17 ms·

1984 was overly optimistic about people, government didn't even need to enforce putting spying devices in homes. Instead a huge chunk opted in voluntarily with

1984 was overly optimistic about people, government didn't even need to enforce putting spying devices in homes. Instead a huge chunk opted in voluntarily with doorbell cameras, Alexa, and other smart devices

arberx 4y ago
It's hilarious. Freedom/privacy-loving Americans voluntarily give it up for minor gains in comfort.
- ziddoap 4y ago
  Google's ToS is 16 pages with what appears to be about 50+ hyperlinks, including several hyperlinks to "additional service-specific terms" which itself has ~50 links to other terms which are all multiple pages. Perhaps instead of pinning all of the blame on users, we could have the companies producing labyrinthian ToS contracts written by top-grade lawyers and full of legalese (that no layperson should be expected to understand) shoulder at least some of the blame? This doesn't even touch on the fact that many topics (as related to data aggregation and privacy) are highly technical and require at least a few years of post-secondary to even begin wrapping your head around (e.g. de-anonymization via large sparse datasets is not something I can reasonably teach my 85-year old parent, nor to my child, both of which use Google services in some capacity). But, yes... Let's blame it on Average Joe, who just wants to watch their dog for a few minutes while at work and saw an ad on TV about a convenient way to do so. Shame on them for not being both a lawyer and a CS graduate.
  - mstipetic 4y ago
    I don’t understand why aren’t there any standard terms of service which are generally applicable and companies can make minor adjustments to them if they can justify it
    - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
      Because their in house lawyers tell them they need a custom made one. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
      - hermitdev 4y ago
        More like "If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem." (I don't know who said it, but I'm paraphrasing from something I've seen on a demotivational poster re: consulting)
  - uoaei 4y ago
    Due diligence is expected among a mature population. But you're right it's not entirely on individuals. There should be ways to disseminate information about the threats these products pose to personal liberty, especially in a nation that uses the word "liberty" so freely in its foundational documents.
    - ziddoap 4y ago
      >Due diligence is expected among a mature population. I wholly agree. But we're quickly approaching (and in some cases, past) the point where proper due diligence requires a 4-year post-secondary education in a related CS field, if not more. We're talking about products that take multiple domain experts several years of collaboration to create. How is it reasonable to expect my mechanic, accountant, etc. to do their due diligence on how that product processes their data, especially when it's processed in a black-box created by several other domain experts, and their only source of information is purposefully opaque terms written by lawyers?
      - uoaei 4y ago
        > proper due diligence requires a 4-year post-secondary education I don't think that's the case here or indeed very commonly. You don't necessarily have to understand implementation details if some core tenet of popular ethics is being violated. One key feature of the domain -- namely that you don't own "your data" and so you don't get to decide what happens with it -- is pretty clearly in violation of principles that the vast majority of Westerners would at least profess to hold. Beyond the motivating principle that third parties should be required to receive explicit whitelist access to use privately-owned data, "implementation details" refers mostly to policy and enforcement, not really technologies.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    A solution to this is for courts to limit what is applicable in a ToS to a certain number of words, and have overly broad statements always favor the entity who has to agree. This, in effect, nullifies all but the most important components of a Tos.
- lijogdfljk 4y ago
  Eh, it's exactly what you expect from America though. Ie the embodiment of short term thinking. Economy, environment, politics, etc - not that America is entirely unique here, just that the population seems to embrace this as a foundation in my experience. Privacy to tech like this is very hypothetical till it happens, and it'll rarely happen. If it's not in our faces we won't vote against it.
  - ziddoap 4y ago
    >Eh, it's exactly what you expect from America though. Ie the embodiment of short term thinking. I think this is the entirely wrong framing. My other comment covers some of it, but specifically in regards to your comment: it's a lack of education, not the embodiment of short-term thinking. And really, we can't expect every person that uses Google (or whatever other large tech company) to thoroughly understand all of the bits and pieces of technology that could be used to fuck them. Or how things that we've been told are anonymous/private become non-anonymous/non-private when combined with other sparse data. These are complex topics that even many technologists don't understand (or are outside of their field of expertise). These companies hire top lawyers to write complex ToS, use as many dark-patterns as legally possible, do illegal things until they get caught doing so, evolve their terms frequently, etc. Yet somehow they've convinced everyone to blame the layperson. It's remarkable, really. What would be really swell is if we could, you know, not have companies spend millions of dollars on how-to-fuck-your-user initiatives.
    - lijogdfljk 4y ago
      But we can't live in a world where the responsibility isn't on the individual, can we? Ie if we expect corporations to not fuck you over, who is there to enforce that? Who has the power to keep them in check? Okay, maybe Government should hold that role - but who then keeps the government in check? Who ensures that the spying or privacy from the Government is kept in check? etc Ultimately the buck always stops at the individual. And we have to be hyper aware of long term implications, because money, greed and power has deep, deep pockets (as you also mentioned) and the fight will be never ending. We, as a community, have de-propritized education, health care, public safety, privacy, etc. Sure, powerful forces have been pushing for that exact thing, but we can't expect them to "just be nice" or w/e. I'm very pro "Big Government". However my ideas behind big government will not work without individual responsibility. Until then citizens are purposefully and willfully giving their power away with every tiny step. The blame is on us, and our current state is inevitable. My 2c.
- smhenderson 4y ago
  It's hilarious. That's an odd take, I honestly don't find anything about this article, or the broader topic of privacy and overreach by companies and law enforcement, amusing in any way.
PeterStuer 4y ago
1984 and Brave New World weren't exclusive. We can have both at the same time.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I like how much of Brave New World is being created in SoMa.
  - danuker 4y ago
    > SoMa Looks like the newspeak got you.
shadowgovt 4y ago
I think Larry Brin's "The Transparent Society" is the best read on the topic. Not predictive of all outcomes, but many aspects of modern surveillance he did see coming.
- mftb 4y ago
  This is confused. The Transparent Society is by David Brin[0]. Two of the founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The confusion is understandable given the name collision. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Thank you; good catch on the name error.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  His novel 'Earth' also predicted glassholes.
isaacremuant 4y ago
This is not limited to Alexa or seemingly unnecessary tech gadgets. This includes ALL your data. Gmail, Google, Android. So unless you're opting for iOs (provided they're not doing the same as Google here) and not using Gmail or Google you're still falling under "Surveilled by the gov via tech company who serves their interests and not yours, even if you pay money for their services".
- yaomtc 4y ago
  OR you can opt for a version of Android without the proprietary bits like GrapheneOS.
  - redblacktree 4y ago
    How accessible is that to your grandmother? Can you walk her through the process? (Are you willing to, given that now you'll be called if anything goes wrong?)
    - yaomtc 4y ago
      Who said anything about grandmothers? GrapheneOS isn't for everyone. Neither is iOS, or Android with Google, or the Pinephone/Librem 5. And that is fine. It's good to have options.
      - redblacktree 4y ago
        What I was trying to imply is that privacy should be for everyone, not just those who are technically capable enough to install an alternative OS on their phone.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bushbaba 4y ago
  This is why Apple is going to continue to crush it. They can build a subpar equivalent to google services and a large portion of the tech world will adopt it for its privacy benefits. The 'tech world' is a large influencer to the general public, leading to further penetration. It's a great strategy as Google makes 80%+ of it's revenue from Ads, and their ad model does not work well with a privacy first mindset. Apple designs with privacy in mind. Google designs with invasiveness.
zappo2938 4y ago
In the West, Orwell was wrong and Huxley was correct.
Aeolun 4y ago
I mean, you carry a listening device with you almost 100% of the time. Why would you even worry about the Alexa in your home?
- ARandomerDude 4y ago
  I definitely understand your point, but I think the greater issue is why should this have to serve as a rationalization in the first place? Why can't we expect our phones to serve us rather than the other way around?
- goodpoint 4y ago
  That's a fallacy. The average "listening device" it's not constantly recording and uploading audio. We would notice if it did.
- DougWebb 4y ago
  For me, the difference is that the phone (with voice assist turned OFF) is not supposed to be listening all the time, while a device like Alexa is supposed to be listening. I don't want devices listening so I turn that feature off when I can and avoid the device when I can't. Is the phone listening anyway? Maybe, but that violates a privacy expectation, and there may be recourse if someone discovers it's doing that.
  - bryananderson 4y ago
    I work on Alexa and for whatever it’s worth, I can confirm that Amazon is telling the truth about how Alexa listens and about what is done with your data. This is all publicly available info, and perhaps there’s no reason why you should trust me any more than you trust Amazon as a company, but as one privacy-conscious engineer to another, I promise that your ambient conversations are not being stored or sent to Amazon and that any data you delete in the app (either by specifying an auto-delete period or manually deleting it) is actually, really, truly deleted. A process running locally on your Alexa device listens for the “wake word”.[0] This audio is only processed locally within a constantly-overwritten memory buffer, it is neither stored nor transmitted. Only once the wake word is detected does Alexa begin to transmit an utterance to the cloud for processing. I’ve worked with the device stack and it really isn’t transmitting your ambient conversations. Within the Alexa app[1], you can see and hear all of your stored data and can delete any of it. You can also control the duration after which it is auto-deleted. From working with ASR datasets, I can confirm that deleted audio (and the associated text transcript) is really deleted, not just hidden from your view. I never owned an Alexa or other smart home device before I worked on it, and I’m not sure I’d buy another company’s device where I lack the same ability to “trust but verify”, so I’m not sure how much weight my word should carry. But I can give my word that Alexa is not transmitting your ambient conversations or just setting “deleted=true” in a database when you tell it to delete your data. [0] see page 4 of https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/A4B/White%20Paper%20-%20Alexa%20Privacy%20and%20Data%20Handling%20Overview.pdf https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/A4B/White%20Paper... [1] https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23608614011 https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23608614011
thescriptkiddie 4y ago
Comparisons to 1984 are hack, but I seem to remember that in the book the telescreens were described as something that people willingly bought.
akira2501 4y ago
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the technology, and it obviously makes peoples lives better to have it. I think the issue is that there are only a handful of vendors that happily operate like the monopolies they are and provide you with zero differentiation or choice within the market. The government isn't particularly interested in ending this problem either, I suspect this is due to a combination of industry capture and intelligence agency interest in these products.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > There's absolutely nothing wrong with the technology Oh, but there is. It's subservient to the manufacturer, not to you. I'm still annoyed that no country decided to classify "selling" things where the manufacturer keeps complete control and denies you access as fraud. But just because no legal system decided it's a crime, it doesn't mean it's right.
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  You say there is nothing wrong, but then go on to list things that are in fact wrong. You think the problems are a mistake or otherwise something to be "fixed" the products are working exactly as both the government and the manufacturers want them to, and it has nothing to do with "intel agencies" Having your entire life "cloud connected" and them complaining about privacy, is like opening a window then complaining that the house is drafty. I love home automation, not a single component of my home automation is cloud connected, if more people would accept, learn and support non-cloud systems, services and protocols everyone would be better off
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > You say there is nothing wrong, but then go on to list things that are in fact wrong. They say there is nothing wrong with the technology, but then go on to list things that are in fact wrong with the not-technology.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
themaninthedark 4y ago
Fahrenheit 451 has a part where they get the entire city to go to their doors to try and spot a fugitive, this action is coordinated by the radios that everyone wears. With these cameras and recognition algorithms, you don't even need people to go to the doors. Just pull the feeds.
robswc 4y ago
right!? TikTok could be a spyware (lol) that requires your SSN and people would STILL download it and defend it just because it brings them mindless 10 second videos. I remember reading 1984 as a kid and thought it was so far fetched, that nobody would willingly let society get to that point... but it just only made more sense as I got older... people really just don't care...

arberx 4y ago

It's hilarious. Freedom/privacy-loving Americans voluntarily give it up for minor gains in comfort.

ziddoap 4y ago
Google's ToS is 16 pages with what appears to be about 50+ hyperlinks, including several hyperlinks to "additional service-specific terms" which itself has ~50 links to other terms which are all multiple pages. Perhaps instead of pinning all of the blame on users, we could have the companies producing labyrinthian ToS contracts written by top-grade lawyers and full of legalese (that no layperson should be expected to understand) shoulder at least some of the blame? This doesn't even touch on the fact that many topics (as related to data aggregation and privacy) are highly technical and require at least a few years of post-secondary to even begin wrapping your head around (e.g. de-anonymization via large sparse datasets is not something I can reasonably teach my 85-year old parent, nor to my child, both of which use Google services in some capacity). But, yes... Let's blame it on Average Joe, who just wants to watch their dog for a few minutes while at work and saw an ad on TV about a convenient way to do so. Shame on them for not being both a lawyer and a CS graduate.
- mstipetic 4y ago
  I don’t understand why aren’t there any standard terms of service which are generally applicable and companies can make minor adjustments to them if they can justify it
  - NaturalPhallacy 4y ago
    Because their in house lawyers tell them they need a custom made one. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
    - hermitdev 4y ago
      More like "If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem." (I don't know who said it, but I'm paraphrasing from something I've seen on a demotivational poster re: consulting)
- uoaei 4y ago
  Due diligence is expected among a mature population. But you're right it's not entirely on individuals. There should be ways to disseminate information about the threats these products pose to personal liberty, especially in a nation that uses the word "liberty" so freely in its foundational documents.
  - ziddoap 4y ago
    >Due diligence is expected among a mature population. I wholly agree. But we're quickly approaching (and in some cases, past) the point where proper due diligence requires a 4-year post-secondary education in a related CS field, if not more. We're talking about products that take multiple domain experts several years of collaboration to create. How is it reasonable to expect my mechanic, accountant, etc. to do their due diligence on how that product processes their data, especially when it's processed in a black-box created by several other domain experts, and their only source of information is purposefully opaque terms written by lawyers?
    - uoaei 4y ago
      > proper due diligence requires a 4-year post-secondary education I don't think that's the case here or indeed very commonly. You don't necessarily have to understand implementation details if some core tenet of popular ethics is being violated. One key feature of the domain -- namely that you don't own "your data" and so you don't get to decide what happens with it -- is pretty clearly in violation of principles that the vast majority of Westerners would at least profess to hold. Beyond the motivating principle that third parties should be required to receive explicit whitelist access to use privately-owned data, "implementation details" refers mostly to policy and enforcement, not really technologies.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  A solution to this is for courts to limit what is applicable in a ToS to a certain number of words, and have overly broad statements always favor the entity who has to agree. This, in effect, nullifies all but the most important components of a Tos.
lijogdfljk 4y ago
Eh, it's exactly what you expect from America though. Ie the embodiment of short term thinking. Economy, environment, politics, etc - not that America is entirely unique here, just that the population seems to embrace this as a foundation in my experience. Privacy to tech like this is very hypothetical till it happens, and it'll rarely happen. If it's not in our faces we won't vote against it.
- ziddoap 4y ago
  >Eh, it's exactly what you expect from America though. Ie the embodiment of short term thinking. I think this is the entirely wrong framing. My other comment covers some of it, but specifically in regards to your comment: it's a lack of education, not the embodiment of short-term thinking. And really, we can't expect every person that uses Google (or whatever other large tech company) to thoroughly understand all of the bits and pieces of technology that could be used to fuck them. Or how things that we've been told are anonymous/private become non-anonymous/non-private when combined with other sparse data. These are complex topics that even many technologists don't understand (or are outside of their field of expertise). These companies hire top lawyers to write complex ToS, use as many dark-patterns as legally possible, do illegal things until they get caught doing so, evolve their terms frequently, etc. Yet somehow they've convinced everyone to blame the layperson. It's remarkable, really. What would be really swell is if we could, you know, not have companies spend millions of dollars on how-to-fuck-your-user initiatives.
  - lijogdfljk 4y ago
    But we can't live in a world where the responsibility isn't on the individual, can we? Ie if we expect corporations to not fuck you over, who is there to enforce that? Who has the power to keep them in check? Okay, maybe Government should hold that role - but who then keeps the government in check? Who ensures that the spying or privacy from the Government is kept in check? etc Ultimately the buck always stops at the individual. And we have to be hyper aware of long term implications, because money, greed and power has deep, deep pockets (as you also mentioned) and the fight will be never ending. We, as a community, have de-propritized education, health care, public safety, privacy, etc. Sure, powerful forces have been pushing for that exact thing, but we can't expect them to "just be nice" or w/e. I'm very pro "Big Government". However my ideas behind big government will not work without individual responsibility. Until then citizens are purposefully and willfully giving their power away with every tiny step. The blame is on us, and our current state is inevitable. My 2c.
smhenderson 4y ago
It's hilarious. That's an odd take, I honestly don't find anything about this article, or the broader topic of privacy and overreach by companies and law enforcement, amusing in any way.

PeterStuer 4y ago

1984 and Brave New World weren't exclusive. We can have both at the same time.

dehrmann 4y ago
I like how much of Brave New World is being created in SoMa.
- danuker 4y ago
  > SoMa Looks like the newspeak got you.

shadowgovt 4y ago

I think Larry Brin's "The Transparent Society" is the best read on the topic. Not predictive of all outcomes, but many aspects of modern surveillance he did see coming.

mftb 4y ago
This is confused. The Transparent Society is by David Brin[0]. Two of the founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The confusion is understandable given the name collision. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Thank you; good catch on the name error.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
His novel 'Earth' also predicted glassholes.

isaacremuant 4y ago

This is not limited to Alexa or seemingly unnecessary tech gadgets. This includes ALL your data. Gmail, Google, Android. So unless you're opting for iOs (provided they're not doing the same as Google here) and not using Gmail or Google you're still falling under "Surveilled by the gov via tech company who serves their interests and not yours, even if you pay money for their services".

yaomtc 4y ago
OR you can opt for a version of Android without the proprietary bits like GrapheneOS.
- redblacktree 4y ago
  How accessible is that to your grandmother? Can you walk her through the process? (Are you willing to, given that now you'll be called if anything goes wrong?)
  - yaomtc 4y ago
    Who said anything about grandmothers? GrapheneOS isn't for everyone. Neither is iOS, or Android with Google, or the Pinephone/Librem 5. And that is fine. It's good to have options.
    - redblacktree 4y ago
      What I was trying to imply is that privacy should be for everyone, not just those who are technically capable enough to install an alternative OS on their phone.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bushbaba 4y ago
This is why Apple is going to continue to crush it. They can build a subpar equivalent to google services and a large portion of the tech world will adopt it for its privacy benefits. The 'tech world' is a large influencer to the general public, leading to further penetration. It's a great strategy as Google makes 80%+ of it's revenue from Ads, and their ad model does not work well with a privacy first mindset. Apple designs with privacy in mind. Google designs with invasiveness.

zappo2938 4y ago

In the West, Orwell was wrong and Huxley was correct.

Aeolun 4y ago

I mean, you carry a listening device with you almost 100% of the time. Why would you even worry about the Alexa in your home?

ARandomerDude 4y ago
I definitely understand your point, but I think the greater issue is why should this have to serve as a rationalization in the first place? Why can't we expect our phones to serve us rather than the other way around?
goodpoint 4y ago
That's a fallacy. The average "listening device" it's not constantly recording and uploading audio. We would notice if it did.
DougWebb 4y ago
For me, the difference is that the phone (with voice assist turned OFF) is not supposed to be listening all the time, while a device like Alexa is supposed to be listening. I don't want devices listening so I turn that feature off when I can and avoid the device when I can't. Is the phone listening anyway? Maybe, but that violates a privacy expectation, and there may be recourse if someone discovers it's doing that.
- bryananderson 4y ago
  I work on Alexa and for whatever it’s worth, I can confirm that Amazon is telling the truth about how Alexa listens and about what is done with your data. This is all publicly available info, and perhaps there’s no reason why you should trust me any more than you trust Amazon as a company, but as one privacy-conscious engineer to another, I promise that your ambient conversations are not being stored or sent to Amazon and that any data you delete in the app (either by specifying an auto-delete period or manually deleting it) is actually, really, truly deleted. A process running locally on your Alexa device listens for the “wake word”.[0] This audio is only processed locally within a constantly-overwritten memory buffer, it is neither stored nor transmitted. Only once the wake word is detected does Alexa begin to transmit an utterance to the cloud for processing. I’ve worked with the device stack and it really isn’t transmitting your ambient conversations. Within the Alexa app[1], you can see and hear all of your stored data and can delete any of it. You can also control the duration after which it is auto-deleted. From working with ASR datasets, I can confirm that deleted audio (and the associated text transcript) is really deleted, not just hidden from your view. I never owned an Alexa or other smart home device before I worked on it, and I’m not sure I’d buy another company’s device where I lack the same ability to “trust but verify”, so I’m not sure how much weight my word should carry. But I can give my word that Alexa is not transmitting your ambient conversations or just setting “deleted=true” in a database when you tell it to delete your data. [0] see page 4 of https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/A4B/White%20Paper%20-%20Alexa%20Privacy%20and%20Data%20Handling%20Overview.pdf https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/A4B/White%20Paper... [1] https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23608614011 https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23608614011

thescriptkiddie 4y ago

Comparisons to 1984 are hack, but I seem to remember that in the book the telescreens were described as something that people willingly bought.

akira2501 4y ago

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the technology, and it obviously makes peoples lives better to have it. I think the issue is that there are only a handful of vendors that happily operate like the monopolies they are and provide you with zero differentiation or choice within the market. The government isn't particularly interested in ending this problem either, I suspect this is due to a combination of industry capture and intelligence agency interest in these products.

marcosdumay 4y ago
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with the technology Oh, but there is. It's subservient to the manufacturer, not to you. I'm still annoyed that no country decided to classify "selling" things where the manufacturer keeps complete control and denies you access as fraud. But just because no legal system decided it's a crime, it doesn't mean it's right.
phpisthebest 4y ago
You say there is nothing wrong, but then go on to list things that are in fact wrong. You think the problems are a mistake or otherwise something to be "fixed" the products are working exactly as both the government and the manufacturers want them to, and it has nothing to do with "intel agencies" Having your entire life "cloud connected" and them complaining about privacy, is like opening a window then complaining that the house is drafty. I love home automation, not a single component of my home automation is cloud connected, if more people would accept, learn and support non-cloud systems, services and protocols everyone would be better off
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > You say there is nothing wrong, but then go on to list things that are in fact wrong. They say there is nothing wrong with the technology, but then go on to list things that are in fact wrong with the not-technology.
  - phpisthebest 4y ago

themaninthedark 4y ago

Fahrenheit 451 has a part where they get the entire city to go to their doors to try and spot a fugitive, this action is coordinated by the radios that everyone wears. With these cameras and recognition algorithms, you don't even need people to go to the doors. Just pull the feeds.

robswc 4y ago

right!? TikTok could be a spyware (lol) that requires your SSN and people would STILL download it and defend it just because it brings them mindless 10 second videos. I remember reading 1984 as a kid and thought it was so far fetched, that nobody would willingly let society get to that point... but it just only made more sense as I got older... people really just don't care...