, it's fucked that the cheaper devices that low-income people can afford are always the ones with the most surveillance.)
- ta988 5y agoThis is similar to saying, if you don't want to be filmed in the street move to a private island. Doesnt solve the problem for most people. Brands don't care about the few exceptions that know their dark side. What they care about is that tens of millions don't.
- fouric 5y agoThe existence of "reasonable alternatives" is largely irrelevant. Firefox is a reasonable alternative to Chrome, and yet very few of the people I tell about Chrome's tracking switch - they just don't care. Same for Protonmail/Gmail, iOS/Android, Linux/Windows (yeah, yeah, not everything runs on Windows - nobody I know will even attempt to dual-boot and do what they can on Linux), dumb/smart TVs (yes, reasonable dumb TVs exist - the Spectres, most notably). This is a willingness issue, not a lack of reasonable alternatives, in the majority (not all) of markets.
- rsfern 5y agoI don’t remember much backstory in 1984 for how the surveillance state came to be, but I think it’s totally plausible that a government could co-opt this self-imposed setup and use it for 1984-style control.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoIIRC there wasn't much backstory on how it came to be other than a war between continents.
- TchoBeer 5y agoIt's 1984 and we're the proles