WTF!! When did we land in the middle of a Black Mirror episode?
I'm half convinced the first run of the LHC split the timeline and we've landed in the evil one.
At least a decade ago! The first TVs with Automatic Content Recognition shipped in 2013[0]. There was also a brief panic in 2024 about air fryers spying on people[1].
And of course practically every website you visit is doing a full session recording with mouse movements and key presses captured.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/air-fryer...
I worked at a major media buyer agency “big 5” in advanced analytics; we were a team of 5-10 data scientists. We got a firehose on behalf of our client, a major movie studio, of search of their titles by zip code from “G”.
On top of that we had clean roomed audience data from “F” of viewers of the ads/trailers who also viewed ads on their set top boxes. Basically any internet connected device you get is probably doing whatever it can to sniff mac addresses of your network at the least.
From a previous comment of mine:
> … my Insignia TV (best buy store brand) with fire tv built in is basically unusable. Echoing a previous comment I made too, about “smart tvs” and the “streaming sticks”: Hey, have you ever thought of why even the $149 Black Friday loss-leader no-name-brand TVs all have Amazon Fire, Roku, or are now "Smart" in some way? Certainly isn't because they need to incentivise you to connect it to the internet so it acts as a Nielsen-esq measurement device of all media you view on the screen via digital fingerprints that exist in all commercial media and advertisements. [1][2]
Doesn't Google basically make this kind of data public? I know I've seen maps by state of what people are searching for, this is barely different.
Point being, it seems absurd to compare this to snooping on people's private networks by third parties
And yes, it's for the reasons those of us who have been in the tech field for a while would guess: it's "smart". It comes preloaded with apps for several streaming services, from which it surely gets a cut. It probably displays ads if allowed to connect to the internet. No doubt it reports what you watch.
Well yeah at the very least, that’s Google Analytics and/or similar alternatives.
Most individual websites outside of Google/Facebook/Amazon don’t get any data other than what you do on their website, so it doesn’t seem quite as creepy to me as a device on your home network port scanning and sniffing other traffic.
Google and Facebook can and do ‘spy’ a lot, of course, but otherwise the browser does protect you from most trivial spying by random sites. Not that that’s reason to feel any safer; the few people actually spying on what you do everywhere on the web are the ones with the most resources. This is all going to get way weirder with AI logs, I’m guessing.
And the first store clerks at the time that shout that "all people have agreed on that, period, complaints are non appropriate because society decided".
A small step for senseless humanity, a giant leap for the beast with big promises (that we are still seeing in development).
World only survives, in realities where this particular creature in containment is alive. I’ll see if I can dig it up.
> Reactive Action: None taken; event fully consistent with long-term probability models.
heh. love scp humor.
But thanks for an hour-long break from work nevertheless.
SCP Wiki should itself be classified an Euclid-level threat (TV Tropes is obviously Keter class).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...
The EFF, Doctorow, et. al. were warning us that this was going to happen, over and over again for a really long time. Then they were saying it was beginning to happen for a really long time. Well guess what, the thing they were saying was going to happen happened!
People can work around patents, or pay for licensing them etc, if they really want to do something.
With just a little bit of interaction with the modern internet, the profiles created are stunningly accurate. Age, gender, political ideology, favorite food, relationship status, how many kids you have.
All this stuff gets slowly collected, aggregated and shared amongst data brokers.
People would care so much more if they knew just how invasive advertising actually is. All to try and convince you to drink one more coke or grab one more cheeseburger.
Maybe I should be port scanning it to make sure?
330M people in the country, you can run that entirely though a remote FBI office.
and the people using the data are gonna be the local cops; FBI ain't flying out to chase a couple of basic-ass assault charges or thefts.
email snooping, hand full of highway cameras at known bottlenecks, border crossings -- these are abstractions to most people. the flock cameras in their neighborhood are not, and cannot be absractions.
If people didn't care then why do so many companies have to coerce/deceive users into using their product?
Convenience my ass - the alternative to "convenience" is not participating in modern society, which isn't a decision at all.
Ahem
This depends on the country:
- In Germany, many people are very suspicious about such privacy invasions.
- In Singapore, on the other hand, people seem to very accepting of public surveillance if it serves public safety.
- In China, of course, public surveillance is also huge (at least in the big cities). I don't know how Chinese citizens think about that.
And thanks to surveillance, you never will.
I'd convergence was about 10 years back. Whenever the David Cameron pig story broke.
We really need laws protecting consumers from "data collection for advertising". It should be a default no with a requirement for explicit opt-in /and with no legal way for companies to charge less for the advertising model/. In fact, customers who agree to the advertising model should be able to get profit sharing revenue.
Sadly the real answer is much less dramatic: we did this entirely to ourselves, voluntarily, purely out of lazily taking the path of least resistance offered us by companies that don't have our best interests in mind.
Lovey example: https://frescocooks.com/platform/marketing-and-engagement
Air Fryers selling data: https://abc7news.com/post/certain-air-fryers-app-connected-a...
Student in NZ protesting it: https://www.consumer.org.nz/consumer-rights-and-campaigns/da...
Hope your TV isn't connected to the internet: https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/tv-spying-yes-h...
The first thing that Meta did after Brexit was moving its UK's user data to the US.
The FUD (never laughter) came from the scummy US ad-tech industry; the people whos very salleries depend on invading our privacy.
You will find many of them posting (and downvoting GDPR posts) here on HN to spread their FUD.
April 29, 2016. It explains so much.
"Smart" devices have been pulling this shit for years. If you're surprised by this you weren't paying attention!
The majority of people just chose to turn their blind eye towards those developments and dismiss the warnings as conspiracy theories.