21–30 of 73 posts
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The problem with "smart" TVs is that infrequently there is no choice but to get those and try to minimize the damage. Despite all their advantages "dumb" TVs are getting less and less popular.
No, there's still plenty of them on the market; they're just marketed under the name "monitor" instead of "television".
I worked for a power monitoring company that put a box in your house, monitored power use for each circuit breaker. The CEO noticed that his house cleaners turned on lights in all the rooms and turned them off as they finished cleaning them.
You can learn a lot from watching a homes power, especialy if its split up circuit by circuit.
> Almost every TV on the market now is connected—because otherwise how do you Netflix and chill? If you buy a "smart" TV, refuse to connect it to the internet and just get an Apple TV/Chromecast/whatever.
Yet when I try to tell people why copyleft ala GPLv3 that prevents tivoization is so important I get shouted out of the room. I should have the ability to root and control the linux on my smarttv. Full stop. This is part of the problem. The same goes with things like phones. This is why both android and ios are NOT the mobile os of the future. They restrict the user from truly owning their device, and I'm fed up with…
I too would like a more open OS for mobiles, but you have to realize that the majority of users doesn't care about this. They are unconcerned about most privacy issues, don't need to ever tinker at a low level with their devices, and they are the ones ultimately deciding on what the future will be. What matters is the UI, and that the various features "just work".
You are in a minority, however vocal, that has little to no say in what the future of mobile OSes should be. My take on it is that whatever will replace android and ios will be even worse on these issues.
I know it's sitewide on every article from the mothership, Gizmodo, but still...
It's all extraordinarily creepy because you expect your home to be the safe haven of privacy, but considering how ubiquitous smartphones are and how much of our lives already happens digitally, you could somewhat cynically argue that the privacy loss is comparatively small (because you have very little to begin with nowadays). But if smart utilities take off, maybe some privacy label for consumers would be nice. Mayb…
How the device looked: http://www.rxcontrol.org/Visiophone/index.html
A good summing up of the results of the paper by Francis Jaur (1990) is here:
Basically people soon understood that the thing has its use, but limited it to "public" areas of their home and to selected communications.
Why?! When I bought a Roomba a decade ago, it was a decent vacuum that picked up dirt, could not connect to the internet, and never nagged me. Why would I want it to be worse?
Somewhat off topic, but anyone else think it's kinda weird that an article about data privacy has so many third party tracking scripts? I know it's sitewide on every article from the mothership, Gizmodo, but still...
these smart homes bring up ethical dilemas. I worked for a company and someone got a home automation kit. It monitored comings and goings. They looked at the logs and realized the dog walker one day did a really short walk. How do you broach this? Do you bother for an otherwise responsible walker. I worked for a power monitoring company that put a box in your house, monitored power use for each circuit breaker. The C…
The city wanted to install one of those smart meters in my home, i refused. but I was told that unless i have them installed, they would shut off my electricity. Being that they were in a position of power over me, I complied.
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We need a concentrated effort to move solutions like Ghostery and Ad Block Plus up the chain, from the browser in to the router. And we need to make it user friendly and sexy. And for what it's worth, I don't like in Ghostery, a plugin I run to try and stem the tide of tracking, how many times it begs me to send usage data and create an account. That's literally the opposite of why I downloaded you, Ghostery.
Remove ghostery and install privacy badger instead https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
But my stack is ugly and kludgy and not fit for regular human consumption. We need a comprehensive community effort to make it sexy and easy.
Somewhat off topic, but anyone else think it's kinda weird that an article about data privacy has so many third party tracking scripts? I know it's sitewide on every article from the mothership, Gizmodo, but still...
Not really. Online publishers think that surveillance is free money, so they're always happy to add more. Savvy users block it all. Some day there will be a reckoning.
If it hasn't already.