Dystopian Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality
dallincrump.com
dallincrump.com
We're always eager to say how much we dislike it, but there's so little self-reflection in our community.
importing hordes of foreign tech workers or hiring asians broadly whose culture is very much the opposite of “don’t tread on me” led to much of this.
might not be comfortable to say but most of our tech companies are led by people who aren’t “Americana” (cultural)
and broadly speaking, there are very few people like me (i’m asian) that value the American way of independence at all cost and most are just strivers and consumerist
so the goal for most of them is to make 300k base and 300k stock per year. fuck the consequences.
the days of making tech for the love of the game are long gone.
and it reeks of extractive personalities that took over
> so the goal for most of them is to make 300k base and 300k stock per year. fuck the consequences.
"What could be more American than that?" — Wadsworth, Clue (1985)
Culture is defined by people not borders- simply crossing an arbitrary line doesn't change someone's beliefs and values.
The immigration boom especially on the West coast has vastly diluted assimilation into American culture- coming from an immigrant, who married into another family of immigrants- too many people move here and stick to their own cultural enclave, building a version of their home country in miniature instead of trying to integrate.
No, lol
That would make up between 0.3% and 0.5% of the global tech workforce, if you added all of their employees together.
I've gotten some traffic from HN before and if I recall correctly, about 30% of it was from California, followed by Washington (Seattle) and then NY.
What things are intended to be and what they become are often vastly different things.
There's huge amount of cross-pollination on HN, even from non-IT industry participants.
Is that really "embodiment"
Sounds like the opposite
People in the practice of abusing blind trust (the people generally are never seen; they fear being publicly named)
Did everyone read yesterday's Brian Cantrill anecdote
Corporations like Google and Meta, and most other so-called "tech" companies, _assume_ trust
Getting trust for free, never earned. "Don't trust corporations". Except for "Big Tech". WTF
"Don't trust the government" is laughable when the person works for a goverment contractor
No such thing as integrity in SillyCon Valley
Why should society allow individuals have to make such difficult choices between being principled or rich? It's the government's job to control. And I don't mean salary control, but to understand why there are such differences and work to mitigate them.
Google's ex-CEO Eric Schmidt in 2009:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines—including Google—do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."
Pretty minor if it's just that individual. But for certain this means there is a transcript on Apple's servers that can be subpoenaed by law enforcement, or sooner or later, searchable without a warrant.
Believing in that would be like believing web tracking is only ever used to "enhance your browsing experience".
Any recordings should be kept in something akin to password manager.
Heck, all of my data in any app should be kept in something like that.
That being said, I do actually expect that this stuff will (generally*) stay on-device. Apple's oddly good about that.
..but impossible to have unless you control the operating system that is distributed with phones that normal people will use.
If you can't be bothered, it wasn't that meaningful or important.
if chats are so important to you, write it down, with your hand. journaling is fun and great and there's evidence that it's good for your mental health because it allows you intentional time for introspection and insight-building
I agree with you that it's weird outside of professional settings.
Experts know what they are saying, and they often rapidly download dense technical information. I first noticed the problem after asking a friend for advice on handling a psych issue with a friend's child.
Otherwise experts talk and I listen and I understand, but I can easily forget nuance and detail.
I also learnt to record medical specialists talking to my mum, so I could replay the details to my dad.
Why would dad trust my recall? And will he trust facts if I've repeated them as a non-specialist? And perhaps dad picks up different aspects due to his own experiences.
The better way IMHO is use local models so data never actually leaves the device.
Now I’m kinda feeling like this Meta glasses shit should be straight-up illegal. These really aren’t for people doing art or documenting civil rights violations or anything.
I realize it makes me a kind of hypocrite, but it’s all so creepy now.
Now it will also be voice recording one has to be aware off ?
Is that the AI future we want or need?
What country do you live in? This is almost certainty not true in the US
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy when you are in public or can be clearly heard from public. If you are "in the street" no one needs to get your permission to record you or what you say.
Note how it’s about recording, not sharing.
(It’s way more nuanced and complicated in practice of course)
The tools available for thought control in early modern Europe were poor even by 20th century standards, but they worked. And for hundreds of years, the struggle primarily centered around that increasingly important first mass manufactured article in Western culture: the book. Whether you could print them, possess them, traffic in them, read them, teach from them without the permission or control of an entity empowered to punish thought.
By the end of the 17th century censorship of written material in Europe had begun to break down first in the Netherlands then in the UK then afterwards in waves throughout the European world and the book became an article of subversive commerce and began eating away at the control of thought.
By the late 18th century that struggle for the freedom of reading had begun to attack the substance of Christianity itself and the European world trembled on the brink of the first great revolution of the mind. It spoke of “liberté, égalité, fraternité”, but actually it meant freedom to think differently." -- https://archive.org/details/EbenMoglenRepublica2012
Every big problem needs to be addressed from multiple angles, whatever you can do, you can contribute to the solution.
The problem is: it's not obvious to most people your cell phone (or TV, or car, etc.) would start recording you without your consent or knowledge. It's only just starting to become common knowledge that your phone's location data is being captured and shared with everyone.
Even after being told about the cameras around them or the fact that every Tesla that drives past them is also recording they're still convinced the threat is the one person holding a camera. It just never occurs to them that the street photographer is not only less likely to use what they capture against them, but is also far less capable of causing harm even if they wanted to.
When every single thing you do is put under a microscope you will be found guilty of nearly anthing. It will be possible to construct a believable number of crimes that you commited from circumstantial evidence and/or the pile of minor offenses citizens commit every day.
The american system would defacto flip into "you are guilty, we just need to find out of what." and this becomes a way to control and witchhunt a population into silence and complaince.
If it's only that though, how is it different from someone just writing down what you said?
If you’re really paranoid, you can build yourself a small Faraday room. It’s not that difficult. It’s also sometimes possible to buy used telco equipment sheds that come pre-shielded, they are popular with radio nerds.
The audio is not recorded.
It is in no way settled law especially in places with 2 party consent laws like Florida or California. Nevermind Oregon. Or the Europe. A cursory search suggests France's laws have some teeth to them.
It also doesn't address the inadvertent listening problem.
I don't even know how this is supposed to work e.g., in states with call recording legislation, let alone any new legislation. It feels utterly appalling that every Apple watch could theoretically be recording all surroundings now.
we have entropy to fight, so the margins have always been small,and with narso/nialists running things it gets nasty while they seek scapegoats for the contradictions they have created
It absolutely can be a problem when used for organizational or ideological gain - e.g., when used by state, religion, business, or political group to spread propaganda, suppress opposition, unjustly favor an in-group, etc.
The classic case of using mass surveillance to help a burgeoning theocratic or fascist state is a pretty standard example.
It is very easy to take the philosophical stance where every concept can be totally detached from the incentives it creates and the social dynamics it is part of. It is easy to take that stance, but it is very hard to use that stance to explain reality, because reality plays by more complex rules.
Please, always consider the status quo and the incentives involved instead of stating the surveillance equivalent of "weapons don't kill, people do".
NSA is allowed to collect any information about non-U.S. citizens outside U.S. and there are some limitations to collection of information about U.S. citizens outside U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
The US Constitution applies to people in the US, by the way, not just citizens.
My friend, if there's a reporter standing behind you, it could end up on the nightly news. And it's been that way forever. Certainly, a plethora of terrifyingly broad data collection greatly exacerbates the problem, but it's not a new problem.
> bla bla bla...Amazon Echo...listening in on us without our knowledge or consent. I've lost track of how many times I've experienced or heard others...discussing a particular topic...and then as soon as they get on Facebook...they see posts and ads featuring the very topic they were discussing.
There are lots of real problems with surveillance tech, but the stuff about smart speakers specifically is still a dumb conspiracy theory. People are CONSTANTLY testing the hardware in these things and watching network activity. They really are not listening to you, and blindly repeating this claim greatly harms your credibility.
> bla bla bla...George Orwell envisioned in his dystopian novel 1984
Okay, new rule, these articles need to pick at least one other dystopian novel. There are so many. What's wrong with Fahrenheigh 451, where the government had everyone look out their doors in a mass manhunt? That's a good one! Use it to talk about Ring cameras or something.
It's a matter of scale. Now everybody with a device is a reporter.
That all said, as a technologist in the past I could say "of course they aren't recording you and data mining your conversations" because that's obviously an expensive and complicated proposition when much cheaper forms of data mining exist. But with AI advancements I think that calculus could change - the systems that could do this are already being built for other reasons; the main reason to not do it is cost but that's being eroded.
Can't tell if this is meant to be ironic or not. Are you seriously comparing a future consumer product to be potentially sold in the hundreds of millions with TV news reporters?
That's the most HN spin I've seen this year
I argue that this is a false equivalence. When the scale of something changes by an order of magnitude (or multiples thereof), it’s no-longer the same problem/circumstance.
We know for certain that they do listen to us even when they shouldn't and send that data https://www.techradar.com/news/your-smart-speaker-could-be-a...
We also know that there have been multiple instances of employees and low paid contractors listening to people having sex and talking about very personal things.
I don't think concerns over smart speakers spying on us qualifies as a "conspiracy theory". People looking for a conspiracy theory are better off digging into how this happened https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/amazon-alexa-c...
If our devices were never listening to us in secret things like audio beacons wouldn't have been invented https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-th...