It’s shit like this that is why we need consumer privacy right to own your own data laws.
It’s bad enough that the governments spy on you.
It’s absolutely abhorrent that individual companies owned by investors (who have an explicit drive to earn more money this quarter than they did last quarter) can spy on you to attempt to target and manipulate your buying preferences to spend more money on them.
This age of being spied upon is either going to become such a norm that it will be weird that people had issues with it in the future, or they’re finally going to fuck up some irrevocable way and make everybody wake up and realize that we don’t need every single motherfucker and who has a dollar in the game looking up our booty holes to determine what the fuck we just ate.
This age of being spied upon is either going to become such a norm that it will be weird that people had issues with it in the future
It’s like this now though. I’m apparently a total freak (outside of lemmy) for giving a shit about my privacy. I swear that everyone I know thinks I’m a conspiracy theorist. When I mentioned that Alexa listens to you when you’re not talking directly to it, I actually had someone laugh like it’s a totally absurd idea even though a two second search will bring up a million articles on it. Not to mention the lawsuits for when it spied on children.
People either don’t seem to care at all, or it’s just easier and more convenient to stick their heads in the sand. Which I guess is pretty typical for Americans at least. I will just never understand how anyone is ok with any of this.
Ima a bit of a hypocrit there. I prefer Siri, configured with push to talk, so it’s not always listening, it’s processed mostly on device, and it’s controlled by a company that’s not in the advertising business and markets their products on privacy.
…. But also having Alexa listening in in every room is so damn convenient
Note to people who didn’t think there was new features in Apple’s recent announcement: the new watch has enough CPU that they will now be doing voice processing on device for that as well
Most of us on here are a bit more technically minded than the general public, so we know how these things affect us. For your average person on the street though, nobody’s given a decent answer to the question ‘So what?’
‘The government knows where you live’
‘So what?’
‘The tech company knows what phone you have’
‘So what?’
‘Your ISP knows what sites you’ve visited’
‘So what?’
We know why these things can be bad, and how they might be used against us, but most people don’t, and the attempted explanations don’t get the point across. I’m not going to pretend to have any answers, but until we can convince people that trading privacy for convenience is bad, things are not going to change.
It’s shit like this that is why we need consumer privacy right to own your own data laws.
It’s bad enough that the governments spy on you.
It’s absolutely abhorrent that individual companies owned by investors (who have an explicit drive to earn more money this quarter than they did last quarter) can spy on you to attempt to target and manipulate your buying preferences to spend more money on them.
This age of being spied upon is either going to become such a norm that it will be weird that people had issues with it in the future, or they’re finally going to fuck up some irrevocable way and make everybody wake up and realize that we don’t need every single motherfucker and who has a dollar in the game looking up our booty holes to determine what the fuck we just ate.
It’s like this now though. I’m apparently a total freak (outside of lemmy) for giving a shit about my privacy. I swear that everyone I know thinks I’m a conspiracy theorist. When I mentioned that Alexa listens to you when you’re not talking directly to it, I actually had someone laugh like it’s a totally absurd idea even though a two second search will bring up a million articles on it. Not to mention the lawsuits for when it spied on children.
People either don’t seem to care at all, or it’s just easier and more convenient to stick their heads in the sand. Which I guess is pretty typical for Americans at least. I will just never understand how anyone is ok with any of this.
I don’t disagree, but wouldn’t Alexa have to listen to you always, if only to be on the lookout for ‘hey Alexa’?
People just think it’s magic
Ima a bit of a hypocrit there. I prefer Siri, configured with push to talk, so it’s not always listening, it’s processed mostly on device, and it’s controlled by a company that’s not in the advertising business and markets their products on privacy.
…. But also having Alexa listening in in every room is so damn convenient
Note to people who didn’t think there was new features in Apple’s recent announcement: the new watch has enough CPU that they will now be doing voice processing on device for that as well
Most of us on here are a bit more technically minded than the general public, so we know how these things affect us. For your average person on the street though, nobody’s given a decent answer to the question ‘So what?’
‘The government knows where you live’ ‘So what?’
‘The tech company knows what phone you have’ ‘So what?’
‘Your ISP knows what sites you’ve visited’ ‘So what?’
We know why these things can be bad, and how they might be used against us, but most people don’t, and the attempted explanations don’t get the point across. I’m not going to pretend to have any answers, but until we can convince people that trading privacy for convenience is bad, things are not going to change.