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Comment by popeathlete | Hacker News Reader

One company controlling all these electronics in my house. How do people not find that disturbing?

I find a security system that only lets me know when it’s been triggered useless. My wife set off our alarm the other day. I used an external webcam to verify that it was my wife, and disabled the alarm before she could put her things down and disable it herself. You can’t do that with a system that isn’t connected externally.

External connection != external control.

Although with home security services, it's one of the areas where I think external control is advantageous because the best cameras don't help you when the thieves take the device that keeps the recordings with them.

> External connection != external control.

Exactly this. Even in security contexts, my Home Assistant-based security system is running fully-local object detection and runs automations when "Person" shows up in an unexpected place at an unexpected time. It emails me the offending image (thereby offloading from the camera) and records video locally. If it happens at night while I'm asleep it runs a sequence of turning lights on to scare them off and then wakes me up if it didn't work.

This is kind of a combo of local-only with a few pings to the outer world.

What software are you using for object detection? I'd like to extend my Home Assistant setup.

I made a custom component to integrate this object detection lib with pytorch.

https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5

The tensorflow one it comes with didn't work on python 3.8 or on my gpu.

I should blog about it.

In case you do, what’s your blog so I can follow?

I plan on using HA for everything but the alarm system eventually. But I don’t know of a monitored system controlled by HA, do you?

My camera isn’t part of the alarm system (not sure I really want an alarm going off because of a camera). They are triggered by it, though.

Is there any reason the manufacturer couldn't have simply supplied an additional box you put in your home, that has all the storage and processing to do all that? The only thing the manufacturer would have to do is provide a dyndns-like service.

What bothers you more; "one", or this particular company?

For me; both.

"one" because it is too much of a situation of "all of your eggs in one basket". I understand why people heavily invest in a specific ecosystem but I feel it's short-termism. I would be open to the argument however that tech moves so quickly that short-termism doesn't really apply to most consumer products.

"particular company" because Google has been a bad actor in all of the projects I have personally been involved with where they have been involved. This is purely a personal anecdote and YMMV (and probably does). I am sure I am an exception with this opinion.

To me it more resembles telling your secret to one trusted friend vs telling everyone you know.

This X-Files episode (s11e07) from the 2018 reboot season satirized something similar brilliantly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rm9sbG93ZXJz

There’s so many things I find disturbing that whether my is Google speaker is listening to me doesn’t even crack the Top 10.

What’s the negative outcome? I don’t believe this is the start of an inevitable slippery slope decline into a Big Brother surveillance state.

Yeah maybe they’ll get more data and target ads better, but that’s a good thing. I want to know about products that might interest me and then buy them!

you can't imagine the problem of having your private conversations recorded, then a business compelled to release them without a warrant? You can't imagine what inferences might be made about your personal conversations and sold to others? I do not think you are giving the words you say enough credit.

Of course I can imagine those problems! Those problems are brought up literally every time I mention that in-home speakers are not the end-of-the-world-nightmare-scenario so many people treat them as.

I just don’t particularly care.

Also if someone wants to cut out the middleman and buy my personal conversations directly, feel free to reach out. Great value! Last night I talked about weed and Top Chef!

Enjoy your privilege of not being interesting or important enough to be the target of criminal activity or government opppression. Millions of people aren't so lucky, and they deserve empathy as they work to build a better world for you to carelessly enjoy.

How is other people's lives their responsibility?

Empathy is everyone's responsibility, yours included.

To believe otherwise is literal sociopathy.

Edit: LOL. Okay, let's just live in denial of the definition of antisocial behavior.

So GP is a sociopath for choosing to use a Google Home?

GP is a sociopath for acknowledging that it is a valid issue, but it doesn't affect them, so "I just don't particularly care" is the real tell.

For most people they're personally investing their energy in what they consider more important issues. We all only have so much energy to go around, and this obviously comes low on GP's list. This is in the same vain as online advertising or buying food from supermarkets over local stores.

The privilege is that you have so few real problems that this is something you have time to worry about. The millions of people you talk about couldn't care less since they have immediate non-hypothetical problems to focus on.

So, not caring because because oneself is not being persecuted at this minute, and determined to err on the side of being no threat to any criminals or people who persecute others, ever, and to hand that "value" down the generations. I could get more eloquent descriptions of that argument from history books, and don't even care for those.

I hope you never witness a government official commit a crime and consider blowing the whistle.

I hope so too!

And if weed became illegal again? Hmmmmmmmmm

> And if weed became illegal again?

“became...again”? When did the federal prohibition of weed end?

Exactly.

I will purchase access to and broadcasting rights for all conversations that take place in your home. Name your price.

$1,000 a day seems fair.

Well that hardly seems like a discount for cutting out the Googley middle man! Perhaps you do indeed value your privacy a bit more than you realize?

It’s called negotiating. What’s your best offer?

The infrastructure of the Big Brother surveillance machine is the same as the infrastructure of the target-ads-better machine, the only difference is who is in charge of it. And relying solely on our current mechanisms to prevent the system being co-opted is naive. Especially given it’s already public record that some of these mechanisms have already been co-opted.

Also, that is just talking about the worst outcome, there are plenty of horrible possible intermediate outcomes, with the data being sold without restriction or not properly protected.

> there are plenty of horrible intermediate steps which could happen

I just don’t believe any of these are particularly horrible when considered in the context of the assorted horrors of the world today.

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