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“Our privacy is disappearing” is a valid concern.
“Megacorporations are conspiring to harvest advertising data from millions of consumers through the continuous, unadulterated processing of recorded audio, recorded without their consent” is, well, a conspiracy.
There is no physical and empirical evidence that suggests this. I’ve asked multiple times in this post for direct empirical evidence of advertising companies hijacking consumer devices to record you without your consent, explaining why it should be easy and trivial to detect if it were the case. All I’ve gotten so far was moving the goalposts, fear mongering about late-stage capitalism, pre-emptive special pleading, “well the government said it was happening with some other tech (even though we’re not supposed to trust the government)” and anecdotes.
I’ve challenged the objectivity of the anecdotes presented to me, because “my wife and I talked about buying electric blinds in the car and suddenly we got ads for electric blinds” is not scientific. Because I’m interested in the core, objective truth of the situation, not someone’s over-aggrandized and biased interpretation of it.
This is the second time someone has called me “naive.” Critical thinking is not naive: it forms the literal cornerstone of our modern society. To imply otherwise is the same type of dismissive thinking used to perpetuate these conspiracies — from companies listening to your every word, to crystals healing you, to doctors scamming you via cancer treatments.
You are right that there is concern for privacy. When it reaches the point of living in abject anxiety and fear of every electronic device you will ever own in the future because of an irrational and frankly schizotypal belief that they’re all listening to you… that’s simply not healthy for the mind. That is wariness brought to an illogical extreme.
I got over that fear so long ago when I sat down and actually thought about the practicality of the whole thing, and I’m glad that I have a healthier state of mind because of it. Meanwhile, this thinking continues to prevail in the privacy “community” and be parroted by major figureheads and “leaders.”
What this community needs is actual accountability to thoroughly scrutinize and dismantle bullshit beliefs, not fostering even more paranoia. That’s the line I draw.
I mean, I get what you’re saying. I’m not the person that was claiming 100% this without a doubt exists. I was just talking about my experience in nearly signing away the right to allow them to record surreptitiously at any time. I don’t know exactly what they’re looking for. and you’re right, unending recording is absolutely not happening. But signing away the right for them to record however they want in the future is just as bad.
I live alone. If they were recording all the time it’d definitely be one huge, mostly silent file of me sometimes making noises at my cat and then music or tv sounds.it’d be pointless. I’m not claiming they’re recording nonstop. It wasn’t me that said it. But my signing away their right to do so is 100% problematic. They don’t have to be recording all the time FOR it to be problematic. I’m not claiming they’re using unique, multi-word phrases to wake up/initiate recording to sell me blinds.
But how many times have we heard law enforcement has gotten warrantless access to customers’ data brought companies? It doesn’t stop until it’s exposed—and even then I do not doubt that it continues after the public outcry has died with the news cycle. I mean, just this week we heard about pharmacies just handing out medical records whenever asked. The cops have been just acting as private enterprise and are customers in the data-trading market. So they’re warrantlessly accessing all that really weird specific private data. They’re ClearviewAI’s customer for facial recognition data.
It’s not at all illogical to read the privacy policy, see I’m signing away the right to record at any time, look at articles like these, and have cause for concern. I get it, you’re saying we would know immediately if we were being recorded based on empirical evidence in our data usage. But what I’m saying is the stars are aligning in troubling ways. I’m not claiming constant surveillance. I’m saying we are signing away all rights to any privacy, data mining and trading is a massive industry that exists and is abused by law enforcement, law enforcement itself operates in super problematic ways, capitalism has bred vampiric companies hat are extracting as much money as they can from our increasingly free-flowing data.
My concern is broad and overarching. I’m not claiming constant recording. You might be confusing my conversation with another you’ve had ITT. But I’m 100% uncomfortable signing away those rights, and I’m sure we are headed for much worse. I’m inclined to take part in the pearl clutching and fear mongering (yes, I know these two phrases have negative connotations) when articles like this are discussed because we are UNDER-alarmed with the loss of our privacy. So I say we DO get people riled up over this because we’ve let WAY TOO MUCH slide for way too long. We neee to be getting our collective ire up over the loss of privacy, and if we need to use unfounded claims of the POSSIBILITY for them to be doing this AT THE SAME TIME that we’re signing away all rights to privacy, then fine. Set off the fire alarm for the noxious fart that is the unfounded claim in this article.
Because we desperately need to do something.
That’s a fair stance to have. I agree that the general trend of privacy violations across all industries is concerning, and it’s reasonable to extrapolate that it’s going to get worse. At the same time, it’s important to gauge what is presently possible in order for these extrapolations to be reasonable, so we can appropriately prepare for what these advertising corporations would do next.
For example, I think it’s very likely that the government and megacorporations will collude further to harvest as much personal data and metadata in the name of “national security” — see the revelation that the government gag-ordered Google and Apple to keep hush about the harvesting of metadata from push notifications. I don’t think, even with the advancements in AI, that we will have smart speaker and phone companies deploying a dystopian, horrifying solution of mass surveillance to a scale that would make even the CCP blush. Maybe it would be possible within the next 50 years, but not now with how expensive AI software/hardware is right now, and especially not in the past.
In principle, I do agree that riling up people through outrageous claims of privacy violations is a good thing purely to spread the message, but I think the strongest weapon we have for actual change is legal precedent. We need a court to strictly and firmly tell these companies, and companies in the future, and government agencies looking to infringe upon our rights, that harvesting the private, sensitive information of its users without consent is objectively wrong. A court case where the factual basis of the situation is dubious at best (for example, the context of this whole “marketing company is listening to you” claim is confusing and questionable) isn’t going to help us here, because these companies with handsomely-paid lawyers are just going to say “well, that’s not what the situation factually is, it’s <thing that is technically true but we’re saying this to specifically twist things so that the judge/jury believes us instead>.”