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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

#181

Post by kahrl »

this_user wrote: post #147
devsda wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it is probably not the American way but the only way to address this problem is to make laws that prevent a duopoly, penalize anti-competitive behavior and push open-source standards for software/hardware. Unfortunately, the status quo also means the US (and its tech giants) has real power and control over other countries' technology sector. So, no party in America will make or enforce laws that will change th…

> make laws that prevent a duopoly, penalize anti-competitive behavior and push open-source standards for software/hardware. None of this is legally easy to implement or enforce, and any attempt of doing it is virtually guaranteed to create an unbelievable amount of unintended consequences as people figure out ways to game this new set of rules.

[flagged]

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

#182

Post by SoftTalker »

prmoustache wrote: post #133
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.

E-mail used to be provided by your isp and there were enough different ISPs ( at least in my country ) to not have a duopoly.

Yes, but they didn't develop it. ISP email required you to configure IMAP or more likely POP in an email application and did nothing to combat spam. Google came along and offered gmail, easy sign up, no configuration, used your web browser so no other applications to install, spam largely filtered out, just worked.

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

#183

Post by acdha »

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.

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 work.

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

#184

Post by Insanity »

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 is the easiest to cut of those. I don’t use anything from them as I don’t engage on social media, nor use their VR and AR stuff etc.

Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.

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

#185

Post by miyuru »

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…

his app has also Google, Apple logins and for first time I have seen, login with meta button.

https://app.wordsunite.us/

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

#186

Post by acdha »

tsunamifury wrote: post #66

I can say from direct experience Apple is not any better and at times much worse as they actively lie about their security measures by obscuring loopholes left open for direct government access as well as they cooperate with little to no push back.

Do you have any details about those loopholes? It seems like a potentially big story.

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

#187

Post by calibas »

otterley wrote: post #148
calibas wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're an attorney and you're asking me why the government spying on everyone is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment?

Yes. You’re the one making the assertion (not just that there is a violation but also that the activity is that “the government spying on everyone”); the burden of proof is thus on you. Attorneys challenge each other as a matter of course in every case before a court. This is how the adversarial system works. Perhaps what you meant to say is that “I don’t like the activity that is happening here,” or “I think some of…

You seem to be playing dumb here. You realize us "normal people" believe the Bill of Rights is to protect us from the government, and the 4th means the government doesn't get to spy on everybody indiscriminately?

And yes, they are spying on everybody. They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy.

It's also my firm belief that our legal system has been undermining these basic concepts for decades now. It benefits the federal government to make this all very vague, as if modern technology suddenly means you have no expectation of privacy anymore. They've also mixed in some of that wonderfully authoritarian "for purposes of national security".

There's actual lawyers saying these same things, if you'd like someone to properly debate with.

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

embedding-shape wrote: post #95
lqstuart wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by mistrial9 »

barnacs wrote: post #153
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…

> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice? This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by o…

"trust"? Lot's of ambitious people are selling extra refined new additions to surveillance right now! "business is good" for example the 90s PDF architect Leonard Rosenthol recently put up ads promoting a brand of Ring cameras that have extra features. Of course he is making money on it. Someone on LinkedIn said "what is this?" and the reply was "adding ownership attributes to Ring camera footage is a step towards publication rights for the owner" .. almost too strange to believe but yes, this is the actual move.
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