General

All my appliances are dumb, so I don't have to worry about them reporting back home.

But yes as an example, people have gotten in trouble from Alexa recordings. I've read about recordings being used to catch a cheating spouse, or as evidence in court. If it exists, it can be subpoenaed. Especially if it's in your own home where you would have agreed to the terms of use (so it could be used as evidence even in states that prohibit recording without consent).

Of course the response of "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" pops up whenever privacy haters get into stories like these. But it's not just about "not doing anything wrong". There are plenty of perfectly good things someone can do that they may not necessarily want everyone to know about. For safety reasons (what times of day they typically are or aren't home makes it easier to plan a break in); for medical reasons (which there are many and varied reasons you may not want some conditions made public); or personal reasons (not everyone wants to advertise every time they have had an argument with a spouse, as that could further exacerbate things).

99% or more of the time though, the spying is just to collect data that helps then sell you to advertisers in a more effective way, and none of the potential issues above will come into play. Because why just sell you a product when we can then harvest you as a product to sell to advertisers?

Sadly this is just most devices that connect to the internet, even social media platforms. The biggest money maker is data. Roombas, doorbells, cameras, tvs, phones, tablets, watches you name it. It probably record or collects data about you so the company can sell it off to advertisers.

benstylus wrote:

So, I think it is important to note just how Alexa works for those paranoid about this. It doesn't record anything by default. In fact, it doesn't even know what you are saying, by design, until the activation keyword is triggered locally. Anything AFTER that may be sent to the cloud to be processed, sure.

The only cases I could find were related to those keywords being part of the recording. For example, there was a murder case where they used these commands to help piece things together. A guy killed his wife. So, they have the wife saying "Alexa, volume 3" and then him saying "Alex stop" later -- along with some other things. But all were with the Alexa keyword, of course.

Without the keywords, there would be no recordings to worry about. Of course, you'd have to trust Amazon for that -- but LOTS of people have monitored their internet traffic for years and it certainly looks like it really does only send data after you specifically activate Alexa.

I searched and the only thing related to Alexa being used in a cheating situation that I could find is where a wife reviewed the latest keyword activation recordings and could hear another woman in the background of her husband using Alexa. So, yes, technically, Alexa recordings were used -- but only because someone purposefully activated Alexa.

So, to be clear, Alexa doesn't record anything except when you trigger it to do so basically.

That being said... Wyze had an interesting bug recently where anyone going to the web site to view their cameras were suddenly shown someone ELSE'S live camera feed! It was some kind of weird caching problem on their site, but it was a bit insane. Everyone was viewing this women walking around her dining room for a bit. Could have been MUCH worse, of course...

I gave up ages ago on privacy ... it doesn't exist. Your phone is listening 24/7 and always on you. Might as well let everything else hear/see as ultimately, it means better targetted advertising, and/or better products.

My whole house is always on. I have ~95 or so devices on my home network. I can whisper alexa/hey google, and it'll be picked up in any room. I swear, it's not a problem ...

I look forward to moving and getting all smart appliances.

Noticed that I was running low on my phone's internal storage. I looked at my apps and was shocked to see my browsers were eating up about 6 GB in cache, and then another 2 GB in cookies from every site I've ever been to, even if it was just once.

You aren't kidding that privacy is dead.

I cleared them all and disabled all cookies in my browsers (whitelisted gtz and a few other sites I use). Because unless I'm signing in or shopping or something you really don't need to put a cookie out there.

For the record, GTZ's cookies were measured in bytes. Most others were in Megabytes.

Let's see how this goes.

I thought about not doing it due to all the sites that have HEY, WE WANT TO TRACK YOU UNLESS YOU REJECT OUR COOKIES pop-ups, but even those don't ever seem to save my setting and keep popping those warnings up every time anyway so there's no point unless you just agree to take it where they want to give it to you.

I don't believe that privacy exists anymore. I wish I could give my kids a taste of 80s/90s life untethered by common place technology/social media.

Privacy is what you make of it on social media. If you are constantly sharing everything you do with the general public, that's you being an exhibitionist, not an invasion of privacy.

The ads on the other hand...

My buddy was a data architect at a firm that mined and sold data from our phones... Six years ago. Back then it was BATCRAP how much they knew about you. Got to see some of how they did it and how it's all sold in microsecond. Can only imagine how much worse it has gotten.

If you think anything you do on tech is remotely private, you're sorely mistaken. For me though, who cares? If it means I get better ads that are relevant to me, game on. Do they know my age, location, likes and dislikes? Yep. Does it matter? Nope. The amount of things that I've purchased due to targeted ads is pretty awesome. I wouldn't have ever known about them without it.

I, and pretty much all of us, aren't important enough that I care if my persona is well known. Ultimately our data molds advertising and advances in tech.

I just wish every website wasn't bloated with 82 ads these days. Feels like we're back to the old days with pop up windows all over the place.

Only time privacy matters to me personally, is logins/financial info. Crazy enough, only had a couple fraudulent attempts at credit cards, all resolved same day.

benstylus wrote:

I am baffled what so many people put online. Not isolated to a particular generation either. So many just don't care about what they put out there and the fact that this is all accounted for in background checks, is mind boggling. For the youth especially, they need to be taught the ramifications of improper social media use.

MrBean wrote:

This is the high price of free. Free social media, free email, free apps, free entertainment...

People might not like to hear it, but the truth is if you aren't paying for the product, you ARE the product.

benstylus wrote:

Absolutely. Yet now we're seeing the greed get even worse. Expect all social platforms to eventually charge for use soon enough.

I'm game to go back to IRC, ICQ, and GTZ chat! Reddit is really the only platform I care about, rest can (and should) die off.

MrBean wrote:

I think most of them know that will never fly now. The "free" mindset has just been so ingrained in people.

elonmuskspersonaldiaperfire.com mentioned they were going to charge new users $1 a year just to help scrub bots. But I don't think most people would even pay that nowadays.

I would happily pay something like $20 a year for a website I use on the regular if it meant I would stop being spammed up and down with intrusive ads everywhere, and that my information wasn't being sold to advertisers. Maybe as a perk you could get a cool avatar, sig, personal forum, and a subscriber icon. If only there was some site that let me do this...


5326196 was my old icq number. No idea how I still remember it, I haven't used it in about 20 years lol

It would be really interesting if a nonprofit social media site were able to take off and do well. If not nonprofit then at least one where the business model isn't data collection and advertising.

Edit: apparently icq is still around. I just logged in and it had my old contacts and everything. Kinda neat to see a few names I haven't thought about in years

Woah Woah wait, what, ICQ is still around and still has old data? Wow, I wonder if I can still login!

I was pretty surprised myself.

My kids have Snapchat and they keep pushing the paid subscription on it. However, I think they are really smart about it because the small sub service is full of stuff they really value like their snapscores, keeping conversations saved, etc. And it's like $1 or $2 a month. I definitely am NOT getting it for them but I thought that was very clever to get people off the 'i'm not paying for social media' habit.

Old tech did too. One of my previous employers banned a certain electronics manufacturer as someone found they put extra components in their products that allowed them to spy on companies. We're talking 90's here, maybe older.

And if you are carrying a smart phone something is listening. I was driving once and discussing lunch options and my phone, sitting untouched in the console, blurted out navigation to one of the options I said. I don't have any voice commands set up and it never did it again...

Do most new cars track your gps location? ...with no way to turn it off?

If you have OnStar or an app from the manufacturer that lets you monitor the car remotely from your phone, the vehicle is being tracked whenever it is on with no way of opting out. You had to opt-in when starting that service.

If you just have gps nav as part of the headunit, it's contained to the device.

bill wrote:

Surely that would be an advertised or subscription feature they would make you pay extra for... after all if you have automatic GPS on your car that makes it much easier to recover if stolen.

Unless it's enabled all the time and they just refuse to use it to your benefit unless you pay the fee. Which wouldn't surprise me at all.

bill wrote:

Absolutely

The one silver lining to all this is hopefully if someone is thinking about murdering someone else...they realize that will all the surveillance that it would be impossible and they don't try! :D :D

Sometimes publicity is the point. They aren't interested in getting away with it they want to go out in a blaze of glory

What if my car is thinking about murdering someone in a blaze of glory. Is there a way to turn that off?

bill wrote:

Get an electric. They blaze less gloriously

bill wrote:
I will definitely watch Christine tonight... Thanks

bill wrote:


Yes, it can easily be done but automotive manufacturers don't want the liability. Frankly I think it should be a many year requirement on top of the breathalyzer on the ignition for dui plea deals.

If AI is going to run car...it's just a matter of time anyway before we all metalhead anyway