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

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

#271

Post by tokyobreakfast »

hermannj314 wrote: post #252

We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls. 1. Postal Service Act of 1792 2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera. We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to d…

Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one. In the early days they would spin it as a good thing: "that's why the spam filtering is great!"

Why is everyone suddenly outraged Ring has access to your footage? These cloud-connected cameras...hosted on someone else's servers. It's literally how they work. "But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!"

So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.

It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.

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

#272

Post by lazide »

jeffrallen wrote: post #249
notepad0x90 wrote: post #234

I don't think people grasp the gravity of the situation. I see everyone talking about how to stop using products. I even thought about legislation that could help. But that's just it, none of that is possible. You can't even employ a "torches and pitchforks" approach. For any of this to be possible, people would have to coordinate. The means by which people communicate and coordinate are under the influence and contr…

It is not yet illegal or dangerous to call for a general strike. Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services will people create enough economic disruption that the billionaires will call their political toadies to heel and get them to start fixing this shit. We still have the power to panic the billionaires, and they have the power to get what they want. If what they want is tempor…

What would be asked for, exactly?

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

#273

Post by ProllyInfamous »

hermannj314 wrote: post #252

We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls. 1. Postal Service Act of 1792 2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera. We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to d…

3. Video Rental Protection Act (1988)

>we don't seem to want to

Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons.

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Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits.

Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.

After city councils individually ban Flock-like CCTV traffic monitoring within their jurisdictions, their police can (and often do) still access neighboring jurisdictions' to monitor border crossings. You can't escape This System, even without license plates nor cell phones.

----

Term Limits now? end Citizens United. release The Files!

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

#274

Post by Insanity »

neoCrimeLabs wrote: post #216
Insanity wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs. I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away. Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account…

I removed Facebook about 11 years ago now. I made new friends who know I’m not on social media so we organize through text or discord. And for my core friend group they also moved to discord servers, so that made the switch easier.

I guess it can be hard initially though. Also, my core group of friends is less than 10, but that’s enough for me. I don’t need to follow what 100 other people are doing in their day to day haha.

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

#275

Post by yunnpp »

It is remarkable that it took an ad from the same company that makes the product to make (some) people come to the realization of the surveillance they are subjected to and uninstall their cameras. The public is truly clueless despite all the messaging from the EFF and other organizations.

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

#276

Post by random2021 »

jbstack wrote: post #217
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It doesn't have to be a binary choice between "don't use it ever" and "continue using it as much as you are now". If people stopped using these services 50% of the time, it would have a huge impact.

In concept what you say is correct but reality is complex. There are very few providers that implement friction free login/password and importantly security. A large number of email providers didn't implement 2FA until very recently. Even those that have terrible apps, ad infested, no app password or oAuth etc. so many governments use MS hosted services.

It is akin to Visa/MasterCard duopoly. It is hard to escape but even if one does it then it resulted only inconvenience. I still don't have my cards in phone - neither will google change path nor will govts force a change.

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

#277

Post by tokyobreakfast »

kakacik wrote: post #264
hermannj314 wrote: post #252

We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls. 1. Postal Service Act of 1792 2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera. We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to d…

Its a nice outrage wave, but I have very hard time believing this will be a major topic in 2 weeks. People simply don't give a fuck en masse. Accept that many folks are built differently than you and me and stuff like actual freedom you may be willing to lay your life for may be meaningless fart for others, especially when its not hurting them now . For example US folks voted current admin willingly second time and e…

The Epstein stuff is a distraction. The previous admin had 4 years to do literally anything about it and they did nothing.

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

#279

Post by voxl »

otterley wrote: post #212
voxl wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. We live in a society where the 2nd amendment is a rorschach test for interpreting century old English. Yet, because of how people feel , particularly a couple of activist judges, it has been given the strongest possible interpretation to impart the strongest possible freedoms to the citizenry. Why have the other amendments not enjoyed this same individual freedom absolutism? Why are we cherry picking which…

I'm not dismissing the opinion; I'm asking for it to be supported by law and facts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47024599 I also disagree with your characterization of 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, but I'm not going into that rathole!

Not overtly but the subtext is there, but you also miss my point: there is no argument to give. There is no good faith argument with this supreme court. Unless you're the kind of person who is going to defend overturning the precedent of Roe v Wade.

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

#280

Post by prophesi »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #180
oceansky wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone commented on a HN threads on just de-googling and he couldn't even pick up his kids without a gmail or apple account. Just not using it is really unrealistic for the average person at this moment

Everything counts, this attitude is very defeatist. Stop using it the easy ways at first, and then make conscious steps to get off these services going forward.

It's probably at the same scale as gas/oil companies and recycling at this point. I'd like to believe my individual efforts will make a dent in the surveillance state, but at this volume legislation is truly the only meaningful effort to defang these multi-billion dollar companies.
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