Luxury Surveillance
reallifemag.com
reallifemag.com
This comes down to education. We have been educated to follow and accept, rather than think critically and take the long term view on something, and act on it. Very few people are even able to consider just how much of how they view the world is on account of the way they have been taught. They think the values they have are their own, but it is not on a basis of truth, it is repetition and being told what is right. It is not their personality/individuality extending into the world - it is consensus thinking.
Frankly, its quite sad! And for some of us it is like living amongst the borg, with all these received opinions.
Who is in control? Who wrote the narrative of your life? Who decided to believe in that story?
I am absolutely on the path to self-liberation - the policeman in my head is gone. Its been a work of years.
Why do you say wild animal? Are you a wild animal if someone doesn't tell you what to do? I think you need to check your assumptions. We are naturally joyful, trusting creatures, but this is used against us.
And having children personally made me double up my efforts. I needed to find answers - I didn't want to commit my children to automaton living.
I was not in control - I was not the author of my life. I was provided a story, and that is now rejected. I write my own story - and fyi here is a good essay that captures how I feel:
https://kateofgaia.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/behold-a-whit...
The job we have - as I see it - is to act according to what we know. There is a big difference between what you know and what you *think* you know. Eg, do you know your date of birth? No, you do not. You do not remember it - you only know what you are told. Knowing is personally verifying! Say what you see and don't lie to yourself or others.
If you do not personally verify the stories you are told, you will be 'lost in stories'. Someone else (not you) is controlling the narrative. Technology is just the latest iteration of the stories - we also have government, religion, law, our 'educated' peers, etc.
In addition, the issue of learning to live with uncertainty, being mature to the degree that unknowable answers and their questions simply set in an unknowable and ripe for exploitation category in one's mind. Grasping the power granted to others when they claim answers to unknowable questions is the true source of evil in this human society.
On living with uncertainty - this seems to be our major struggle. We can't say "I don't know", we would rather the life-raft of a comfortable story that assuages us. Most of us are both arrogant not because we know/have verified but because of stories/beliefs. It is hybris!
A wild human animal is not domesticated and does not care about what society thinks is normal acceptable behavior. It treats feeling as equal with reason; both mere qualia to be either utilized or disregarded...
I'm sure naturalists will gladly heap entire dictionaries of verbage on what I'm trying to communicate: all explainable in an instant by an upredictable, fundamentally not-safe look in one's eyes.
I'd posit that the people who think this does not apply to them actually demonstrate this just as much as anyone else. We all make subconscious decisions about what we are going to follow and accept versus challenge because if you challenged everything you wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. How do I know I _really_ need to eat breakfast, or take a shower, or go to work today? Most of the time we operate on autopilot and we save our mental capital for decisions where we think we need it.
And we all prioritize the importance of decisions differently, and that's ok. For some of us, that important decision is, should I buy a device that let's a big corp spy on me. For others it might be, should I call my mother who I got in a fight with yesterday. For everyone with their own stack ranked list of priorities, other people's look "wrong".
Tldr, some people know they are being surveilled in since capacity and do not care, and that's ok.
But do you forget that we did not know we were being spied on. Some of us suspected perhaps, but this only became blatant with the Snowden revelations. The point is that this is not an open, free-sharing system - it is plainly deceitful, designed to extract our most personal information, to provide it to a corporation/governance structure whether we want it or not.
And now we see the long path we are on coming to fruition - we will have to have a phone, a vax passport to simply get into shops. We are facing a world like East Germany, but on techno-steroids.
So, fine, choose what you like. But do you not think a line is crossed when the techno-snooping becomes mandatory, with smart phones, smart tvs, smart meters, etc? Must I hand over all of my information to what is shaping up to be a fascist (government+corporate) governance structure?
Most people around here would say yes.
Is this more unacceptable than people dying in a building collapse in Miami, or children starving to death in third world countries, or a loved one passing away, or someone being rude to someone else?
It's truly in the eye of the beholder.
But what does that have to do with technologists working hard to eliminate freedoms and privacy, not just for themselves but for everyone? Do technologists have the truth, do they really know what is better for everyone else?
> Most people around here would say yes.
Singling-out of smartwatches is a bit moot when smartphones are universally adopted though. Poor or rich, everyone has a telescreen, it's even worse than 1984.
It would be smart to let them battle it out first, if they oppose it too. Like the US waited for the Soviet Union to get seriously wounded before taking on the Nazis, because both were a threat.
We shouldn't let people with these sorts of agendas dominate the discussion on such serious topics, we don't need another stripe on the LGBT flag to signify anti-surveillance. LGBT, trans-activism, feminism, etc. etc. are, and should remain disjoint from the fight against surveillance. If we start mixing in leftist-politics into the discussion we are weakening it by pushing away people who are not left-leaning or not in support of LGBT. By leaving anti-surveillance and pro-privacy activism pure and undiluted from left-right politics, we will have a greater ability to educate the masses.
1984 has just been lapped by reality.
I think it is already a lost cause. We had the chance a decade ago to collectively show companies doing this is bad business. Instead we collectively did the opposite. You don't get a do over with this.
Maybe it is even related to this nonsense statistical thinking that has infected our group mind. Even when it doesn't apply at all, everything is a random draw from the urn.
"We just got unlucky on this draw from the urn with surveillance". Maybe next time we will have better luck even though there is no urn, draws or next time.
Also, re: "class oppression". Like so many things, this is definitely about class. "Surveillance" is only half of "surveillance capitalism" ;)
I don't think traditional social class plays much in that particular equation. It's a really small group of people that have the resources and access to use the surveillance data in oppressive ways. Government officials, 9+ figure-company CEOs, poor activitists are all targets.
> The thing is it doesn't have to be this way.
Agreed, I'm not as pessimistic as others but we have to either solve the funding issue for OSS work, or come up with some other means of establishing trust in proprietary devices and software.
It's about as surveilled as you writing in your own private journal.
It's a proprietary device, running proprietary (updateable) firmware, using proprietary tamper-resistant security chips for which the supply line and schematics are not publicly verified.
If my life depended on it...I'd crush my phone, laptop and every other wifi enabled device into dust immediately.
The use of physical one-way hash functions is involved.
Apple loudly and publicly claim these facts (about data not leaving your device, and sync being end-to-end encrypted). It is one of the most scrutinised companies (see every -gate and even Google's 0-day blog), and they made Privacy their key differentiator.
They have everything to lose and almost nothing to gain from secretly tracking personal data.
(Of course I have no proof, that’s why it’s called paranoia)
This feels more like a marketing campaign to associate Apple with privacy. From 2020 they have been mentioning it insistently, and while Apple has made steps towards it, they still make devices that deliberately include tracking functions, even if they make third parties disclose them.
If Apple was really serious about being a bastion for user privacy, they would make drastically different OSs and APIs.
Therefore playing the privacy card gives them a market differentiator against those who are mainly into the ad business, and who must collect as much intimate data as possible in order to run competitive ad platforms.
Anyone have other thoughts or information on this point?
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/12/security_risk...
I think that testing has showed it’s created two low-medium security paths, one with high theater and one with lower theater.
Unless things have changed in the past several years, you should be able to opt out of the mm-wave scanner for a pat down instead. Although I guess you could do this without pre-check/GE. It just takes more time.
Between the two, I have managed to never walk through a mm-wave scanner.
As an aside, why are you in precheck if you have GE? GE gives you everything precheck has
I am in both because I enrolled in TSA Pre and then about a year later needed to be in Global Entry due to a sharp increase in international travel. Once my TSA Pre expires, I don't expect to have both. Right now, various frequent flyer programs still have my TSA Pre number entered and I just leave it alone.
No affiliation, I just think it's a cool project. It's worked well for my needs.
The solution has a different bioethics issue, in that it creates a marketplace for bioinformatics. It is a broader category than what the article discusses.
Luxury Transportation: Some people pay for a taxi to be transported from A to B, while others are forced into a car and are transported to jail. Why people would spend money on transportation?
The end goal of using a smart watch is to track your exercise and health. The end goal of an electronic monitoring device like those on parole or probation is to keep track of the location of the person under surveillance.
The technology might be similar but the end goals are completely different. Just as you can use a knife to have lunch or to kill. Or a jab for a vaccine or lethal injection. Same technology but very different end goals.
Also, I don’t agree with using the term surveillance. If you’re using a smart watch to track your progress it’s not surveillance. Writing your thoughts in a diary it’s not surveillance. Looking yourself in the mirror it’s not surveillance.
On the technology side, Apple claims that Health Information is encrypted end-to-end [1]. Regarding sending your device location, my understanding is that it’s only sent to Apple “only if you actively request the location of a device or accessory.”[2]
Anyway, I have to say it sucks to know it’s feasible to turn those devices into surveillance devices. The Snowden revelations showed that governments did mass surveillance over many mediums, so they could do it even at a lower level if they wanted. Sometimes companies would collaborate with them and sometimes it was without the company’s knowledge.
It’s an inherent problem of being able to change the functionality of a computer and having to trust to many parties.
Finally, they could also do it with phones. Far more people have phones than smart watches. They could turn the mics on your phone to listen to you. Or the camera. Your phone has all your contacts and chat logs. Moreover, telcos keep logs of which antennas your device uses.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 [2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212037