By now, many of you are probably aware of the 'Internet of Things' - objects in your house that are internet connected. Maybe they can be controlled from your cell phone - alarms, thermostats, smart refrigerators [as ridiculous as that sounds], etc. Maybe it's convenience things - Amazon Alexa, Echo Dot, Google Home, etc. There's a growing list of things consumers are buying and putting into their homes because, let's face it, they're preeeeeetty cool and awfully convenient; maybe you have some of them already [if it's a smart fridge, what the hell are you doing with your money?!]. Let's talk about why that's a god damn disaster.
So you may or may not be aware of the story from a few months ago about Alexa calling the cops on a dude for beating his girlfriend. Way to have our backs, corporate America. There's been all sorts of other stories where these devices save the day, and that's kinda neat, but it poses an extremely important question - just what exactly are they listening to?
The answer is everything. You don't really have control over when one of these devices has it's mic activated, just a certain set of voice commands to get it into a mode to do what you want. What's happening with all that data that's being recorded? If you saw the last post [let's hear it for all the fine folks that contributed to it as well], it's being recorded, indexed, and bought/sold. You're a product on display in your own home.
But even if it's something with no microphone or, god forbid, camera, there's still plenty of data that can be used. For instance, let's say you've got a smart thermostat. How much data could those possibly give? If your thermostat is on a timer, there's a small string of data saying when you are and aren't home. Any adjustment made to it sends that same information. Now they've narrowed down where you are, what days/times you're likely to be somewhere, etc.
And if you think I'm being paranoid and you've got nothing to worry about, here's an interesting tidbit of information to consider - Pokemon Go was government spying from day 1, and we took the bait. I'd be lying if I said I didn't play it a couple times. So here's the kicker - people are aware that Pokemon is a Nintendo-owned IP. Nintendo doesn't have the experience necessary to make a GPS-based augmented reality game, so they called in Niantic, a company with staff that had worked for years on google maps/earth. Niantic needed funding, which they received from In-Q-Tel, a venture-capitalist firm created by the United States Government that exists solely to provide funding to companies making products that assist American intelligence agencies with - you guessed it - data harvesting and intelligence. All that data, as well as much, much more, is stored in the Bumblehive, the NSA's data center in Utah, as well as indexed lists of your phone calls, emails, texts, GPS coordinates timestamped at certain intervals, etc. That's also where much much much of the data from all these cool internet of things devices is being stored.
And that's why I've been posting information for a couple days now. I feel like many of you will think that this is some foil-hat conspiracy bullshit, and I certainly can't blame you for that. But that's the world we currently live in, and that's what happens when we connect cameras, microphones, and GPS sensors to internet connected devices that have functions we don't understand, and then in good faith surround ourselves with them. That's what capitalism has bought us - big brother isn't necessarily watching you, but they know exactly where you are, what you ate, where you've been, how long you slept, etc. And what's worse - they're sharing that data with advertisers... ok, maybe that's not worse, but targeted advertisements are fucking annoying.
So what can we do? Nothing. That's the cold, hard truth of it right now. The patriot act has twisted and morphed into something horrifying, and we're at it's mercy. What we can do is make that data more inconventient to obtain, obscure our data/marketing footprint, limit how much and how often we're using these devices, etc. A lot of this was covered in the last thread I posted about some telemetry features in Windows 10 and how to stop them, and many of the users in this sub hopped into the comments and put down some extremely useful information. We need more of that, because the left is pretty suspicious of the government and capitalists as is, yet we're leaving ourselves so vulnerable where it counts. That's not anybody's fault, but as a community we should be looking out for each other, and education on preventative measures [or, in this case, inconveniencing measures] is a great way to look out for your fellow lefties.
So here's where we need some tech-savvy leftists to get involved, we need to be looking out for each other, and this is a skill set that's often overlooked among political communities. Commie nerds, now's your time to shine.
And for fucks sake, if something says you can unlock a device with a fingerprint or facial/retinal scan, DON'T DO IT. You're just asking for it at that point.
Submitted September 22, 2017 at 06:25AM by pizzapede http://ift.tt/2ygFTDd socialism
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