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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

#221

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Alone from that list, it means.

No Go, no Flutter, no Android, no GCP nor AWS or anyone that relies on them like Vercel and Netlify, no llama, no React or framework that builds on top of it.

Keeping the list small, there are other items that depend on those companies money and engineering teams.

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

#222

Post by calibas »

otterley wrote: post #214
calibas wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, that's the exact "loophole" I mentioned in my original comment! The government can now partner with private businesses to effectively bypass the Fourth Amendment.

Yes, that is true. But that is not a violation , which was in the first clause of your original claim. It's an end-run. If it were a violation, Courts could enjoin it. But since it's not a violation, there's nothing to enjoin.

If it's not clear already, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not using strict legal definitions.

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

#223

Post by gbriel »

mmaunder wrote: post #210
acdha wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He became well known for exposing surveillance but that instinct to portray himself as exposing government hypocrisy lead him to parrot Russian intelligence/Trump campaign attacks on Clinton and Biden long after he should have realized that the right posed a much greater threat to civil liberties and were feeding him information in service of their own campaigns, not transparency. It’s really undercut his earlier wor…

Examining Glenn's work through an ideological lens leads to this kind of rhetoric. It's why he's so good at what he does. He's crossed ideological boundaries constantly in pursuit of the truth of a matter, and in defense of the public.

His ideology is “America bad”, which leads to some alignment with foreign influence and arguably leads to him spreading propaganda

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

#224

Post by belter »

"...While the “discovery” of footage from this home camera by Google engineers is obviously of great value to the Guthrie family and law enforcement agents searching for Guthrie, it raises obvious yet serious questions about why Google, contrary to common understanding, was storing the video footage of unsubscribed users. A former NSA data researcher and CEO of a cybersecurity firm, Patrick Johnson, told CBS: “There's kind of this old saying that data is never deleted, it's just renamed.”..."

Its another copy of their MAC data storage scenario due to a "rogue engineer"

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

#225

Post by gmuslera »

oefrha wrote: post #21

It’s pretty amazing when you get the worst of both worlds—total surveillance, yet still rampant crime.

And the people in power not facing the consequences of their crimes even if they come to broad light. In fact the people in charge of the surveillance is the same that hide those crimes, or convince population that there is nothing to see there.

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

#226

Post by KingOfCoders »

Dropped Alexa years ago. They sure can do the same thing, and listen into every house "to find a missing child". Or some other BS. Or let all Alexas say "This is a national emergency. Do not leave the house. This is ..."

East Germany spent millions to spy on people.

Now people spend millions so the state can spy on them.

Madness.

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

#227

Post by II2II »

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…

In the main example cited by the article: how? It involves the use of surveilance systems by other people,These people may be unaware, disinterested, or even enthusiastic participants in this data collection. The same goes with data being collected by Google when the customer did not have an active subscription.

At best, we can only control our own actions. Even then, it is only possible to minimize (rather than eliminate) the use of their products without putting up barriers between ourselves and society. Consider email: we can use an alternative provider, but chances are that we will be corresponding personally or professionally with people who use Gmail or Outlook. The same goes for phones, only the alternatives available are much more limited. Plus you have some degree of tracking by the telecom networks. (I don't consider Apple or Microsoft much better on these fronts. Ultimately they have their business interests in mind and, failing that, their existence is ultimately at the whim of the state.)

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

#228

Post by notepad0x90 »

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…

None of that helps, that's the point. How can you stop a ring camera from recording you as you're just taking a walk outside? How can you stop people's phones from tracking other people's phones, APs and BT? How can you stop ISPs from selling your real time location info, including to the cops?

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

#229

Post by nxpnsv »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #63
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…

>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…

But you can still reduce your exposure. Giving in to hopelessness seems suboptimal.

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

#230

Post by tastyfreeze »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #144
bloak wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state. After all, the state provides a road network, which is similarly essential and rather more expensive.

> basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state You're looking at America in 2026 and concluding we want to give the state more control over private lives?

The more you ask around the more you will find the real divide in the US is the same as it always has been. There are those that believe a more powerful government will solve all the problems and those that just want the government to leave them alone to solve their own problems.

Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions describes the difference well.

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