Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

cato.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 210 posts

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#161

Post by zizek23 »

hakejam wrote: post #117
ljw1001 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be available to be licensed for use in the private sector, but it is hardly a "public service." Without exaggeration, I think it would be closer to the truth to call it a "public menace".

"public service" was a bit of a misnomer. The article states: "Amazon is providing police departments in Orlando, Fla., and Washington County, Ore., with powerful facial recognition technology." Rekognition is SaaS (software as a service). Anyone can pay for running Rekoginition on their data sets (within Amazon ToS). Rekognition was not created directly for the police departments in FL or OR.

This is disingenuous. It's been actively marketed to law enforcement. A product is not created out of the blue with no target market. That's simply not how things work.

And that's whats happening to with a lot of surveillance technology, see Palantir, they are being packaged and aggressively marketed to schools, law enforcement and government.

Taken together these companies are selling and enabling a surveillance dystopia for no bigger reason than personal gain and the people responsible should be called out.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#162

Post by lovemenot »

mirimir wrote: post #145
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politicians should have less right to privacy than us citizens.

Everyone with substantial power should have less privacy. Politicians should have almost none.

That was a core idea for the British Establishment.

Public school was where children went to learn how to operate in public life. The rest of the population had less privilege, but more privacy.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#163

Post by candiodari »

ams6110 wrote: post #155
candiodari wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please, for once, make this not a "Trump is evil" thread ? Besides, yes, Trump is evil, but among the general US population there are far worse people than him, and despite what you probably think, together they have far, far more control over your life than Trump does. Private individuals are already implementing something worse than China's social credit score all over America. [1] Currently they're limited…

My local Kroger is now taking video of the faces of every customer as they check out. To their credit they make it obvious by having a display screen at each register where you can see what they are recording, but I stopped shopping there for that reason.

Great. Do you think it matters ?

For example, to give some vague indication of just how pervasive it already is: https://www.google.com/search?q=index+of+public+webcams

I guarantee you there's 5000 private webcams and non-web cams pointed at the street for everyone listed there. 100 government ones.

Stopping shopping is not an effective punishment, and will not lead to stopping progress on machine learning. I would just ignore it. Besides, at this point, it's probably just a security cam. 24h and your video is gone (assuming the store wasn't attacked).

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#164

Post by Fnoord »

cyphar wrote: post #137
ma2rten wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why so many tech-literate people have an issue with that. As I am sure you know, those devices only record your voice and send it to the server when they hear their hotword. The hotword detection has to be done on the device itself for technical reasons (battery and data usage). Theoretically it's possible that the companies that build those devices lie and actually record you other times. But the…

Aside from the striking similarity to 1984 there is the fact that all of these devices are internet-connected and probably have backdoors or vulnerabilities (so while they might not listen all the time normally, they can be switched to listening all the time if you become targeted). Stallman calls this a "universal backdoor". Most of these devices are always-on and are placed in central positions in your home -- this…

> Personally I physically disconnect all of the internal microphones from my laptops, and cover the cameras.

How do you deal with the former on your smartphone?

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#165

Post by hutzlibu »

sedachv wrote: post #116

> When most people think of the tech giant Amazon, they think of an innovative, consumer-friendly company responsible for affordable deliveries. This is one of those instances where I say to myself, "I wish I had listened to Richard Stallman X years ago": https://stallman.org/amazon.html

Hm, just browsed his page a bit again ... well, it seems still centered around, "this is bad and that is bad" "and this is wrong.. "

Not sure if this is the way to get people exited, building on better things.

I also like to read about, what works. What are working alternatives, and this he writes about ... but less so in my opinion.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#166

Post by 13of40 »

ploxiln wrote: post #157
ma2rten wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why so many tech-literate people have an issue with that. As I am sure you know, those devices only record your voice and send it to the server when they hear their hotword. The hotword detection has to be done on the device itself for technical reasons (battery and data usage). Theoretically it's possible that the companies that build those devices lie and actually record you other times. But the…

Software engineers are right to be scared of these voice assistants. The problem is that typical sloppy, glitchy software (and hardware) is poised to record your voice and send it somewhere at any time, and that somewhere will play or record this, because that's what all this stuff more-or-less setup to do. It's already happened! Alexas have already "butt dialed" other people (not just amazon's servers)! Think a bit…

Something kind of eye-opening for me was that I recently found an Android setting to make my phone (a OnePlus 5T) vibrate whenever any app requests location data, and even with location access denied to everything, it still vibrates about once every ten or fifteen minutes. As an end user I'm helpless to know whether it's a normal function of the OS, or if I have malware, or if it's Google, or OnePlus, or the Chinese. I can only hope I'm a little fish caught up in someone's advertising scheme and I'm not being tracked by the FBI because I said the wrong mix of things online. (You know, because there's no way I'm getting rid of my smart phone.)

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#167

Post by 13of40 »

beenBoutIT wrote: post #130
ehnto wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am honestly very surprised at how comfortable people are with them. I think the smartphone paved the way and normalized it. I remember friends and family being terrified that their SMS messages were being read. Now people often don't give it a second thought.

Never write anything in an email/SMS/etc that you wouldn’t feel comfortable reading on the Jumbotron in Times Square. If you follow that simple rule you'll do fine.

Or, more realistically, that you wouldn't feel comfortable having read back to you in court.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#168

Post by JackCh »

Fnoord wrote: post #164
cyphar wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the striking similarity to 1984 there is the fact that all of these devices are internet-connected and probably have backdoors or vulnerabilities (so while they might not listen all the time normally, they can be switched to listening all the time if you become targeted). Stallman calls this a "universal backdoor". Most of these devices are always-on and are placed in central positions in your home -- this…

> Personally I physically disconnect all of the internal microphones from my laptops, and cover the cameras. How do you deal with the former on your smartphone?

You missed this part: "I don't actually have a smartphone for this reason)."

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#169

Post by maccard »

13of40 wrote: post #166
ploxiln wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers are right to be scared of these voice assistants. The problem is that typical sloppy, glitchy software (and hardware) is poised to record your voice and send it somewhere at any time, and that somewhere will play or record this, because that's what all this stuff more-or-less setup to do. It's already happened! Alexas have already "butt dialed" other people (not just amazon's servers)! Think a bit…

Something kind of eye-opening for me was that I recently found an Android setting to make my phone (a OnePlus 5T) vibrate whenever any app requests location data, and even with location access denied to everything, it still vibrates about once every ten or fifteen minutes. As an end user I'm helpless to know whether it's a normal function of the OS, or if I have malware, or if it's Google, or OnePlus, or the Chinese.…

IMO this is a failing of Android that should be dealt with immediately. iOS has had a big red bar across the top of the screen for years when location or microphone is being accessed.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#170

Post by gordaco »

lazybreather wrote: post #150

I am in this dangerous situation where I see posts like "X is tracking people online" and just scroll though without even giving it a thought. Help me!

This kind of bad news fatigue is a very real (and frequent) phenomenon. And it's really, really scary when you think about it. We are so accustomed to having less and less privacy (among many other things) that moving downward at the usual speed of the last decade is just the new normal.

Even worse, knowing about this phenomenon seems to do very little to stop it. At least that's what I'm feeling.

Post reply on HN