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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

#281

Post by aydyn »

embedding-shape wrote: post #236
stackghost wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is one massive echo chamber. Sorry to be the one to point it out to you. Why do you think HN has such a bad reputation for being smug corporate bootlickers? The elitism and groupthink here is fucking wild.

Every places have echos of echo-chambers, but some are worse than others. At least on HN you can choose to see stuff heavily downvoted, in many other places moderators just remove posts as they see fit. You'll get more different point of views here than on many other places, but I'd be happy to hear what places you consider less of an echo-chamber than HN.

Wait a second, I instantly recognized your post as self-deprecating humor and not glazing and had a light chuckle. You mean that:

>That's why I hang out here on HN with my fellow crazies who can separate ideas, thoughts and knowledge from the person.

Is unironically what you think and posted in earnest? Thats WILD.

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

#282

Post by stogot »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #22

Great writeup. Glenn mentions that he stopped using Gemini. While I still use Gemini for technical research and occasional coding/design work via Antigravity, for all day to day queries and prompts I have switched to using Proton's Lumo that is really quite good: use of a strong Mistral model and web search is 100% private, and while chat history is preserved for a while it is stored and processed like Proton Mail. M…

I wasn’t aware of the 100% private web search, I’ll have to look. How well does this work?

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

#283

Post by bigyabai »

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…

> The only way to win this war is by means of economic warfare.

We are only in this situation because the economic war was lost. You want the world to fight Amazon and Google while they're in the middle of counting their spoils?

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

#284

Post by staticassertion »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #179
staticassertion wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing teams are constantly out of touch with the message they want to convey vs the message that gets conveyed. The creative team is usually not even talking to the other teams that would drive decisions like this - they almost exclusively are an isolated team (purposefully, like how engineers are often isolated from customers) that talks to a separate marketing team that then manages things like legal/compliance…

I worked in that world for a solid decade as a “creative” (video production) and when it comes to the big dogs, that is absolutely not true. They are incredibly top down and have to review everything. We have to pitch our ideas even when we’re in the door. They have strict brand bibles we have to adhere to. Ones that gave us free rein were the exception, not the rule. Sometimes it was for no other reason than a bunch…

I feel like what you're saying is compatible. I'm not suggesting that things aren't top down or that you wouldn't have brand guidelines, that's actually exactly what I'm suggesting. I just mean that there is organizational isolation between creative teams and other teams, just as there is organizational isolation between engineering and other teams.

So it is unsurprising to me that a creative team might have been given brand guidelines and a goal, like "hey we want to sell this, we want people happy with this" (much more concretely, obviously) and that could lead to this sort of ad, and I think that's probably more plausible than the team going "we're going to psyop everyone into surveillance statehood".

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

#285

Post by throwworhtthrow »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #140
WarmWash wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you remove like 250sq mi of land from that stat you can cut the violent crime stat by 90%. There are some neighborhoods with more murders in a month than some whole states see in a couple years.

Not popular. We know exactly where the majority of crime is in the US, you are correct, down to the neighborhood. Now… let’s say you were to call the national guard in to safeguard those areas, how do you think that would go over by those cities governors and reaction media? I guess the answer depends on the year.

Tim Walz and Jacob Frey are both on record saying they'd love to have federal help with reducing violent crime.

That is not Donald Trump's / Stephen Miller's objective in Minnesota, nor is it the outcome.

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

#286

Post by generic92034 »

acdha wrote: post #207
joebates wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".

Very much so: “everyone does it” means that the leader can destroy anyone who doesn’t toe the line while seeming to be following a reasonable law.

And only a few steps further and the leader rarely needs to employ the service of obedient judges, but opponents "just" fall out of windows.

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

#287

Post by otterley »

Loughla wrote: post #270
otterley wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is true. But that is not a violation , which was in the first clause of your original claim. It's an end-run. If it were a violation, Courts could enjoin it. But since it's not a violation, there's nothing to enjoin.

Congratulations. By needling and carving at semantics, you win the argument! Two more Internet points for you! It's almost like HN isn't a court and the OP was expressing their opinion that this should be illegal. . . Not relying on specific semantics for the current state of affairs?

To say that something is a belief or should be and to say that something is a fact are two different things. When you say the latter, you are putting yourself at a significantly greater risk of being incorrect. You don’t have to be a lawyer to know this. And I’d expect someone with your background to know this better than most!

HN is a forum of written communications. Clarity and accuracy are essential skills for participating effectively in such places, and are the responsibility of the author.

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

#288

Post by SoftTalker »

prmoustache wrote: post #238
SoftTalker wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The app to install wasn't really an issue given any OS with a default desktop came with an email app. What brought the popularity of gmail was the huge space provided which at the time felt infinite. I still remember the counter that was showing the size increasing seemingly indefinitely.

Yes, that too. I think the initial sell was a 1GB mailbox. Which was an enormous limit at the time. And another thing the ISPs missed. Most had small limits, "mailbox full" was a common thing and you had to download/delete mail all the time which was annoying.

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

#289

Post by jon-wood »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #271
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 th…

> But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!

This is exactly the sort of thing there should be legislation for. To a somewhat weaker extent than I’d like this is what GDPR and friends covers, the law says that companies must state what data they’re gathering and what purposes they’re gathering it for. If they overreach then they can be fined into oblivion.

In practice this is not as strong as it should be, broadly companies can and do basically go “we’re collecting all your data for whatever purpose we like” and get away with it, but they do at least think carefully about doing so.

There’s no reason we can’t force providers of cloud backed devices to treat your data with respect, rather than thinking of it as residual income they’re leaving on the table if they don’t also sell it to third parties for data mining.

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

#290

Post by gtowey »

harimau777 wrote: post #61
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'm not sure its necessarily that simple. For example, because of the job market for software engineers I have moved to new cities multiple times during my adult life. As a result, my social network is highly fragmented and without Facebook it would be incredibly difficult for me to manage. So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to m…

People before Facebook found themselves in exactly the same situation as you and managed to survive.

People have become dependant on the convenience of these tools and become, for lack of a gentler word, lazy. Moreover we have this current sense of entitlement -- that all of these details of modern living should be done for us. Having our social circles organized and maintained for us, having infinite entertainment a button press away, food delivered to our door on a whim, cars to take us anywhere always minutes away.

People survived just fine before these conveniences, it just too a bit more effort. You could collect your friends contact information, keep an address book, call them up from time to time. It's not perfect, but it works and starts to break the silicon valley tech giant dependence.

Personally I find adding friction to these processes has actual value. When you slow down and have to put a bit more effort in, it helps you to evaluate what is important, and what truly matters. You prioritize, you make tradoffs. The process IS the richness in life. We all don't need to be jet setting globetrotters to whom paris might as well be New York or london or munich, while robots manage our social lives. There is no substitute for actively working to build a community where you are. You have to put the effort in, and in a single generation we have lost so much of it. But we can get back there again if we try.

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