Amazon Echo

This reminds me of the (just as insane) concerns that people had about Microsoft's Xbox One Kinect being likened to a 1984 telescreen. I crunched some numbers like you just did - back when the One came with a Kinect and had to be online to work, the numbers worked out to something like exabytes of data that would be getting streamed to Microsoft, every single day.

You think the ISP's are cheesed off at Netflix? You haven't seen anything yet. The screaming from a non-trivial portion of their customers suddenly uploading multiple gigabytes of data per day would be deafening.

Sarcasm aside, anyone who thinks that this is seriously some kind of government listening device needs to up their medication. The number of insane assumption that have to be made for this to be plausible are:

* This is a listening device, live transmitting everything you say, when it would be more economical to listen for a codeword on chip. (Amazon is wasting money because they are not a corporate enterprise, and we all know how much companies love spending money they don't need to)

* That the data being transmitted is being stored for long term periods of time (Amazon is wasting money on storage when it makes more sense to just process commands)

* That that literally nobody actually notices the data stream going to Amazon servers when not in active use. (Not bloody likely)

* That ISPs will not flip their collective shit at the data usage should this catch on (Hello? Netflix? And that's a company whose business is transmitting large quantities of hard to compress data.)

* That customers won't notice this data usage when their next bill comes in or when their shitty connections get saturated by the upstream

* That the sorry state of connectivity in the USA (especially with regard to upload/download asymmetry) doesn't render the entire exercise meaningless from a surveillance standpoint even if we ignore every other point above

* That the outrage angle once these things that are never noticed are noticed wouldn't be played up in the media

Fucking. Seriously?

If I were a high level NSA guy, and this was the plan that was brought before me? I'd fire the guy for rank incompetence.

"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." - Scott McNealy

> I don't care about my location information, I don't use social networks.

> I care about the content of my private communications w/ other people. Including in-person conversations.

A widely accepted security fundamental is that metadata, such as where, when, and with whom you interact, is as valuable as the content of those communications. People in the surveillance business (from security agencies to businesses who track users) value metadata for a reason.

Think about it this way: If you wanted to spy on someone what would be more valuable?: Recording everywhere they go and everyone they talk to, or recording the content of those communications?

Most people don't care because they're not culpable enough to feel paranoid. Some percentage of people will be unjustly exploited, but probably not enough to offset the economic benefits that technology like this brings to its users.

I think your focus on 'the people vs the government' is misplaced, because government is just a sort of social technology which can be used and abused like any other technology depending on who controls it at the time. What about Barack Obama, for example? Do you seriously think he will refuse to relinquish power in 2 years? You probably don't, just' just expressing your cynical (and entirely justifiable) opinion about the political class. But that's not much different from a Marxist asserting that business is fundamentally antagonistic towards workers or similar monolithic abstractions. When you make arguments like this you've opted for ideology over empiricism.

Bringing it back to technology, certainly the ubiquity of digital technology makes it easier to establish mass surveillance of a kind that would have seemed nightmarish a few generations ago. But the same technology has also facilitated a significant number of populist uprisings in recent years, and made it far easier for marginalized communities to get their message out in relatively short order, as well as facilitating organizations with both benign and malicious intentions (eg MSF and ISIS, who both leverage social media but for wildly divergent ends).

The internet of things isn't 'coinciding with the dragnet surveillance trend'; the latter is an emerging property of our increasingly networked society. When we use metaphors like a 'world wide web' traversed by 'spiders' and so on, we should not be surprised that such technologies are going to amplify the capabilities of institutional actors in at least the same proportion that they amplify the capabilities of individuals.

so you guarantee that the system doesn't access the microphones until it gets an interrupt from that chip? I don't see why that should be mutually exclusive.