504 karma · joined May 9, 2013
Palantir, Anduril, telcos, and more are contributing to the erosion of our privacy.
It’s been 2 decades since we learned about the secret NSA room at AT&T. 13 years since the Snowden revelations. This is not new and we need to be vigilant.
We learned about the government’s domestic surveillance programs from Snowden over 13 years ago.
About ten years ago, I learned about fiber optic and WiFi sensing techniques that would make the hair stand up on the back of most people’s necks.
14 years ago, stories were written about a pregnant teen whose parents were sent coupons from Target for baby items, because Target had automatically marked the girl as pregnant because of her shopping habits.
Computers, vehicles, and software that we pay for have so many built in tracking mechanisms that I think circumventing them would make you more of a surveillance target at this point than not.
I know people try to rationalize the whole “I said something near my phone and Facebook gave me ad impressions for it” as simply the algorithm finding a strong signal in your browsing data, but I’m fully convinced that Meta apps are listening on iOS, even with the screen locked.
Those who enable these sorts of things should feel shame. You’d have to be a complete asshole to do this stuff to fellow humans just for money.
There were many religions before the Abrahamic ones.
Do we need Facebook? Do we need Instagram? Do we need deepfakes and AI music?
Interesting.
We can each play this game.
What the government probably _should_ do is begin establishing a record of manufacturers/vendors which indicates how secure their products have been over a long period of time with an indication of how secure and consumer-friendly their products should be considered in the future. This would take the form of something like the existing travel advisories Homeland Security provides.
Should you go to the Bahamas? Well, there's a level 2 travel advisory stating that jet ski operators there get kinda rapey sometimes.
Should you buy Cisco products? Well, they have a track record of deciding to EOL stuff instead of fixing it when it's expensive or inconvenient to do the right thing.
Should you buy Lenovo products? Well, they're built in a country that regularly tries and succeeds in hacking our infrastructure and has a history of including rootkits in their laptops.
A long-term tactic of our adversaries is to capture network traffic for later decryption. The secrets in the mass of packets China assumedly has in storage, waiting for quantum tech, is a treasure trove that could lead to crucial state, corporate, and financial secrets being used against us or made public.
AI being able to leverage quantum processing power is a threat we can't even fathom right now.
Our world is going to change.
It is sad, though, that they couldn't stand firm about what's right and become a building block for long-term world peace.