Terrifyingly Convenient

Or, if this bothers you, you can choose to avoid the hedonistic treadmill altogether and not outfit your house with an Alexa, a Kinect, and countless other mostly useless devices that people lived happily without 10 years ago.

How about corporations who see us as nothing but a source of data, not even as customers? http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-d... & https://vimeo.com/110222526

"While advertisers have been the dominant buyers in the early history of this new kind of marketplace, there is no substantive reason why such markets should be limited to this group. The already visible trend is that any actor with an interest in monetizing probabilistic information about our behavior and/or influencing future behavior can pay to play in a marketplace where the behavioral fortunes of individuals, groups, bodies, and things are told and sold. This is how in our own lifetimes we observe capitalism shifting under our gaze: once profits from products and services, then profits from speculation, and now profits from surveillance."

Companies have larger weight in American government than people do. Lobbyists and campaign contributions go a long way. Aaron Schwartz became dedicated to campaign finance reform for precisely this reason.

Part of the problem (and part of the solution to that problem) is that large scale companies must always optimize for money. They can care about certain things more, but still must optimize for money. Sometimes this benefits the general public, but sometimes it works against them too.

Decoupling industry from politics may be a good idea; we can give more weight to what is good for people than what is good for companies. Although politicians like Trump make me think that might not be ideal either :P.

(Note: I'm not attacking or critiquing your comment, just attempting to show another scope) I'll point out that the same argument applies for living in a city vs a suburb vs out in the country. It's a very very old dynamic, and sometimes people get ensnared, and we have to be careful. For example, countries where you need an exit visa to leave.

But like the meatspace equivalent, there's likely to be different situations simultaneously for different populations. With an ebb and flow between them and between more or less free choice.

this immediately made me think of the clockwork orange scene where they forced the guy to watch the propaganda videos:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=clock+work+orange+eyes+preyed+open...

same scene could be used to describe how watching news in general forces us to be afraid. Like a person constantly screaming into our face: "BE AFRAID!"

> we all know what the terms of this kind of convenience are

Most people have no idea whatsoever what those terms are. Even among technical crowds I still find people assuming that humans are required for various tasks that have been automated for a long time. I seriously don't understand why you think people understand the "terms" of what big data and machine learning are doing to their data. Even simple things like the fact that cell phones give away your location can be a new concept for people that have only considered them telephones.

And why should most people have a realistic understanding of this stuff? The computer industry has been over-promising and dressing up their products since the transistor was invented. We have decades of services that dissemble as their business model, convincing people that their data is "private".

> 'smart' (read data gathering) devices

Why should anybody think that their TV is surveilling them. It wasn't long ago that saying your TV was spying on you could lead to a schizophrenia diagnosis. Nobody reads the legalese and manual for a TV before they bought it, understood it, and choose to trade their data. They bought a TV that advertised voice activation or some other feature. There is no reason for most people to think surveillance would be involved.

> stop opting in

While some people have started to realized how this stuff really works, the common response is to feel trapped without options. It will take time - decades - to properly educate the general public.

> The ignorance card is utter bullshit at this point.

Look at how many people here on HN that still think "anonymized" data cannot be correlated back to real their real identity. If people that understand terms like "hashing" and "INNER JOIN" are still figuring this out, the general public doesn't have a chance.

Facebook is similar. I don't care one whit about Facebook users who complain that the company is using their information and that they have no privacy. That's what you signed up for, duh. More interesting is that Facebook amasses a lot of information even about people who do not use the service.

Right now the Echo is only listening inside of homes, so logically you can figure there's not much risk of third-party harm here. But this gets more tricky if these things start listening in public spaces, or if they're on phones...suppose the pizza delivery guy gets a cell phone that listens all the time, and it hears something interesting while the pizza man is at your door.