A sociotechnical threat model for AI-driven smart home devices
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
The authors use prose and structure to look like a scientific study, but they only interviewed some domestic workers and didn’t consider anything else, like the homeowners.
I’m sorry, but if I invite a contractor into my house I’ve been putting temporary cameras up. It’s helpful to see when they come and go and it’s invaluable if anything goes wrong and contractors start pointing fingers at each other. Would be great if we lived in a world where everyone was trustworthy without a second thought, but we don’t. If you don’t want to put cameras up in your own home then I support you 100%. If a contractor doesn’t want to work in my home with cameras then I completely support their decision too.
I get the threat of pervasive AI but this hardly seems like it.
When the panopticon is flipped inwards, everyone scrapes together an excuse for why their solitude is more important than others.
That isn’t a high bar. It’s only recently that the greater accessibility of cameras and recording devices that we get insight into just how much abuse there is, such as that experienced by women or by police towards minorities.
I've heard of some bad behaviour. I haven't heard of millions of cases of bad behaviour. Do you have numbers to back up your assertions?
Outside the West too!
For example, at every AI company right now, an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff. There tends to be extremely little attention paid to the social ramifications of this: like every SV business before them, the goal is to "disrupt" and leave the consequences for everyone else to deal with.
So yes, collectively, what has led to the current situation is indeed "millions of cases of bad behavior", each one of them often relatively localized, but collectively leading to damaging results.
The proposed oversight of board members and CEOs could be a great way to bring these issues into public discussion, to provide much-needed pushback that we don't get if boards have no oversight other than that provided by investment markets.
Almost everyone has an explicit goal of spending less money for equivalent goods and services. People prefer to stores that prioritize lowering prices over paying for more staff.
Perhaps you’d like to reconsider your comment with that in mind.
>an explicit goal it to make profit by replacing or reducing the need for human staff. There tends to be extremely little attention paid to the social ramifications of this:
Can you acknowledge this gap in your analysis?
Scrutiny and surveillance are not synonyms.
Many of the high-trust smaller societies before those locks were actually pretty low privacy.
The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work, and if the company you’re paying to provide a service doesn’t trust their own workers enough to not keep them under constant surveillance, go find one that does. The panopticon is a cheap answer that lets us pretend we don’t need to put the work in to manage our own lives while leveraging the power of the state to subjugate everyone further down the socioeconomic ladder from us.
I would say that cameras are protecting the honest worker as much as they help the homeowner.
> The answer to this is if you don’t trust your domestic worker to not steal from you, either hire one you do or go do your own damn domestic work
Why only these two choices? The worker is free to not take the work at a place with cameras. No one forces them.
The cameras are a means of rigidly enforcing the rules, to a degree that traffic on the way back from lunch becomes something that threatens one’s employment. You and I bend the rules a thousand times a day in ways big and small because the world does not accommodate rigid rules and that’s fine; the workers under panopticon surveillance are not afforded the same grace we are to navigate the circumstances where the rules and reality conflict.
> No one forces them.
Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.
Cameras provide alibi to those who may be suspects, saving time and money.
And so on.
You are only seeing the negative side of cameras, but there are positives as well.
> Their landlord forces them. A tight labor market forces them. Time pressure forces them. Bills force them. Hunger forces them. Our entire system forces them.
Nope, they are free to walk away, rent without cameras, etc, etc.
I think this contradicts with your first sentence.
Depends on whether you want to contribute to the creation of a dystopia.
You could maybe make the effort to hire someone you trust. And put any true valuables in a safe.
This "article" is as good as a blog post
General audiences reading only the title, or coverage of it in the media, will immediately understand it, without having to read or think too much about it.
As far as I can tell home smart speakers are being used for warrantless mass surveillance, unlike Flock for example. Do you mean the possible future situation where they are?
We all also have phone in my pocket 24/7 and my laptop on my desk, both with microphones in them. In the event of the government doing warrantless spying on all devices it seems like that is a strictly higher ROI target for them?
Re: phones - yes, they’re a strictly higher ROI target, which is why they’re regularly targeted by state-level adversaries, who also seem to enjoy using every other tool and opportunity available to them to surveil and collect data on whoever they’re considering this week’s bete noire, including both warranted data requests from phone manufacturers, service providers, and cell networks, buying data from commercial brokers when that doesn’t work, or just outright hacking whoever they’re interested in.
But no, you’re strictly correct that to the best of my knowledge we do not currently have specific evidence that state level adversaries have leveraged the notably piss-poor security standards and data protections on IOT equipment containing multiple microphones capable of collecting room-level audio and separating out that audio into individual actors to surveil persons of interest, so, no need to worry.
Are you worried about some foreign state actor like Israel targeting you specifically, hacking your devices to listen to you chatting? Or you're worried about US warrantless mass surveillance wiretapping all citizen's smart speakers, and you're worried the US government may spin up such a program?
In the latter case, the scenario you expect will happen is we'll have ~100 million US households are live wiretapped 24/7 without anyone knowing, you'll be part of the remainder living your life blissfully wiretap-free thanks to not having a smart speaker?