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Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

greenwald.substack.com

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Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#91

Post by Schiendelman »

oceansky wrote: post #67
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow. "Just stop using" makes for a catchy…

Someone commented on a HN threads on just de-googling and he couldn't even pick up his kids without a gmail or apple account. Just not using it is really unrealistic for the average person at this moment

Apple isn't on the evil list, aside from the kowtowing every powerful leader must do not to have their business attacked.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#92

Post by alejohausner »

jeffbee wrote: post #55
alejohausner wrote: post #38

Glenn Greenwald is back on substack. Yay! For the past few years, he’s mostly done videos on rumble, and he’s fun to watch, but personally I prefer his writing. In case you’ve been under a rock for 10 years, Greenwald was the guy who published Snowden’s revelations. His focus has always been on censorship, surveillance, and hypocrisy in government.

"Yay" Greenwald is (still) playing footsie down at the Nazi bar. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...

Rumble is indeed a free for all, with lots of angry kooks. But it’s also a place where reasonable dissenting voices have found a way to get their ideas heard. It’s a mixed bag.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#93

Post by simpaticoder »

WarmWash wrote: post #58
wordsunite wrote: post #32

I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better. I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a cl…

Its an intractable problem because people now have a general expectation that everything is "free". Look at Kagi's success and compare it to Google. It doesn't even register. People need to start paying for things, because if you're not paying for it, you're not in control of it.

>People need to start paying for things

...with money. They are already paying for things by violating their own privacy and those around them. The irony is that the amount of money required for the service is much less the expected value of the surveillance for the provider. Service payment is an insurance expense, protecting against individual and systematic violation of the 4th Amendment rights. It's insurance (and cheap insurance) because this usually doesn't matter in practice. But sometimes it does, and when it does it REALLY does matter.

It would be smart for surveillance capital to fund some of these privacy forward providers, steer them to both charge you for a service and violate your privacy, hope for a very public controversy, and eventually discredit the fundamental approach.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#94

Post by dopidopHN2 »

okanat wrote: post #39
wordsunite wrote: post #32

I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better. I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a cl…

That is going to work as the same as telling people to stop buying gas from Standard Oil or stop using Bell Telephone. Without government intervention you cannot break up their control.

You can start by creating a email at tuta or proton. It does not have to be 100% overnight

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#95

Post by embedding-shape »

lqstuart wrote: post #84
embedding-shape wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters If we're gonna judge authors for what platforms they're using, does that mean we're all bad guys here on HN too, since a lot of current misery is because of startups and technology companies who used to receive a lot praise here?

It's always fun reminding people that the internet was invented by the US military

So was the programming compiler, not sure what that's supposed to tell us. Programming languages are violent?

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#97

Post by AnthonyMouse »

harimau777 wrote: post #73
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books. People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed. But they…

On the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value. If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.…

> If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.

Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws.

There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets.

The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#98

Post by jeffbee »

alejohausner wrote: post #74
jeffbee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greenwald is a vocal and consistent anti-institutionalist, and this creates the conditions for strongmen to take over. Whether he is aware of having this effect is not relevant.

He criticizes the military-industrial complex. Don’t you think that’s an institution worth dismantling?

Greenwald has criticized every institution that exists, so there's not a signal there.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#99

Post by tjpnz »

wordsunite wrote: post #32

I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better. I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a cl…

Meta was easy - nothing of value is lost. Google and Amazon are a bit harder.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#100

Post by verisimi »

calibas wrote: post #96

It's a clear violation of the 4th Amendment, but the government acts like they've found a "loophole" because it's private businesses doing the spying.

If corporations and government are acting together, this is fascism (according to Mussolini). It seems that is already the case. It's just we call it 'democracy'. Perhaps 'crypto-fascism' is the right term.
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