Showing posts with label spying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spying. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

I’ve Created a Monster!; Slate, May 22, 2017

Cory Doctorow, Slate; 

I’ve Created a Monster!



"I’m a Facebook vegan. I won’t even use WhatsApp or Instagram because they’re owned by Facebook. That means I basically never get invited to parties; I can’t keep up with what’s going on in my daughter’s school; I can’t find my old school friends or participate in the online memorials when one of them dies. Unless everyone you know chooses along with you not to use Facebook, being a Facebook vegan is hard. But it also lets you see the casino for what it is and make a more informed choice about what technologies you depend on...

Your mobile device, your social media accounts, your search queries, and your Facebook posts— those juicy, detailed, revelatory Facebook posts—contain everything the NSA can possibly want to know about whole populations, and those populations foot the bill for its gathering of that information.

The adjacent possible made Facebook inevitable, but individual choices by technologists and entrepreneurs made Facebook into a force for mass surveillance. Opting out of Facebook is not a personal choice but a social one, one that you brave on your own at the cost of your social life and your ability to stay in touch with the people you love.

Frankenstein warns of a world where technology controls people instead of the other way around. Victor has choices to make about what he does with technology, and he gets those choices wrong again and again. But technology doesn’t control people: People wield technology to control other people."

Friday, May 12, 2017

'Echo Is Not Spying On You,' Amazon Lawyer Declares; Inside Counsel, May 12, 2017

C. Ryan Barber, Inside Counsel; 

'Echo Is Not Spying On You,' Amazon Lawyer Declares


"We designed the Echo devices very intentionally to only listen when spoken to … and also be incredibly conspicuous when it is listening,” [Ryan] McCrate said, referring to the ring of LED lights that flash when Alexa perks up.

McCrate’s brief remarks on the panel sounded at times like a promotional pitch touting the lengths the company took to protect consumer privacy. The Echo, he said, was inspired by Star Trek—and Amazon knew that its customers would be familiar with a virtual assistant as a science-fiction concept. But the company, he added, also realized there would be “well-founded” concerns about a product like the Echo."

Thursday, February 11, 2016

The internet of things: how your TV, car and toys could spy on you; Guardian, 2/10/16

Sam Thielman, Guardian; The internet of things: how your TV, car and toys could spy on you:
"Can your smart TV spy on you? Absolutely, says the US director of national intelligence. The ever-widening array of “smart” web-enabled devices pundits have dubbed the internet of things [IoT] is a welcome gift to intelligence officials and law enforcement, according to director James Clapper.
“In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” Clapper told the Senate in public testimony on Tuesday.
As a category, the internet of things is useful to eavesdroppers both official and unofficial for a variety of reasons, the main one being the leakiness of the data. “[O]ne helpful feature for surveillance is that private sector IoT generally blabs a lot, routinely into some server, somewhere,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That data blabbing can be insecure in the air, or obtained from storage.”"

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Some Bot to Watch Over Me; New York Times, 2/19/14

Steven Kurutz, New York Times; Some Bot to Watch Over Me:
"No parent wants a child smoking pot in the den with a gang of delinquents while he or she is at work. Still, is it a good thing that parents can so effortlessly watch children who are at home and unsupervised?
Torin Monahan, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the co-author of “SuperVision,” a book about surveillance in society, said that today’s youth are almost inured to being monitored, particularly when it comes to social media. But the justifications for doing so in this case are questionable, he said, because they are fear-based. And because of that there are developmental implications: “We don’t allow youth as much agency as perhaps they need to develop identities fully apart from their families.”
“Invariably people will spy on family members,” Mr. Monahan added. “I worry it could undermine trust relationships in families.”
Adam Sager, a security-industry veteran and one of the creators of Canary, disagrees with that assessment.
“The way we look at it — and we feel strongly about this — we believe Canary brings families and people closer,” Mr. Sager said."