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Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

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Re: Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

#41

Post by catalogia »

3pt14159 wrote: post #22
MobileVet wrote: post #6

The further down this future we travel, the less I want to do with technology. I am becoming a Luddite. None of this crappy IOT stuff will enter my home.

My roommate has a phone. I didn't think much of it until he said "Ok Google" while cooking. What am I supposed to say here? I don't like microphones being always on either, but it's his phone and his home too. I can't escape the millions of cameras around the city or the constant internet trackers. We should have had regulated this stuff decades ago.

More privacy has been one of the perks of not having a roommate since... forever. This isn't a new consequence of technology.

Re: Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

#42

Post by frereubu »

smabie wrote: post #35
yumraj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My minor kids' photos in some company's database, tagged with neighborhood data which points to where they live, correlated with what characters they like based on costumes, correlated with their age based on their height and so and so forth.. Now if the said company can connect my kids' photos with their identity based on some other database, it will have a lot more info on them to sell ads and for other nefarious p…

Do you actually believe this is happening? No offense, but what you’re describing sounds like a paranoid fantasy. Moreover, I’m sure your kids value candy more than privacy. Also your kids have probably been caught on video hundreds of times at convenience stores, streets, wherever. If you actually wanted to avoid them being on camera at all, you would have to lock them in your house and things would turn out like th…

The issue is not necessarily whether this is happening now, but whether this is feasible in practical terms. If it is, then you need to have a very strong sense of trust that this capability won't ever be used against you in the future. There are many examples throughout history where this trust was eventually abused. In the last few days 1.2 billion text records of "enriched" data about people was found in a publicly-accessible Elasticsearch instance. How long do you think it will be before those records contain facial recognition?

Re: Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

#43

Post by frereubu »

throwawaysea wrote: post #7

I don’t understand the issue here, and it frankly feels like a manufactured outrage from a minority group of activists. If customers voluntarily release a segment of video to law enforcement, so what? That’s their right. People do so in the interest of preventing crime. I don’t have any cameras myself but I completely sympathize with neighbors who have Ring cameras given the huge uptick in property crime here in the…

This sounds very much like "if you've done nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Re: Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

#44

Post by sansnomme »

frereubu wrote: post #40
maximente wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean, is it any different than having any other conversation that potentially involves interpersonal conflict? if it's important to you and you're willing to burn social capital on it, just politely ask that he not use it when [your boundaries here]. if you come to an impasse, then there's not much to be done other than part ways. i'd imagine this is similar to any other incompatible roommate situations, e.g. someo…

I think the idea is that, rather than fight hundreds of small battles like this every day, we should collectively agree (through democratic political means) what's acceptable without explicit permission.

Well if you care about it so much, contribute either money or code and create ecosystem with the same level of layman UX. It's difficult to get legislation when you cannot demonstrate alternatives that do not severely reduce convenience. This is a forum of overpaid software engineers. Distributed neural network training isn't science fiction anymore. Go ship or pay others to do so.

Brave and DuckDuckGo built entire businesses on the premise of privacy. Many an arrogant reader here HN have no qualms claiming that they can replicate Facebook in a weekend.

Go forth and walk the talk. Yet another Mastodon client is cool, but do you know what's cooler? A production quality OCR competitive with Google Cloud Vision API, voice transcription on par with AWS Transcribe, or personal assistants with the ubiquity of Siri.

Re: Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

#45

Post by jay3ss »

city41 wrote: post #12
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won’t things like smart TVs sending pictures of what you watch back to HQ

It depends on the device and whether they use your network's DNS server or their own. In my experience Roku devices are easily blocked with a pi hole, for example.

In my experience with Roku TVs and the Pi Hole, this only works when the Pi Hole is set as the DHCP server. Otherwise, the TVs will only show up on the admin panel sporadically (meaning that blocking the requests that TVs make is not happening). Once I used the Pi Hole as the DHCP server, every request that the TVs make show up.

Re: Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

#46

Post by 3pt14159 »

maximente wrote: post #25
3pt14159 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My roommate has a phone. I didn't think much of it until he said "Ok Google" while cooking. What am I supposed to say here? I don't like microphones being always on either, but it's his phone and his home too. I can't escape the millions of cameras around the city or the constant internet trackers. We should have had regulated this stuff decades ago.

i mean, is it any different than having any other conversation that potentially involves interpersonal conflict? if it's important to you and you're willing to burn social capital on it, just politely ask that he not use it when [your boundaries here]. if you come to an impasse, then there's not much to be done other than part ways. i'd imagine this is similar to any other incompatible roommate situations, e.g. someo…

It is different. The reason it is different is that when things like always on microphones are legal it implies that they are safe. My roommate isn't technically savvy. He works as a project manager of in construction. He's a great guy, but we didn't talk about always on mics when we first met and frereubu is right that fighting battles like this isn't the way to do it. Legislation should solve this problem.

Re: Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

#47

Post by frereubu »

sansnomme wrote: post #44
frereubu wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that, rather than fight hundreds of small battles like this every day, we should collectively agree (through democratic political means) what's acceptable without explicit permission.

Well if you care about it so much, contribute either money or code and create ecosystem with the same level of layman UX. It's difficult to get legislation when you cannot demonstrate alternatives that do not severely reduce convenience. This is a forum of overpaid software engineers. Distributed neural network training isn't science fiction anymore. Go ship or pay others to do so. Brave and DuckDuckGo built entire b…

I care about it enough to contact my local representative (my MP because I'm in the UK) and he agrees with me that there should be explicit legislation to control the use of these technologies. The EU's GPDR is a step in that direction when it comes to things like automated decision-making. Open source is not a solution here, and to suggest otherwise seems like it misses the wood for the trees. Besides which, I hardly think that restricting the use of cameras on doorbells (which is what this sub-thread is about) is "severely reducing convenience."

Re: Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

#48

Post by zamadatix »

3pt14159 wrote: post #46
maximente wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean, is it any different than having any other conversation that potentially involves interpersonal conflict? if it's important to you and you're willing to burn social capital on it, just politely ask that he not use it when [your boundaries here]. if you come to an impasse, then there's not much to be done other than part ways. i'd imagine this is similar to any other incompatible roommate situations, e.g. someo…

It is different. The reason it is different is that when things like always on microphones are legal it implies that they are safe. My roommate isn't technically savvy. He works as a project manager of in construction. He's a great guy, but we didn't talk about always on mics when we first met and frereubu is right that fighting battles like this isn't the way to do it. Legislation should solve this problem.

The assumption being everyone agrees what "privacy" should look like and will be happy with legislation around that.

The majority of people don't seem to care about always on microphones.

Re: Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

#49

Post by 9dl »

throwawaysea wrote: post #27
9dl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True What problem if I (anyone) can know where are you now at any point of time, even you newer allow that Or any law enforcement agency can arrest you even if you do nothing and software just wrongly identify your face on crime scene And god forbid if you have not white skin color

What does skin color have to with this? That seems like reckless alarmism. Humans are in the loop to validate facial recognition matches. It’s a first pass filter.

https://academic.oup.com/policing/advance-article/doi/10.109...

https://idatassist.com/can-really-trust-algorithm-predicting...

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...

Yup, that alarmism about reality we live

Some DS just not really know or understand how to clean datasets

So some models suddenly use skin color as main predictor of some bad thing

And I assume that you ok with total surveillance.

Hmmm

Re: Before buying Ring, WEMO or Roku, consider privacy issues

#50

Post by Thriptic »

I'm confused about the issue with Ring here. The primary complaint seems to be that users can share data with police if they want and that police can then save that data. Ultimately that's product agnostic; someone could easily take footage from any camera and show it to police voluntarily, and users could always be compelled to hand over footage of a crime with a warrant. People have zero control over how neighbors use their personal cameras and I don't see why that should impact personal buying decisions, even if you decide to never share data with police. What's the problem?
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