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Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

forbes.com

21–30 of 87 posts

Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

#21
post #6

If your data is not end to end private key encrypted, then you are inviting the government in to look at all your shit; photos, documents, logs, everything.

We tend to view this as a technology problem. The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior? Fighting a technology arms race with the government is a losing battle. They can ask for private keys to be handed over - on threat of jail time if you don't comply. We need to start at the ballot box.

It is a technology problem. Technology created the centralisation that makes the target so juicy, and courts treat stuff entrusted to third parties with less care than stuff you keep in your mind.

The closer the storage is to you, the bigger a hurdle the government needs to jump to access it. Closer tech is more private tech. It's also much more expensive to snoop on.

The ballot box approach will last exactly as long as the next terrorist crisis.

Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

#22
post #13
post #5

I think the time has come for a The Wire reboot. Anyone else? Edit: Downvotes, why? The Wire was a critically acclaimed series whose major themes included abuse of power, the use of technology to both surveil and evade surveillance, perverse incentives, and failure of institutions, among other things that are as relevant as ever in the post-Snowden era. But instead of pagers and burners we'd get tech circa 2018.

A series where people used technical surveillance using devices like these (IOTINT? IDK what the term of art is yet), OSINT from online things like FB, various forms of legal process (civil, LE, NS, and extralegal), etc. to go after "terrorists" down to criminals of various crimes down to "enemies of the Party" down to "people who slightly antagonize employees of the Agency" to "for the lulz" would be interesting. Mo…

If you want a total surveillance show, there's Person of Interest.

Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

#23
post #15

The weekend submission of this article had a comment with a marketing to law enforcement video linked https://www.dropbox.com/s/x83gyclt497fi8t/Ring%20Neighborhoo... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18215293

Seems like a well designed system. Note if you don't watch the video - the police can only send requests to users for video. The users can say no.

Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

#24
post #20

It's interesting how many hardware and software services are "in the cloud" now. For example Slack monitors the conversations of thousands of businesses, and there's no telling what they do with the data behind the scenes.

How do you know that they’re actually monitoring conversations? Is there nothing in the TOS saying that they won’t view your actual conversations?

Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

#25
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager white-collar crime happens more than street crime. It's known that it costs us between 250 billion to 1 trillion dollars yearly, but pursuing the crimes isn't prioritized by the FBI/IRS because of the costs of litigation, the possibility of destabilizing the markets, and the war on drugs/terror.

Interesting point - maybe they don't need home surveillance in these investigations that often? The case mentioned in the article as the first one was a white collar crime: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/10/12/how-a...

That doesn't really say much about what the prosecution learned from nest.

Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

#26
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why we are building on-device private AI at Snips ( https://snips.ai , disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) We believe that the only way to have people trust AI is when we will make it possible to have privacy-respecting AI, we believe it is not only feasible, but it is our duty to build AI which respects people and is able to scale without presenting a danger to our societies

Sorry man your site lost me at the token based app store...

> lost me at the token based app store

Same. Got excited, then saw it's shilling a coin [1]. From a branding perspective, this undoes the goodwill won by the privacy message.

[1] https://token.snips.ai

Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

#27
post #15

The weekend submission of this article had a comment with a marketing to law enforcement video linked https://www.dropbox.com/s/x83gyclt497fi8t/Ring%20Neighborhoo... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18215293

An alternate link in case Dropbox disables the link because of high traffic

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468851579487780905/50...

Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

#28
post #6

If your data is not end to end private key encrypted, then you are inviting the government in to look at all your shit; photos, documents, logs, everything.

We tend to view this as a technology problem. The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior? Fighting a technology arms race with the government is a losing battle. They can ask for private keys to be handed over - on threat of jail time if you don't comply. We need to start at the ballot box.

[deleted]

Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

#29
post #2

I am surprised that it is only 300 times - but this is probably because these devices are now bought by wealthy people who don't commit too many crimes or felonies.

I'd wager white-collar crime happens more than street crime. It's known that it costs us between 250 billion to 1 trillion dollars yearly, but pursuing the crimes isn't prioritized by the FBI/IRS because of the costs of litigation, the possibility of destabilizing the markets, and the war on drugs/terror.

[deleted]

Re: Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tend to view this as a technology problem. The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior? Fighting a technology arms race with the government is a losing battle. They can ask for private keys to be handed over - on threat of jail time if you don't comply. We need to start at the ballot box.

>The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior? Not many care anymore about privacy except basically, us, the tech power user community and then a few stragglers. This new generation just doesn't care because they never really grew up with any in the first place, just shoved right into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. They probably didn't go too depth into privacy laws, why your priva…

Just from observing my kid and his friends I think they are amazingly adept at privacy even if they don't realize it, yet. They are more concerned about trolling, being trolled, and in extreme cases, swatting. They share stuff on FB-IG-SC-YT but are conscious to give out just enough information. No real names, no addresses, no phone numbers.

Now the older generations (boomers, GenX, Xillenials) share way too much information, in my opinion. They get on FB, tag everyone in the photo, even those without a FB account. And share their phone number and directions to their house.

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