Submitted 1 day ago by Beep@lemmus.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/amazons-ring-and-googles-nest-unwittingly
Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
As if this hadn’t been obvious the very moment they started connecting their massive amount of same model cameras to servers under their own regime (aka " the cloud"). And as if nobody told you so.
Sometimes stuff like this makes me at least a tiny bit happy to be living in a 3rd world shithole where the country isnt seen as prime-quality consumer habitat.
The contradictions in the US are crazy.
We’re living in this enormous Panopticon - a massive digital fishbowl - for tracking and harassing and arresting lawful citizens. But you can kidnap an Olympics announcer’s mom, live on camera, and no one can find you. No one can catch you. Even as Ring runs “Find My Dog With AI” commercials during the Super Bowl.
What “global backlash”?
If there had been such a thing European citizens and companies would have not have spent the next decade putting their data in America’s hands and now be scrambling to decouple as American goes Hard Neoliberal At Home Fascist Abroad to Full-on Fascists Everywhere.
For people paying attention back then it was painfully obvious back then that one could not trust one’s data in the hands of American companies or in fact any companies from a 4-eyes (meanwhile expanded to 7-eyes) country and yet the rush for putting personal and corporate data in American cloud systems were insane (not helped by the EU approving the US as a “safe haven” for data, something so outrageous after the the Snowden Revelations that I bet a lot of people involved were either customers of Epstein’s “services” or corrupt as fuck).
In fact, that massive surveillance cooperative operation expanding from 4 countries to 7 is also a pretty good indication that there wasn’t really a “global backlash”, otherwise countries like New Zeeland would be wary of joining it as it would get them cut out of international data networks and agreements.
Only countries like China seem to have taken the whole thing seriously and setup their own local stack of consumer and corporate data sharing and storing, and that seems to have been driven at least partly by wanting to do exactly the same as the 4-eyes countries were doing.
What “global backlash”?
Just another day of headline gore. Anything to get you to click past the headline.
It’s kinda hilarious that propaganda in the US talked about “EU is always watching you” as a part of the propaganda against government regulations. While some places over there are starting to see the rise of fascist parties, I think awareness of the US’s fall into fascism is hurting their cause as people are a little more aware than they might otherwise be.
And while I don’t generally like any government monitoring, if I had to choose, I’d choose EU monitoring over US monitoring any day, considering how our democracy has long been secondary to capitalism (with our own special twist of that old socialist phrase, for us “Taking the resources of the many to concentrate in the hands of the few ultra-wealthy”)
Our oligarchs have corrupted the entire system, and our government allows us just enough to survive while funelling all the resources up to the oligarchs. They have more than they could possibly spend, and they still demand more More MORE M O R E.
Back to cameras: In this case, more data, more control, more intimidation, more fear.
The only place in the EU with surveillance anywhere as bad as the US was Britain and they aren’t in the EU anymore.
And this is just State surveillance.
When it comes to Private Sector surveillance, nowhere in the EU are things anywhere close to as bad in the US since EU countries have far tighter Privacy regulations and even outside the EU-wide regulations most countries have had pretty strict Medical and Banking data regulations for quite a while.
That Propaganda in the US is a mix of straight bullshit about government surveillance in Europe - which in reality is not much of a thing outside dictatorships or Britain - and the insiduious take of, anchored on the Hard-Neoliberal Fable that Public Is Bad, Private Is Good, not even considering private sector surveillance and its impact, when that’s a far worse problem in the US than in Europe.
the thing 1984 got wrong is that people are willingly buying their own (multiple) telescreens and happily submitting their entire life to the party
We didn’t see how we got to 1984. We just see one person living with consequences of what society has become. We’re building our own 1984 right now!
This is why Fahrenheit 451 (and not 1984) is my go-to analogy for today’s plight: Bradbury correctly predicted that people would willingly walk themselves into an oppressive technocracy for the sake of entertainment and convenience.
i mean we could say we’re living through 1984, brave new world, Fahrenheit 451, handmaid’s tale, maybe lolita–i haven’t read that one, but heard it’s a bit child-rapey
whatever it is, no one source has really encapsulated the hell of actual reality today
1984 and brave new world ass world
relevant webcomic contrasting 1984 and brave new world, which is insightful, but doesn’t include the reality that we’re literally living in both novels’ universes
First they sell the fear, then they sell the “solution”. Poor on poor crime is down to record lows. What’s up is government crime on poors, that has skyrocketed.
All these cameras do for the people who paid for them is provide a memento of the thing being stolen from the front yard. If you think you’re going to show the video to a cop, and they’re going to say, “Hey! I know that guy!”, and then run off and retrieve your truck that’s too big to fit in your garage, you are sorely mistaken.
Also, if you install these things inside your house, you can bet dollars to donuts that someone is gooning to your antics. I mean, besides your dad.
I know a lot of times replies are viewed as “You’re wrong!” but this, if anything, I think reinforces your comment:
I went looking for statistics and couldn’t find any, but did run across these assertions:
Certainly people are becoming more aware of those cameras and perhaps covering up to disguise their identity. So at most they might deter someone from going for your house, but as they become even more common, that effect will probably drop off.
Government crime as funded by the rich and greedy, to be more precise. The government isn’t simply working with the rich but was actively bought and paid for and is not executing the job they were paid to do.
Unfortunately most people just don’t fucking care, or even consider it an issue.
Someone in my local HA community proudly shared how they had been able to use AWS face recognition with their own cams so they didn’t need to run face recognition locally…fucking absurd to experience someone tech-savvy willingly hand over these things and recommending others to so it too.
They are starting to care, Amazon got a huge wakeup call when they dropped the creepy Milo ad and people destroyed their products. But now they know the line and will slowly creep past it instead of plowing past. We just need to keep pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding, we have made some great victories against AI in the last few months.
I’m disappointed that it took seeing that ad for so many people to realize what should have been obvious: ring, along with teslas, and any voice assistant listening devices, or any other cloud-based tech that monitors video, audio, or even other data, can be used to set up an unprecedented surveillance network. Phones are a part of it, too, at the very least as tracking beacons, assuming the mics and cameras aren’t being tapped more often than that little activity dot indicates.
There’s a reason why the venn diagram of people who really understand tech and people who are enthusiastic about most new tech in the last decade and a bit aren’t the same circle. The Snowden revelations weren’t surprising on the “what they are capable of” side of things, though there had been hope before they came out that they weren’t crossing the lines that tech would have easily allowed them to. Just like when zuck bragged about the information fb users just gave him, that wasn’t all new but there was an unspoken (and perhaps naive) rule that admins should respect their users’ privacy.
When I was on the webteam for a gaming community, it would have been trivial to set up the login page to also store all user/password/email combos in a location none of the other team would be likely to notice. We hashed the password in the db, but I could change the source code to do whatever. Even if it was hashed on the client, I could have added a temporary unhashed field and get all the plaintext credentials to check who uses the same password for their email. I didn’t because I respected our users, but from then on just assumed that any site admin could see my credentials and never reuse passwords.
That also applies to Lemmy, btw. At the very least, you shouldn’t use the same password for you email and anything else (though also be aware emails are just sent as plaintext to a bunch of servers while being routed to your email provider).
Yeah it’s weird they decided to advertise it. They’ve realized that was their mistake
What’s with that crude 2x4 protection assembly? You’re setting up a permanent camera fixture, and THAT’S what you use for protection? What’s it for, a junkyard? You couldn’t paint it, at least?
Planned Obsolescence, baby! You don’t make money running the Panopticon if your clients aren’t constantly paying 10x the asking price to repair and replace your shitty TEMU knock-off surveillance kits.
It is fascinating to me that the FBI desperately wanting to pretend that they’re relevant and doing actual investigative work in the Guthrie case stupidly confirmed that corporations are not only spying on us all, but feeding the data into federal databases for access without a warrant or any meaningful oversight.
Y’all, it’s wild that so much of what your dumbass, Infowars-obsessed grandparents told you is literally true and provable now.
My dad rips his name out of junk mail and shreds it. He doesn’t want his name tied to his address, which is ironic in the first place, given that he’s already getting junk mail. He’s been worried about hiding his identity, address, cars, etc from some unknown surveillance entity based around Red Scare beliefs. Still, a few steps short of foil hat types.
Then he went and got cloud-based cameras. He’s clueless about smartphone privacy already. He resembles his friends in his cohort. They protested “leftist government surveillance” and then showed me that they’d will invite mystery surveillance in with the slightest promise of convenience.
Sounds about right. Boomers are adorable.
If you really need to see who knocking, just put a camera at a high enough point not to scan past the porch
Don’t have to force surveillance on people. They’ll literally pay money for it.
Imagine that 🤣
If anyone wonders why there are so many scams, it’s easy! The average consumer is in general are short sighted, gullible and naive. Of course there will be plenty who will to exploit that.
The conditions of capitalism make desperate people, or those after easy money, ripe for plunder. Ahh capitalism, you glorious old whore.
A state that should have been obvious to everyone FFS. The cameras are pointed at neighbourhoods, the audio is poly directional, which includes inside the home, and are hooked up to wifi to transmit the data. We have facial recognition, speech recognition, even gait recognition, AI object identification, license plate readers, audio filtering, all automated and analysed for review and every smart device has cameras and microphones.
Yall are fucking morons for embracing all this shit and normalizing a surveillance state that none of have may control of. It’s been a slow moving car accident for 20 years that the masses are too fucking stupid and too arrogant to see.
Yall are fucking morons
I don’t think you’re insulting the right audience here.
Yeah, we’re the people who’ve been sounding the alarm for 20+ years. I’m tired boss
I’m pretty sure plenty if not most of people here pay most of their shopping with a card rather than cash, even though that shit at minimum goes into a database for ever and ever, probably shared with the authorities and in some countries just outright sold for pennies.
And don’t get me started with just how many Techies jumped into Tesla’s “surveillance nightmare on wheels” - I mean, Techies were very much a large block of early adopters of Tesla cars and this was already well after the Snowden Revelations.
Further, how many people are in the habit of accessing the Internet behind a VPN? (Personally, living in Britain at the time, the Snowden Revelations were what prompted me to start using a VPN regularly)
Whilst lots of people here have an actual “lets keep my digital footprint” mindset and praxis, I get the impression that most do not, and even those who bitch and moan about “surveillance” trade convenience (or, even worse, the Techie desire for “shinny new thing” thus getting shit like Alexa) for high digital visibility.
So yeah, maybe not “Yall”, but probably “Most of you”.
100%
This is American culture.
That’s why I only buy Chinese.
Even if they surveill they have no reason to hurt me
And you’re absolutely certain they don’t sell the data back to US brokers or even authorities directly?
That’s why I only buy Chinese.
dude, buying people is illegal!
;-)
That’s a very short-sighted and unimaginative position.
Lmao. Idgaf. I get 0 money from ring income. Maybe they should stop fing me first.
You could, idk, maybe not buy prepackaged surveillance camera that rely on someone else’s computer to work.
Well ya, obviously. And I do that. But for most people that’s not an option. They just gonna get what they have available from Amazon
I don’t use anything cloud based and much of my shit isn’t even allowed out to the internet.
It’s a drop in the ocean, for too many say “But it’s sooooo convenient and I’ve got nothing to hide” and open up all they got. Share camera’s with amazon, email address book with facebook etc. not realizing nor caring I make an appearance in their instances too and I DO mind.
I was looking for a new TV last month, the salesman said it was “sacrilege” when I told him I had no intention of connecting the TV to the internet or using its online functions since I will have a media PC connected to it. I was just interested in the quality of the screen.
I had to revert the firmware on a TV because it effectively bricked itself when the software was no longer supported. I don’t connect these things to the Internet. They will simply display what I tell them to.
What a twat
I was looking for a phone that didn’t have a camera. I told him I already have a camera that is NOT a phone.
He was aghast.
“I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie. A colloquial fib we feel compelled to utter as a mock defense, like asserting innocence will assuage suspicion.
We all have something to hide. Probably many, many things to hide. Even just in the narrow context of the law, there are hundreds of thousands of laws that apply to any one of us at any given time, and you are almost certainly breaking some of them without even knowing it.
Personal security through privacy is so very, very important. I wish more people could see that.
Let me put things this way:
Even if one’s relaxed about data mining on private data for the purpose of serving you custom adverts, there are plenty of other use case which can actually cost you money, not to mention the risk when the Authorities start running crime-predictive models sold to them by slimy Tech Investors with high enough rates of false positive that you run the risk of being tagged a “Terrorism” for some stupid shit like buying more bleech than the average person.
In a little town in the Netherlands life was good. The planning committee actually had smart people who made sure to plan the town according to the people’s needs. Kosher butchers, for instance, were placed near Jewish community centers. They could do that because the town had kept records on who lived where, including the people’s religion. It really was a utopia.
Then the nazis invaded, got their hands on those registries, and with utmost efficiency cleared the town of all jews.
I don’t know if this story is true. I read it (probably much better worded) a few years ago. But it honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true.
“I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie
And easy to debunk. Take their phone, ask the pin. 9 out of 10 won’t. Open bank app ask pin again. You won’t get that far.
Every time I hear that I always say the same thing.
It isn’t enough that you have nothing to hide.
All that’s required is that the general public think they have access to information that someone might want to hide.
Once the public thinks that data can exist or is accessible all that’s required is for them to lie or fabricate the required data.
“It would be very unfortunate if there was questionable content ‘found’ on your phone”
When I was a kid in the 90s, there used to small fringe groups talking about global warming and everyone else rolled their eyes. Now when it’s too late, people have started caring.
Privacy, security and anonymity are at that place now. Anyone talking about how fucked up it is that even your TV and fridge is mining all the data it can is considered to be a fringe alarmist. People are going to wait till the world is on fire before taking this seriously. There was an uproar when WhatsApp changed its terms of service a couple of years ago and that died down and nothing changed. The uproar from this will also die down and nothing will change. Maybe one day people will see this as relevant to their lives and take it seriously.
people that tell me “they have nothing to hide” understand where I am coming from in terms of privacy when I ask them to write down their social security number on a piece of paper with their debit/credit card information
If you have nothing to hide, would you please consider installing 4K cameras in every corner of your house that publicly livestream your every action and also remove your front door?
Assume either Trump will go after anybody saying anything critical about him and the party, or imagine AOC takes over the government and going after anybody saying something positive about Trump. Without privacy, you’re f-ed either way.
It may seem like a drop in the ocean now, but if things ever got to the point where we’re being divided up into groups, you might be oddly left out of every group. It’s not hard to de-Google, de-Meta, inconvenient at times, but maybe it pays dividends down the road.
The trouble with living in a panopticon is that becomes suspicious to not be on a list.
Recent tv’s became thin client’s. Turn it on and it first need to download the app('s)
I loved that ad, it instantly brought the point I’ve been making for years home to the whole Super Bowl party.
The thing with privacy is nobody thinks about it until they need it, then it’s too late.
most of whats being funneled into palintir to look for any threats against the right wing regime, simple as that, or anything that threatens the old guard DNC too.
We need legislation with teeth before they manage to get this in every house. It’s going to happen. Your phone, TV, doorbell, car, crosswalks and street signs are all going to be recording and tracking you eventually. Just recognize that’s going to happen no matter what, and get real oversight and rules into place now. If we wait until it’s all locked, the ruling party will never let it end.
We need legislation with teeth
He said, while living under a dictatorship.
Never said it was an easy lift. There’s a long road between where we are and a functioning society. And currently most of Europe is in the lead.
Frigate with a cheap “AI” accelerator (running visual models) FTW!
Just wanted to point out one oddly written passage:
Numerous media outlets sounded the alarm. The online privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned Ring’s program …
Many private citizens who previously used Ring also reacted negatively. “Viral videos online show people removing or destroying their cameras over privacy concerns,” reported
I was hoping to see that this story had gone national and wasn’t just a buzz in privacy centric circles, so my ears pricked up when they say “numerous media outlets” were reporting the story. But then the example they give a quote from was EFF, which I would not call a “media outlet.”
Below they go on to say that “private citizens” also cried out, and then they use a quote from a USA Today article. USA Today is a media outlet.
Next they say that even scum sucker fish are against all this, using a quote from JD Vance to back it up, and that part was all right.
My progressive-but-detached friends have suddenly noticed how creepy the services are. Not sure if it’s enough to get them to cancel whatever they have, but the combo of “Ring wants constant access” and “Google handed over inaccessible data” has at least gotten them to question their privacy.
Can’t speak for conservatives because I don’t have any of those left in my circle.
I was gonna make a joke how confusing it must be to see a guy appear between houses and seemingly never go home.
But then I realized I have a smart phone that listens to everything I say and tracks where I am.
4grams@awful.systems 7 hours ago
As a working dad with kids, I like my doorbell cam. My self hosted, non-cloud, local only doorbell cam that is.
My f’ing camera feeds are mine.
daychilde@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
But what if some stranger loses their dog? You could have helped, but NOoOOOOooooo you had to be selfish with your privacy you MONSTER.
Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Got any tips on a good model to get? I want one that i can access remotely via my phone. I have to relevant tools to make it remotely accessible but the cameras need to be able to speak to my software. I have a raspberry pi that i can use as a server.
MrKoyun@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Well, cross the wrong street once and now you’re in somebody else’s neatly AI analyzed, uploaded to remote corporate servers and then handed to the government camera feeds…
The world is a joke. Everyone is “entitled” to their privacy, but it isn’t massively illegal to just have a camera running somewhere 24/7 or even recording in public with a phone.