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Welcome to the neighbourhood, have you read the terms of service?

cbc.ca

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Re: Welcome to the neighbourhood, have you read the terms of service?

#11
All our efforts on industrialization are targeted to cover our primary needs, one by one. The main objective on industrialized farms and productive chains from rural areas have been to mantain us supplied to keep working on centrilized and populated urban centers. Now, all needs will be covered by automated tasks, we cannot became artificial agents on a flesh and bone network, fulfilling standard protocols and alienating our minds Why not just turn off the machines in farms, keep the city empty and retake our natural environment. Let's Make the robots deal with all required tech tasks, teach them an Anti AI (for avoiding skynet) and then we could have again a real life living in the country side

Re: Welcome to the neighbourhood, have you read the terms of service?

#12
NYCLU and Columbia University have a 2016 video (starts at 2:50) about the corporate origins and privacy policy of Google's LinkNYC surveillance kiosks in Manhattan: https://livestream.com/internetsociety/hopeconf/videos/13081...

Village Voice covered the topic, https://www.villagevoice.com/2016/07/06/google-is-transformi...

This freedom to opt out entirely is also the last argument that spokespeople for LinkNYC and the city itself fall back upon when challenged with privacy concerns: If you don’t like it, you’re welcome not to use it. It’s a disheartening place to land, especially when discussing infrastructure that’s supposed to be serving people who aren’t served otherwise. To Moglen, it’s simply an unacceptable conclusion. “That’s what they want us to believe, that we have a choice between isolation and monitored connecting,” he says. “Those are not adequate choices in a 21st-century world: We are designing the net to track you — if you don’t like it, don’t use it. The human race is shifting to a fully surveilled and monitored superorganism — if you don’t like that, stop being human. That’s a poor outcome. The United States is a society that was based around the idea that human beings can have liberty. So give us liberty! And don’t tell us that otherwise we can have the death of the net.

Re: Welcome to the neighbourhood, have you read the terms of service?

#15
a bit like "Oath of Fealty" where everything is watched with it implied "not all the time". Where you have a hint of privacy but none really at all with those who hold the keys. The real threat isn't the promises made today, its what the next guy in charge does with it.

in the US there have been concerns already raised over surveillance from license plate scanners to body cameras. The idea they won't have identifiable data flies in the face of the language used to protect law enforcement scanning license plates and its not far behind before body camera recordings are the same.

Re: Welcome to the neighbourhood, have you read the terms of service?

#16
post #7

You can have a smart city without assigning a unique identifier to each individual between collections of data (ie by relying on aggregate data instead), or using the equivalent of a session identifier. For instance, a trashcan filling up can correlate to the number of people who use public transport, but you don't have to say person X took the bus then used the trash can.

But you can correlate the timeseries of crosswalk events that leave from one city block, follow a regular pattern, then a bus boarding, then a bus departure, then a regular trash-can event. Do a thing regularly, or have enough "anonymized" sensors with sufficient resolution, and one can mine a lot from apparently very little.

Even if the system doesn't do this directly, it's easy for a contractor with the data to do as much if the data is highly accurate.

I hope that some mitigations are being put in place by limiting data accuracy to relatively wide windows (and the wideness of those windows will need to vary depending on how busy a thing is).

Re: Welcome to the neighbourhood, have you read the terms of service?

#18
post #17

The public should provide a fair exchange here. Allow Sidewalk Labs to build any infrastructure they like irrespective of laws. Once done, hire whitehats/blackhats, and if they are able to access any information, shutdown the project.

I don't see how that is a fair exchange.

There's every chance that Sidewalk Labs would get to build infrastructure that would otherwise be illegal, and collects data that people don't want collected, just because nobody outside Sidewalk Labs managed to get access to the data.

Even people inside Sidewalk Labs shouldn't have the data. The data shouldn't be collected in the first place.

Re: Welcome to the neighbourhood, have you read the terms of service?

#19

It seems almost a given that whenever the term "smart" is applied to anything, it's something that tries to monitor, monetise, or otherwise resist your attempts at controlling it --- instead, it attempts to control you . There's enough dystopian science fiction out there that the only thing I think when I hear "smart" is "No thanks."

Regarding "smart devices" and IoT, honestly, I don't qualify it as dystopian. To me, it's just pathetic.

A "smart", unnecessarily Internet-connected kettle or lightbulb or juicer isn't going to usher the second coming of fascism to the Western world. Even data breaches connected to those devices aren't going to have any meaningful impact on an average person's life. But it's sad, because it's wasteful. It's ugly. It's bad engineering. And all of this is motivated by greed and sociopathy of people putting it on the market. With each everyday item that gets attached to my butt, I lose faith in people a little more.

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