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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

#451

Post by tsunamifury »

acdha wrote: post #418
tsunamifury wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iCloud loophole, push notification loophole, RCS loophole, business messaging loophole. These are just the semi public ones. No one cares.

Those aren’t loopholes and are widely known? I mean, they have an entire E2EE iCloud feature giving customers a choice between security and convenience: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756 RCS has never offered that security guarantee at the protocol level. Google has deployed a proprietary encryption layer on top but refuses to allow other clients access. This was rather famously part of the blue/green message di…

Im referring to the legal and cooperation loopholes Apple has put behind those.

Each one allows for access, at times warrant less, at any moment.

It’s bizarre that you think this is “Ok”. Insane you are defending it. Combined it makes a hard hard take that they are security oriented.

Beyond that Apple has cooperated with data turnover at the personal request of President Trump multiple times. So pull your head out of the sand.

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

#452

Post by hypeatei »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #385
hypeatei wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment really confirms the "everyone is twelve years old now" theory. "If there's crime, let's send in the army!" Of course you'd suggest that, you're twelve.

I don’t remember suggesting that. But, go on with your strawman, you are doing great.

"Now… let’s say you were to call the national guard in to safeguard those areas"

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

#453

Post by rolph »

mvanbaak wrote: post #439
rolph wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bring my kids now or i will call the police and you will be charged with abduction.

and how are you going to prove your ID? you might as well be the one abducting them, and especially if you refuse to use an app to identify yourself... (playing devils advocate here)

most immediate, would be my children would identify me, next one is under the assumption this suddenly crops up as a policy change, such a policy from the start would be a non starter, however familiarity of face would overide the need for what would be plutobeaurocratic requirement.

the really tight one is how to proceed when there is a change of lawful custody or guardianship, because, unfortunately, divorce, and domestic violence happens, and the lag between court order and, notification of custodial reassignment should be close to zero.

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

#454

Post by xve »

So, what's currently going on to fight back against all this? Here's what I found. Does signing a petition actually doing something? It's hard to tell but if you are inclined, at least take a look at some current efforts.

-Active Petitions and Campaigns to Limit Surveillance: End the Surveillance State (Action Network): Petitions call on Congress to permanently end the PATRIOT Act, stop warrantless surveillance, and oppose the expansion of surveillance technology.

-Ban Facial Recognition (Amnesty International & ACLU): Amnesty International is running the "Ban the Scan" campaign, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) targets the use of face surveillance, arguing it poses risks to civil liberties and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities.

-Stop Surveillance Data Brokers (Mozilla): Mozilla Foundation is targeting major websites to stop sharing data with surveillance technology firms that track user movement and interactions.

-Protect User Data from Subpoenas (EFF): The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pressuring tech companies to resist lawless DHS subpoenas for user data.

-Oppose Localized Surveillance (ACLU/Action Network): Local petitions aim to limit technologies like Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that create massive databases of personal movement.

-Federal Legislative Reform: Advocates are pushing for the "The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act," which aims to restrict intelligence agencies from purchasing data from brokers without a warrant.

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

#455

Post by velocity3230 »

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #173

Regular where I live: I don't use google maps, I use Waze I don't use messenger, I use whatsapp I don't upload my pictures, contacts (sync is enabled by default) Anyways. What are the options? It will be another free cloud hosted service.

Isn't Waze owned, operated and share infrastructure with Google Maps?

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

#456

Post by [deleted] »

otterley wrote: post #148
calibas wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're an attorney and you're asking me why the government spying on everyone is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment?

Yes. You’re the one making the assertion (not just that there is a violation but also that the activity is that “the government spying on everyone”); the burden of proof is thus on you. Attorneys challenge each other as a matter of course in every case before a court. This is how the adversarial system works. Perhaps what you meant to say is that “I don’t like the activity that is happening here,” or “I think some of…

[deleted]

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

#457

Post by oceansky »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #399
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

Oh well, I guess there is nothing to be done. Pack it up everyone. It is over. You can't do anything. No one can learn anything. No. You heard the guy above. It is over. Go home. Do nothing.

I don't mean to say that nothing can be done, I was just agreeing that it's often more complicated than it looks.

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

#458

Post by eszed »

vant1 wrote: post #450
zestyping wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with this. Ranked choice is easy to explain to a naive voter: everyone understands how a preference order works, and the result is "the candidate more people like the most". Counting the votes is (a bit) complicated, but I think the (minority of) people who get excited by implementation details out-smart themselves, by worrying that most people won't understand the details. Of course most people won't understand the details, because they don't care about the details. They don't know how votes are tallied now!

My position admittedly breaks down when people lie to low-information voters about the fairness of the process - but, in my defence, people will lie about any system that doesn't produce the results they want. I'd prefer they lodge their objections to a better system than first-past-the-post.

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

#459

Post by cindyllm »

mmooss wrote: post #446
mschuster91 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 reason…

[dead]

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

#460

Post by Loughla »

oldcigarette wrote: post #295
Loughla wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it is times like these i am reminded of https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

That was actually my first thought. The focus on this part of the thread has left the actual meat of the article entirely and is focused instead on a post trying to weedle meaning where there is none.
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