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Comment by Otek | Hacker News Reader

Users normalised surveillance by buying cheap Android phones from brands like Xiaomi, Huawei and others without thinking about real price of such device - data. Also by buying "smart" devices from these brands. Xiaomi Vacuum can gather tons of informations about home. Air Purifier also. But try to find products of similar quality for an equally low price and you will be faced with the choice of either overpaying or being added to the millions of people who are being tracked anyway. You will become a statistic. No wonder most people don't see any danger in this. Dilution of responsibility.

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American consumers? How does that square with 94% of the marketshare not being from those brands at all[1]?

Or do you mean Samsumg normalizing surveillance.

[1] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...

America isn't the world? Worldwide, Xiaomi is the is the second largest single company by smartphone marketshare: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...

> Users normalised surveillance by buying cheap …

I agree with the rest of your comment, but I wouldn’t say that “users” normalised it, as their choice in the matter is limited. Now it seems that hidden cost of those services is a problem that will need a cultural shift to see a solution. Education helps too.

Apologies if this sounds like a nitpick, I just think that the language we use when talking about these things matters more than we expect.

Surveillance was normalized far before that. People have been using Google products and social networks for years before these devices. The only difference is the extent to which one carries that Panopticon with them.

> Xiaomi, Huawei

Google (Pixel), Samsung, Nokia, OnePlus, etc. All such companies are roughly equally evil. The difference might be price (though frankly it usually is not that divergent), but the tracking is the same. Given that the tracking is present at every price point, the price point is not relevant. The origin of the technology is not relevant. All that is relevant is the fact that this is normalised and it should not be.

That's true - but it's mostly due to ignorance. One of my relative bought a Xiaomi phone (https://www.mi.com/in/redmi-9-power/), and after I pointed out to her that the Xiaomi customised Android OS on it as basically an adware and a blackhole for all personal data on the phone, she asked me for options. When I told her the OS could be replaced (from https://xiaomi.eu/community/), she asked me to do it.

That's one part of it.

The other is that I could replace the OS as Xiaomi (or Sony Open Devices) allow the bootloader to be unlocked and replace the OS. Apple iPhones do not even give you this option.

"Xiaomi Vacuum can gather tons of informations about home. Air Purifier also"

Google ads know your age, location, and tons of personal information. Thats enough info for identify fraud.

What does the Air purifier send, level of dust? It does not even know where it is.

> It does not even know where it is.

How difficult would it be to add a GPS to one of those? At any rate, "smart" purifiers like the one GP is talking about connect to WiFi etc and are definitely able to find out your location.

GPS doesn't work indoors, and even if it did, what then? What are you gonna do with indoor dust levels?

air quality sensors are not a bad proxy of activity patterns. (now does that have any value? good question, and probably very much "depends". Probably does in the sense of things like law enforcement requesting data from siri etc for criminal cases, to feed into advertising targeting it's only a tiny datapoint)

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