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

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

#441

Post by salawat » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

fwipsy wrote: post #60

salawat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using AI to do anything isn't going to liberate one. It's just going to shift the dependence from one company to another. Your new feudal lord will be the people running the Santa Claus machine you're running. Don't keep trying to tell people AI is the solution. The real solution is self-hosting. And that cannot be AI'd half as easily.

The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy. Using AI to build a product doesn't mean sharing the data from that product. In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.

>The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy.

Uh huh. No. You use their system to do it, they have your prompt, and the output on hand. Even more so, they have the capability to tamper with it. They are essentially in a position to own the entire instance of the work product. It doesn't matter if they don't yet. It matters that they can. Furthermore you lose out on the learning. You lose out on any innovation. You lose out in the eyes of the law on the privacy of the communique you use to drive the black box.

>In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.

Yup. Right. Like we don't know how that ends. 50 years of market consolidation in the distance, letting the illusion of choice speak for itself>

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

#442

Post by mmooss » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #345

mmooss wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal human rights is a very widespread belief and concept, extending to all continents and many, many cultures. It's not hard to understand why.

No it's not. There are no human rights for the lowest castes in Hinduism, there are no human rights for polytheists in Islam, there were nothing like the modern idea of human rights in Japan or China before they westernized. That's why the west was able to leapfrog other nations economically (and hence militarily), because it was the first place where people had enough rights for something resembling a modern economy…

> That's why the west was able to leapfrog other nations economically

I tend to agree, though it's of course hard to prove. However, I'm talking about the present, not the past.

> There are no human rights for the lowest castes in Hinduism

I said it is "very widespread", not everywhere. Perhaps the confusion is the word Universal: that doesn't mean everyone believes it (false for any belief), but that everyone has the rights, whether or not they know or can exercise them. It's the concept that starts the Declaration of Independence: All are created equal, and all have inalienable rights.

> there were nothing like the modern idea of human rights in Japan or China before they westernized

I am talking about the present, where it's adopted in East Asia (including in China - Taiwan, Hong Kong (though suppressed now), June 4 on the mainland), throughout Latin America, Europe of course, parts of Africa, the Anglo world, etc.

> there are no human rights for polytheists in Islam,

There is no country called 'Islam'; if we go by scripture, nobody has human rights. The idea that all practicioners of Islam have the same beliefs is as true as saying all practicioners of Christianity do - and look at HN.

In Indonesia, the largest majority Muslim country, there are human rights, also in India, with the largest Muslim population (but not the majority). I think Pakistan and some South Asian countries probably have them enshrined.

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

#443

Post by mvanbaak » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

dopidopHN2 wrote: post #94

okanat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is going to work as the same as telling people to stop buying gas from Standard Oil or stop using Bell Telephone. Without government intervention you cannot break up their control.

You can start by creating a email at tuta or proton. It does not have to be 100% overnight

but then you send a mail to $person, and this $person uses gmail, and now your mail is still indexed by google.

The only way to get around this is to use encryption. dont send plain text email.

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

#444

Post by mmooss » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

wredcoll wrote: post #401

mmooss wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal human rights is a very widespread belief and concept, extending to all continents and many, many cultures. It's not hard to understand why.

If you'd said "isn't just a western thing" I would have definitely agreed, but this claim seems a bit unlikely.

Just look around the world; they are the norm: East Asia (Japan, South Korea, China - Taiwan, Hong Kong, June 4 on the mainland); North America; South America, almost all of the region; Europe; Australia, NZ, Indonesia, the Phillipines; South Asia (India, and I think they are enshrined if not enforced in Pakistan and some others).

What's mostly missing is the Middle East, Central Asia, parts of SE Asia, and large parts of Africa - though there are Benin, Botswana, Kenya, and many others iirc.

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

#445

Post by shimman » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 9:44 PM UTC

joquarky wrote: post #389

shimman wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you can give control to the House of Representatives. The House should have way more control over government agencies, it's the people's house. The people deserve to have control.

> it's the people's house You dropped an adjective: wealthy

No, the Senate, Presidency, and Legislative branches are for the wealthy. The constitution was literally written so a minority of rich people would have the most control over the government. Having state legislatures (who also happened to decide who can vote + how) choose senators, requiring the senate to pass bills written by the house, judges that are chosen by senators. House of reps only serve for 2 years compared to 6 or 4 or lifetime appointments.

The 17th amendment is a little over 100 years old.

People need to stop treating the US constitution as this "mythical" thing rather than the reality of it being a very undemocratic document that is highly resistant to change.

Luckily the house can be expanded with a simple majority IN the house, one way to truly combat this.

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

#446

Post by mmooss » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #343

mmooss wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These comments appear everywhere, as if people never made changes. Look at the enormous changes prior generations have made. Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. The claim doesn't stand up to any examination. Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd ge…

> Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. Which changes? metoo certainly didn't change much, the George Floyd protests also led to nothing, just look at how ICE has been executing US citizens in the last months. In 2025 alone, before Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ICE murdered 32 people with zero accountability [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-intera…

Regarding conservatives/MAGA, if you're saying the US hasn't changed dramatically since 2016 then I don't know what to say to you.

And I think you're misremembering the world before #metoo and George Floyd. Regarding the latter, police used to widely behave like ICE; now it's anathema - at least in cities. None of them help ICE afaik.

The conservatives like to preach hopelessness to their enemies - for obvious reasons, an age-old tactic - saying things like protests accomplish nothing (obviously false), these movements did nothing. The wierd part is, their enemies have picked up that argument and make it themselves. They simply and bizarrely have disarmed themselves, but they had and have the power the entire time.

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

#447

Post by gbriel » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #257

gbriel wrote: post #237

Reminder: Glen Greenwald doesn’t think Jan 6 was an insurrection and now aligns with people like Tim Pool and Alex Jones.

Jan 6 wasn't an insurrection. Nobody was armed except one guy with a pistol and the dude with a spear. It was a bunch of obese methbillies trashing the place. Insurrections do not look like that.

- Jan 6, the day the votes are certified by Congress.

- The goal was interrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, a foundational element of U.S. constitutional governance.

- Force was used to disrupt lawful governmental authority.

- Part of a larger conspiracy to use alternate slates of electors to dispute the election and send it back to state legistatures (see Eastman memo and resulting lawsuits).

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

#448

Post by gcanyon » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #267

dhbradshaw wrote: post #218

I really like this passage: >It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security. > But the core premise of the West genera…

I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain. And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.

If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake).

And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.

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

#449

Post by crazygringo » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

dhbradshaw wrote: post #218

I really like this passage: >It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security. > But the core premise of the West genera…

> “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

No, that's a gross misrepresentation of what he said and meant. Patrick Henry was referring exclusively to political liberty from British colonial rule. There is no sense whatsoever in which he was referring to civil liberties against domestic rule. It didn't have a single thing to do with "security".

> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile.

Also totally false. This is the core premise of libertarians in the West, who are, and always have been, a minority. It is not, and has never been, the "core premise" of the West or the US. Or else, quite obviously, we wouldn't have the constant tension between these liberties and the need for security. The idea that "those trade-offs are never worthwhile" is not a core American idea. We make those tradeoffs every single day. And continue to argue about them, e.g. over what degree of gun control is proper after each school shooting that happens.

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

#450

Post by vant1 » Sun, Feb 15, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

zestyping wrote: post #408

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we can get there with ranked-choice voting. We really need to press hard until we get it.

Approval, not ranked-choice. Ranked-choice reduces transparency and understanding of the vote-counting process, disenfranchises an alarming percentage of lower-income voters, obstructs risk-limiting audits (which are essential for security), and is non-monotonic (increasing voter support for a candidate can make them lose). Further, ranked-choice doesn't actually fix the spoiler problem and won't eliminate two-party…

> Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit.

Not so dead simple to vote, though. If you're a sincere voter and you prefer Alice to Bob and Bob to Charlie, do you approve of Alice, or both Alice and Bob?

That choice has to be either strategic or very noisy.

There seems to be some unavoidable complexity to voting methods: letting the voter deal with the complexity leads to a method with a very simple algorithm but that's tricky to use. Letting the method itself deal with it leads to more complex algorithms, but makes it easier to vote.

That said, the alternative vote is a bad ranked voting method; with that I do agree. Just beware of the complexity hidden in the system, whether that's Approval or Ranked Pairs.