<story><title>Amazon Echo</title><url>http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chatmasta</author><text>This &amp;quot;internet-of-things&amp;quot; trend coincides 
unfortunately with the &amp;quot;dragnet surveillance&amp;quot;
trend. With every new product launch from a 
&amp;quot;cloud company,&amp;quot; I increasingly feel as if I&amp;#x27;m 
reading the tombstone of modern society. The
selling point behind these devices is
convenience, but at the cost of security. I
don&amp;#x27;t think I need to explain to HN why an
&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;always-on, internet connected voice recording
device&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; is something to keep out of your house. [1]&lt;p&gt;Consumers are frighteningly amenable to reducing
their security in favor of convenience. Often
they are oblivious to the tradeoff altogether. 
Evidence of this trend has increased since 9&amp;#x2F;11,
as increasingly paranoid legislation made its
way through congress at the behest of corporate
stakeholders. It should hardly be surprising that
now, with the NSA privileged enough to be openly
flaunting its surveillance, those same corporate 
stakeholders are investing in companies that sell
listening devices to millions of Americans. I am
making a paranoid argument, but it&amp;#x27;s not ungrounded,
and certainly not surprising, because &lt;i&gt;paranoia breeds
paranoia.&lt;/i&gt; Pass paranoid legislation, face a paranoid
populace. The American people are rightfully skeptical
of their government.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it sounds absurd to segment the world into 
the &amp;quot;populace&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;government,&amp;quot; but did it sound 
absurd when you read those terms in high school 
history books? Over spans of centuries, politics is
viewed in the same terms: the people, and the
government. Maybe you and I do not think of ourselves
in the context of centuries. But what about Barack Obama? Vladimir Putin? It seems logical to assume they see themselves in the context of world leaders past. Modern leaders occupy unprecedented seats of power over the largest populace ever. If they are internally comparing themselves 
to each other and their predecessors, then we have a problem. We cannot trust the world leaders, because they 
do not view themselves on the same level as us. Faced with an increasingly empowered and growing populace, they could
react any way. We&amp;#x27;ll see.&lt;p&gt;(Yes, I&amp;#x27;m trying to get on a list at the NSA. It&amp;#x27;s an
experiment I&amp;#x27;m doing. Hopefully I hit enough keywords
today.)&lt;p&gt;[1] Yes, transmission is triggered on-chip, but who verifies
every chip fabrication is performed using the same imprints?
You think governments don&amp;#x27;t have factory floor managers in
their pockets?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anigbrowl</author><text>Most people don&amp;#x27;t care because they&amp;#x27;re not culpable enough to feel paranoid. Some percentage of people will be unjustly exploited, but probably not enough to offset the economic benefits that technology like this brings to its users.&lt;p&gt;I think your focus on &amp;#x27;the people vs the government&amp;#x27; is misplaced, because government is just a sort of social technology which can be used and abused like any other technology depending on who controls it at the time. What about Barack Obama, for example? Do you seriously think he will refuse to relinquish power in 2 years? You probably don&amp;#x27;t, just&amp;#x27; just expressing your cynical (and entirely justifiable) opinion about the political class. But that&amp;#x27;s not much different from a Marxist asserting that business is fundamentally antagonistic towards workers or similar monolithic abstractions. When you make arguments like this you&amp;#x27;ve opted for ideology over empiricism.&lt;p&gt;Bringing it back to technology, certainly the ubiquity of digital technology makes it easier to establish mass surveillance of a kind that would have seemed nightmarish a few generations ago. But the same technology has also facilitated a significant number of populist uprisings in recent years, and made it far easier for marginalized communities to get their message out in relatively short order, as well as facilitating organizations with both benign and malicious intentions (eg MSF and ISIS, who both leverage social media but for wildly divergent ends).&lt;p&gt;The internet of things isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;#x27;coinciding with the dragnet surveillance trend&amp;#x27;; the latter is an emerging property of our increasingly networked society. When we use metaphors like a &amp;#x27;world wide web&amp;#x27; traversed by &amp;#x27;spiders&amp;#x27; and so on, we should not be surprised that such technologies are going to amplify the capabilities of institutional actors in &lt;i&gt;at least&lt;/i&gt; the same proportion that they amplify the capabilities of individuals.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon Echo</title><url>http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chatmasta</author><text>This &amp;quot;internet-of-things&amp;quot; trend coincides 
unfortunately with the &amp;quot;dragnet surveillance&amp;quot;
trend. With every new product launch from a 
&amp;quot;cloud company,&amp;quot; I increasingly feel as if I&amp;#x27;m 
reading the tombstone of modern society. The
selling point behind these devices is
convenience, but at the cost of security. I
don&amp;#x27;t think I need to explain to HN why an
&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt;always-on, internet connected voice recording
device&lt;i&gt;&lt;/i&gt; is something to keep out of your house. [1]&lt;p&gt;Consumers are frighteningly amenable to reducing
their security in favor of convenience. Often
they are oblivious to the tradeoff altogether. 
Evidence of this trend has increased since 9&amp;#x2F;11,
as increasingly paranoid legislation made its
way through congress at the behest of corporate
stakeholders. It should hardly be surprising that
now, with the NSA privileged enough to be openly
flaunting its surveillance, those same corporate 
stakeholders are investing in companies that sell
listening devices to millions of Americans. I am
making a paranoid argument, but it&amp;#x27;s not ungrounded,
and certainly not surprising, because &lt;i&gt;paranoia breeds
paranoia.&lt;/i&gt; Pass paranoid legislation, face a paranoid
populace. The American people are rightfully skeptical
of their government.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it sounds absurd to segment the world into 
the &amp;quot;populace&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;government,&amp;quot; but did it sound 
absurd when you read those terms in high school 
history books? Over spans of centuries, politics is
viewed in the same terms: the people, and the
government. Maybe you and I do not think of ourselves
in the context of centuries. But what about Barack Obama? Vladimir Putin? It seems logical to assume they see themselves in the context of world leaders past. Modern leaders occupy unprecedented seats of power over the largest populace ever. If they are internally comparing themselves 
to each other and their predecessors, then we have a problem. We cannot trust the world leaders, because they 
do not view themselves on the same level as us. Faced with an increasingly empowered and growing populace, they could
react any way. We&amp;#x27;ll see.&lt;p&gt;(Yes, I&amp;#x27;m trying to get on a list at the NSA. It&amp;#x27;s an
experiment I&amp;#x27;m doing. Hopefully I hit enough keywords
today.)&lt;p&gt;[1] Yes, transmission is triggered on-chip, but who verifies
every chip fabrication is performed using the same imprints?
You think governments don&amp;#x27;t have factory floor managers in
their pockets?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Throwaway12928</author><text>The scary part is that you can&amp;#x27;t protect yourself easily from those around you. For example, let&amp;#x27;s say you like to maintain your privacy, and you&amp;#x27;re careful about anything you post online, you&amp;#x27;re careful not to have an always on microphone, such as the Echo, you&amp;#x27;re careful not to have a smart television with a video camera connected to the internet in your living room, etc. That&amp;#x27;s great, and up to you to decide, but what about your friends house?&lt;p&gt;I mean, when you visit your friend, stop at a girlfriends apartment, or hang out with people at the pub, are you checking if they have any of these devices? Do you search their shelves for an Echo? Do you ask everyone at the restaurant if they have a smartphone with a microphone connected to the internet?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s impossible to avoid things like this in your life. The second you walk outside, you&amp;#x27;re surrounded by cameras and microphones that can be streaming anything, to anyone.&lt;p&gt;Facebook is another example. You might say, I don&amp;#x27;t want to enter where I live, or where I went to school, I feel that&amp;#x27;s sensitive information. Well, since you refuse to give up that information, Facebook just encourages your friends to squeal. Hey, does John Doe live in X or Y city? Did you go to university with John Doe? Hey, why don&amp;#x27;t you upload more photos of John Doe, and tell us the time and location that photo was taken. Actually, no need to tag him, we&amp;#x27;ll just detect his face, and use the date the photo was created.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not going to be long until you can search a person, and see a timeline of their life based on data from third parties. Let&amp;#x27;s watch John Doe&amp;#x27;s life for 2018. Oh look, Jan 15, he appears in the background of a tourists photo by the Eiffel tower. Jan 21st, we detected is face on the metro in southern France. Oh, Jan 28th, a car dash cam finds him walking down a street in Italy. Oh, his phone was on and we can see he was in Jane&amp;#x27;s apartment Feb 1st. Let&amp;#x27;s pull the audio from the microphone on Jane&amp;#x27;s television for that day.</text></comment>