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.
minus 1 Billion credit ranking due to your opinions.
The Machiavellian part of me thinks Ring screwed up by not raising the stakes. Search Party and the way they advertised it makes you go "awww’ when you see the golden retriever and then “wait, WHAT?” when they show all their Ring doorbells going full surveillance mode in locating the missing dog.
A lengthier ad showing a pedophile being tracked down and arrested by law enforcement mid-abduction, their victim rescued, then the nonce being served justice may have had a more positive response.
I mean, “think of the children” has been the perfect strawman argument to justify mass surveillance, after all…
The spread of 5G, Data Centers and fiber optic connections directly to home will make everything move faster for Big Bro! The homes in the true 1st World countries received fiber optic connections long ago, while the US continues to fail.
Blame capitalism
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
I don’t find Brave New World to be especially dystopian. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I haven’t read it, what’s not dystopian about it?
The first thing Wikipedia says about it is “Brave New World is a dystopian novel” 😅
Maybe you not finding it especially dystopian says more about the state of the world right now than the book… 😅
Keep in mind that the book is very old, published in 1931. DNA hadn’t been mapped, information technology was limited, and so on.
In the book, people are born in factories. Working class people are born in from split cells, as quintuples if I remember correctly. Your role in life is largely determined by your genes - workers don’t have the psychology for anything but labor.
In spite of that, it’s not an especially oppressive society. There is a “perfect” drug, soma, which is sort of like a non-addictive, non-physically harmful heroin that can be delivered by gas. When there is unrest, security forces come in and get everyone high until they chill the fuck out.
Sex is open and easy, but always completely voluntary by everyone involved. When people are turned down they are sometimes surprised but never upset or aggressive.
Entertainment is presented as vacuous, but the people seem to enjoy it. There are movies, TV, and so on. Sports are engineered to require people take trains out of town to stadiums, and require deliberately-complicated equipment to play, in order to create demand for production.
So… is that a dystopia? There is no discussion of environmental damage, but overall it seems sustainable, not predicated on infinite growth. People are stuck in the role they were born to, but it seems like there are no artificial barriers to advancement… just that not everyone can be good at everything.
People are stuck in the role they were born to, but it seems like there are no artificial barriers to advancement
In the lower three classes, people are cloned in order to produce up to 96 identical “twins.” Identity is also achieved by teaching everyone to conform, so that someone who has or feels more than a minimum of individuality is made to feel different, odd, almost an outcast.
https://www.huxley.net/studyaid/bnwbarron.html
I’d argue that intentionally cloning people with limited abilities and then raising them to stay in thier lane is an artificial barrier…
From the view of John the Savage, and to those who’s personalities align with John, it is a dystopia. This clean, orderly, and oppressive society removes the ability to experience real highs like love and real lows like sacrifice. The workers will only know shallow replacements. Furthermore, the workers no longer have the ability to choose. They cannot choose their role in society, and seemingly they cannot choose to leave the society either. Even John is seemingly stuck in the society, and in the end gives into the sensuality and group think after trying to flay himself.
From the view of the savage, and to those who’s personalities align with John, it is a dystopia. This clean, orderly, and oppressive society removes the ability to experience real highs like love and real lows like sacrifice. The workers will only know shallow replacements. Furthermore, the workers no longer have the ability to choose. They cannot choose their role in society, and seemingly they cannot choose to leave the society either. Even John is seemingly stuck in the society, and in the end gives into the sensuality and group think after trying to flay himself.
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
Give me brave new world all day - it would be vastly preferable to whatever this shit is.
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 from Hard Neoliberal At Home Fascist Abroad to Full-on Fascist 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.
I never for that. Why would countries become so dependent on another one. Like the west would crumple rich now if America vanished.
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.
Americans gate the government but live companies Europe us the opposite.
What “global backlash”?
Just another day of headline gore. Anything to get you to click past the headline.
Jokes on them, I never read the article. If its important the article will be reposted in the comments.
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.
A few people have said it, but I’m really glad my tech is always a few generations behind and I never bought into voice assistants or smart home technology. And I keep my phone in a faraday bag when not in use. That probably makes it somewhat harder for them to spy on me logistically.
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.
What’s also interesting to me about this is imagining how many crimes they know about that they simply allow to take place.
I mean why assume a boomer. Very easily a genx or millennial. Think about it millennials kids are around 20 now.
That’s fair. Gen Z and millenials are radicalized by their corporate social media feeds too. I just default to Boomer because, for so long, Boomers were emblematic of this kind of thinking.
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 do 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.
Yeah it’s weird they decided to advertise it. They’ve realized that was their mistake.
Like it was a joke subplot in succession, where they had to change their tagline away from “we hear you” because they were actually listening.
deleted by creator
Well not if they cancel their storage subscriptions or if the bad press makes other people not buy/cancel their subscriptions.
The camera was never the money maker, it was getting your data and charging you monthly to store your videos
Don’t forget Amazon and Google also have smart speakers with microphones…
Big Brother doesn’t just watch, he listens too.
I’m not allowed to have a smart speaker of any kind in my home office (work from home requirement), but especially Alexa. All my homies are required to hate Amazon.
Amazon owns Ring, so it makes sense
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.
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.
Correct. My database of my neighbors faces and biometric data are MINE. I am its rightful guardian
But what if some stranger loses their dog? You could have helped, but NOoOOOOooooo you had to be selfish with your privacy you MONSTER.
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.
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.
or even recording in public with a phone
Fuck that, we should be able to record ice and the cops
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 us have any control of and doesn’t benefit society at all. It’s been a slow moving car accident for 20 years that the masses are too fucking stupid and too arrogant to see until the wreck happens.
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 swear the friendly future I had hoped of as a kid in the 80s/90s was either all propaganda, hijacked, or we actually did end up in an alternate timeline of pure fuckery.
This is not the future I evangelized.
And yeah, those of us who grew up through it have seen the horrific turn of things have taken from potential world changing awesome humanity, to absolute evil.
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 to anybody willing to pay for it.
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 - maybe the worst offender - 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%
That’s why I only buy Chinese.
Even if they surveill they have no reason to hurt meAnd 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!
;-)
Renting is legal
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.
They definitely make them, but it’s mostly for the government. I don’t know if you can get and use one outside of their contract.
Did you find one?
Well, sort of. I’m now using Google Voice as a land-line.
For portability I have a personal Hot-Spot and an old iPad that is NOT chipped for phones. I can use the iPad’s browser, with my Hot-Spot, to get to my Google Voice account.
I can get voice and pictures and text but for the most part it’s at HOME.
For portability I think I would use an older android phone loaded with your OS choice.
The iPad and phone both have cameras anyway just the phone is lighter. Keep it no sim and in airplane mode
Good advice, Thanks.
I did buy a used phone at the thrift store and put that in the car so I had a clock.
Added plus of the cell phone is it can also still call 911 even without a sim as long as you take it off airplane.
Or at least it should be able to, changing the OS could impact that
“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.
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.
But it honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true.
It’s plausible and that’s enough.
The point is whether or not it happens, as a parable it’s validity is sound. Point is, if even if the current government has nothing but good intentions and would never use the information to do anything you don’t agree with, and you are in perfect agreement with the current government. There is always the risk of either the government changing or someone stealing the information from the government that could weaponize it in ways you would never want.
what’s crazy to me is the people who defend this type of stuff, are the ones that are also terrified of gun registration… because you know if one day a gun ban were put in place, having a list of where all the guns are would make confiscation easy and legal. But they don’t realize that it’s just as likely for them to hunt people who spoke out against the government, or were the wrong race… or hell, just possibly see that you have a gun because you took it home on a ring cam.
100%.
And today Germany still makes you register your religion. You’d think they would have learned…
“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”
Let me put things this way:
- Hands up anybody who doesn’t believe that, if they can, Health Insurance companies won’t mine the shit out of your purchase data and Car Insurance mine the shit out of your driving data to try and fine tune your risk group in their models and find out any change if your conditions that impact their bottom line (and dump you if they can if you switch to a high risk group)
Even if one’s relaxed about data mining of private data for the purpose of serving you custom adverts, there are plenty of other use cases 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.
Even you think you’re above board on everything and about as boring and uninteresting a person as possible, there are plenty of ways in which others known everything about you might come around and bit you in the ass in very concrete ways.
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 (and Discord) 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
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.
imagine AOC takes over the government and going after anybody saying something positive about Trump.
Yeah that’s not gonna happen. I get what you mean, but she’s not some despotic arch-trump.
Only in Fox news reality, I know
Recent tv’s became thin client’s. Turn it on and it first need to download the app('s)
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.
We’re already seeing that where people are suspicious when you don’t have Facebook or whatever.
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.
