It’s fucking wild to me how so many people willingly signed over their privacy so blatantly.
They’ve been conditioned to not care or even desire it. Smartphones had Siri and Google Assistant as a selling point, which led to ever more intrusive tech that was marketed as a convenience. Facebook took it a step further and had you label people in pictures uploaded to them and you sign away your privacy in their terms and conditions. Advanced marketing techniques were irresistible to social media companies and so consumer profiles of everyone they could get became a thing.
Jokes about seeing ads that smartphones can overhear made the intrusive spying all the more accepted as just a part of life. Android marks your calendar and reminds you of appointments made using your Gmail account when you never asked it to. Ring doorbell cameras quietly sell their video feeds to the highest bidder, often to law enforcement as a convenient means to circumvent the 4th amendment. And now the latest trend is to have your car do everything your phone already does but take it a step further by monitoring your driving habits so insurance companies can justify raising your premiums.
The average person isn’t tech savvy enough to understand they’re being sold as a product even after paying for their own surveillance gear. They just want modern conveniences without thinking the price they pay beyond the original sale.
Your phone is probably worse. Yes, even with GrapheneOS.
Please explain?! Is GrapheneOS a honeypot in your opinion?
what the other guy said, plus, speaking entirely about a graphene phone vs a voice assistant, even the sandboxed telemetry is going to give more telemetry because you carry your phone around and use multiple apps, but a voice assistant is a static location and most people use it for music, recipes and weather, whereas more people are more likely to use their phone for banking, shopping, maps, messaging, photos and looking at adult content.
Obviously if you have a phone you’ve just turned on for the first time and you like to tell Alexa when you’re shopping for expensive jewelry every day it’d be reversed - I’m just talking generally
Edit to say: people get tunneled into “Alexa is a microphone, a phone is a computer” when they are both both those things.
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I think it can give a false sense of security, because all of the security and privacy feature can be individually bypassed by the user.
if you try to use it the same way as a regular android phone you end up giving all the apps the same level of control as they would in stock android eventually.
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Greese
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Authoritarians learned that 1984-style totalitarian control doesn’t work anymore; so they tried Brave New World’s control through psychological pleasure, and it is more successful than ever imagined.
Really it’s a mixture of both. Brave New World to keep the masses sedated, 1984 for the people who start to question the system.
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The scariest part is when you just think about pancakes and then start seeing ads for flour and maple syrup 10 minutes later. They don’t even need the wiretap anymore.
Yeah because they know you like pancakes and can serve you ads to start that train of thought so when you are served the pancake ad you feel like it ‘got you’ instead of the real fact that you were manipulated into thinking about pancakes so the pancake ad has more possibility of getting engagement from you. This is why you should have ad block on everything you interact with.
yeah people don’t realize just how insidious advertisement really is.
your phone isn’t “reading your mind,” advertisers have such a comprehensive model of you that they’re able to predict your thoughts with an incredibly high degree of accuracy before you even have them. There’s also obviously a bit of confirmation bias in play, you only remember the times they got it right as opposed to the times they guessed wrong.
I suddenly feel a sharp craving for some ad-block software…
When phones were still tied to a cable, people were freer.
How many of you are responding to this post from your cell phone?
it IS a wonder. i’m actually pretty curious how they accomplished this.
like i know how they harvest our data to figure us out, but i’m a computer guy. the psychology of brainwashing that sophisticated must be crazy.
My hypothesis is that it’s a frog in a pot of water scenario. Western Union started the first charge account in 1914, so we’ve had a long time to get used to the water heating up. It probably did start with honest intentions to make things work a little smoother, but I remember the early days of digitizing records, and there was a LOT of loose data just there for the taking.
I remember that I used to work at RadioShack in the late '00s, and I had to escalate up to district because we discovered a treasure trove of old paper store credit applications that had been cached somewhere in the backrooms, and my manager wanted to just throw them in the normal garbage and not risk the cost of the extra shredding coming out of her bonus.
These things had SO MUCH INFO, handwritten out onto a paper form; name, birthday, SSN, mailing address, street address, then all that info of the spouse/cosigner that wanted to be on the account too. I could have made so much money on the black market, looking back.
Truly amazing how many breaches of privacy people are willing to put up with if the propaganda says that questioning the tracking means you’re hiding something and deserve to be tracked.
Or to protect the children! Child abuse is the trojan horse, also age restrictions a trojan sheep they have several on offer, to surrender to Tech. Social scores by half baked ai deciding everything secretly, in a way no one can know and challenge. The entire west is trying to surrender their citizens to Tech giants last year for a cut of the info and personal exemptions for politicians and security services.
Past generations would tar and feather these assholes something is wrong.
This is the dawn of technofeudalism. First our data is sold to the CorpoLords, then our lives, then our souls.
It really is.
In the late roman empire the rulers fucked up so much, no one could pay their taxes, government wouldn’t even accept it’s own watered down currency for taxes but demanded gold or silver or services and goods in kind. It got so bad people were walking off of their jobs en masse after those jobs didn’t provide for life anymore.
The empire responded by binding people to their jobs for life, and their kids. Many city people remained free but country folk were enslaved. The big latifundia factory farms turned their estates into castles and became lords. All while the barbarian invasions came sweeping through, and the people welcomed their government getting crushed.
One could see how that will play out again.
We need another secession of the plebians. Let these tech bros try and carry on without their main profit vector
That is a great idea. I think we should re-establish the Tribunate. With the veto on government actions and the rest, ability to offer sanctuary, being sacrosanct. Peoples’ tribunate. 500 bc and 350 bc the plebs did a general strike and got that and other concessions and expanded it, simply by decamping to a large hill and refusing to do anything until demands were met. I think they got written laws from that too, the 12 tables, before that the rich just made shit up as they went.
This was so obviously a bad idea from day one, I was shocked at how widely adopted these were right away. In retrospect I shouldnt have been surprised but somehow I just always expect people to be smarter.
All you have to do is not tell any of the customers that it continually listens, by the time the ones who didn’t know find out, it’s already in their homes, they’ve already got the app installed, and they’ve said “I dreamt about something and then saw an ad for it the next day” more than once.
a person is smart. people are dumb stupid animals, and you know it!
I might need you to cite a source on people being generally smart at the individual level. Current politics feels like it disagrees with that assessment…
The CIA openly admits to spying on people around the world and everyone’s reaction is now ‘Oh you’
Somehow (constant media propaganda most likely) they’ve convinced people that to do ANYTHING you have to get your hands dirty; that ‘ANYTHING’ however is rarely or only slightly in our benefit, it’s of a bigger benefit to an elite few instead. Even if you ascribe to ‘the ends justify the means’, the ends aren’t worth it and the means are just getting more and more horrific and we’re assuming the imperial boomerang isn’t on its way back.
From what i gather from talking to people is that
A: they don’t care Or B: I’m paranoid and it doesn’t matter.
I do not understand how people just give up their privacy for nothing
The vast line of imperial boomerangs have been slamming against our jaws for years now
With so many methods for global communications in the average persons hands it not a wonder at all. People are not even one iota security conscious until they get tagged and by then its too late
Google search chatgpts work the same way dear computer guys
I think you will find that most “computer guys” on Lemmy do not use google or LLMs unless forced to for work.
How many people are carrying cell phones around?
No no no, we’re in chat buddy era so it’s “Hey wiretap propose food for today”
Has there actually been evidence of Alexa or Google homes being used for government surveillance?
Ring, also owned by Amazon, shares their video surveillance with Flock, which contracts with local LE agencies who share it with the feds.
0 warrants required, and ICE is actively using the data against people.
An autistic teenage hacker banned from having a computer used a fire stick in a hotel room to hack Rockstar games. I think any given 14 year old war driver can hack these devices and listen to your conversations. If the government will work their butts off to install a tap on a landline, how can they not use an Alexa.
At the very least, there’s a teenager in your neighborhood listening to every damn thing you say. If you have cameras in your home, they’re watching you.
Ring doorbells now give their footage to Flock, which can give/sell it to anyone. No warrant necessary. Not exactly what you’re asking about, but along the same lines.
And police departments have absolutely bought that information, especially given their notoriously inflated budgets (at least in many cities).
Tbf, it would be pretty strange if law enforcement needed a warrant for flock camera footage, considering they’re just freely accessible on the fucking internet /s
They got caught sending info to their data banks they said they would not, and listening all the time even when they said they would not.
All of these smart devices do. If it is connected to the internet, presume it is spying and will sneak the information back.
The feds in the us buy data broker info, all of it, the cia buys and steals foreigners’ too, and distribute it to agencies all the way down to notes, not attributed to source, in the local police’s lien, law enforcement information network. Their dossiers on everyone. No warrants or judges, blessed by the supreme court for some time this is not new.
An end run around privacy laws and the bill of rights. Just like 5 eyes end runs spy agencies not being allowed to spy on their countries. They let their ally do it, lead it on paper at least, then share it with them.
All a result of being ruled by lawyers working for plutocrats.
If the data is there a fascist government will absolutely use it. Of course in a democracy that won’t happen … unless you vote for fascists, ooopsie.
The data isn’t there. At least not in the way some of the biggest fearmongers talk about it. Everything you say to the device, you can assume is there. But it listens for the wake word locally and doesn’t send information to the server until after it receives the wake word.
It’s can hallucinate the wake word and streams everything after. And that’s assuming you trust the manufacturer which, why would you?
Alexa is wildly popular. What has Amazon done to gain everyone’s trust? They just offer the cheapest version.
Yeah, na.
Care to clarify your meaning? Or are you just disagreeing because it feels good to go along with the conspiracy theory?
I’m specifically talking about Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices, not anything else your phone or apps are doing. So the only one of those articles even remotely relevant is the third.
And the third talks about “false wakes” being the cause. Which goes along with what I said before that until it hears the wake word (even if it’s mistaken in doing so), it’s not sending back recordings.
I don’t know. You must be a bot or in some sort of abusive relationship. Why are you desperately taking the side of a corporation who constantly does the wrong thing. Why give them the benefit of the doubt it’s weird?
Here’s something I quickly looked but I don’t care enough to be honest. They’re doing the wrong thing whether they have been caught yet or not. Look up more yourself if you actually care or don’t if you want to stay asleep. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/amazons-alexa-never-stops-listening-to-you/
If they’re not directly storing the entire conversation they’re converting key words to text or entire conversations, why not? If they’re can listen for the 1 word and act on it why wouldn’t they take everything else. Who’s stopping them? I’m going to block because it’s just dumb to trust a corporation so I have no interest in being convinced they are good guys and care about my or your wellbeing.
I just don’t trust corporations 🤷🏻
And they cannot change this without anyone noticing?
No, they can’t. Precisely because of all the people who quite rightly don’t trust Google and Amazon, who would notice their devices’ network traffic increasing.
Depends on the company. Apple uses a very specific type of chip for the wake word that cannot change the wake word. Alexa is able to change the sound wake word to almost anything, iirc.
That might be true, I honestly don’t know. But it doesn’t matter to the point I’m making, which is that however the device does it, it’s the device, locally, that determines whether a wake word has been said, before it starts transmitting what comes next.
Pretty sure it’s illegal for them to confirm that this has happened. Most of the spying is to manipulate your shopping patterns and learn how to make the most profit from you.
Think Las Vegas casino levels of manipulation and then some.
Yes I think the Cloud Act forbids telling the customers that an agency has accessed their data. Not that Google or Amazon would want to tell anyway
Shhhh, the pitchforks are out, who needs evidence. In all reality, if you were to be wiretapped, an Alexa wouldn’t be the best option. Most people already have an internet connected microphone they carry around with them everywhere. And it has multiple cameras too, which are regularly brought into the bathroom with them.
Which is basically what Snowden revealed btw (phone metadata collection, internet traffic interception, data access from tech platforms, fiber-optic cable tapping, smartphone location and metadata)
It’s more than that honestly, or less, depending on the perspective. Most people share their data with “only our 900 bestliest partners” or more everyday. Every tweet, login, whatever metadata can be more valuable and easier to compute than voice or video, depending on what you are looking for.
If somebody wants to hack my camera and watch me cut a turd, who am I to deny them?
I actually use mine as a disability aid. My motor control isn’t the best so it’s good just to call out for light and heat adjustments.
But I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that if ICE or whoever wanted to come bust me down, there wasn’t anything stopping them before I got what is essentially a home aide, and there’s nothing stopping them now.
