Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

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It's not the users choosing to share something that's the problem, it's the corporations choosing to collect every bit of data on their users they can without the consent of the users. From the article:

> "But it gets worse. These social media giants are collecting data about every single internet user at an alarming rate, housing it in enormous data storage facilities around the world. Once collected, this information is analyzed, compiled, and sold to any interested parties willing to pay for it. It’s not only your activities in a web browser that are gathered; many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual conversation looking for key words and phrases. This data will be correlated with the online profile of the speaker with speech recognition and anything you talk about will be added to a database of your interests. Once complied, this data becomes impossible to track down and remove. A user’s personal data will never disappear from the internet. It will be continually be added to, recompiled, reanalyzed, and sold over and over in order to sell ads in the hope of selling a product. If you sign up for a free service on the web, then you are what is being sold."

Going Web 1.0 wouldn't stop that. The genie that came out of the bottle was the realization that such whole-data aggregation is possible.

Take away JavaScript today, and it'd be replaced with the (slower, but still lucrative enough to justify it) process of paying site admins to share their access logs and user account data.

> many smart devices including televisions, smart phones, home automation equipment, and more will passively listen to casual conversation looking for key words and phrases.

That sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense. Is there any evidence for this beyond anecdotes that are probably Baader-Meinhof effects?

If it was happening, hundreds of people would be working on those systems, and at least one of them would have talked.

I don't think anyone will be able to find out easily since this communication is encrypted. Who knows what the random bursts of data from some IoT device are?

I can guarantee someone built a way to enable telemetry and diagnostic data into these devices "to improve user experience". It wouldn't take much for another engineer/sociopathic PM to enable it across the board (telemetry is now opt out) or change the sampling frequency or storage location.

I was about to agree but GP is actually not far off.

Smart TVs have been caught listening to people before. Cell phones absolutely do. Home automation is generally voice controlled, etc.

I feel bad for individuals with paranoid schizophrenia. Give it another 10 years and there really will be invisible cameras and microphones everywhere recording you!

Schizophrenic here with a long time interest in computer security. I've had many discussions with my (previous) psychiatrist about exactly this, often arguing that it's not that far fetched that there are a swarm of entities (not just three-letter-agencies) that are interested in surveilling you. Add to that that your paranoia might be more or less well-founded, say that you're doing various criminal activities, the bounderies between justifiable paranoia and illness can become _very_ hard to make out.

I remember especially us discussing three-letter-agencies' mass-surveillance and I brought up NSA's ECHELON and other things that have been semi-known/-public for decades. About two years later the Snowden leaks came about and my psychiatrist started telling me about different cases he had had where people were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and there later turned out to be real world explanations and not hallucinations and/or delusions.

I just wanted to share this anecdote. It's a shitty disease and you're absolutely on point about how it already is and will become even more so in the near future.

> Once collected, this information is analyzed, compiled, and sold to any interested parties willing to pay for it.

The part about selling isn't true. Google and Facebook slurp in a lot of data, but they hoard it. It's only "sold" by allowing advertisers to target against it.

Google claims

> we do not sell your personal information to anyone.

Facebook claims

> No, we don't sell your information.

Maybe there's an asterisk when it comes to heavily aggregated data, and they both work with legitimate researchers, but big tech selling your data isn't true. A bunch of medium-sized adtech players you've never heard of sell your data.

What most privacy advocates don't get is that users do not care. The vast majority of people make their choice by buying the cheapest thing. In this case, the cheapest thing is free, paid with data.

I think most of us do get that.

However I also believe that's only because they haven't considered the potential impact of constant surveillance from everything you own sent to third parties who will keep the data forever.

...or maybe they just trust faceless strangers more than I do.

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