Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
the thing 1984 got wrong is that people are willingly buying their own (multiple) telescreens and happily submitting their entire life to the party
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relevant webcomic contrasting 1984 and brave new world, which is insightful, but doesn’t include the reality that we’re literally living in both novels’ universes
Give me brave new world all day - it would be vastly preferable to whatever this shit is.
Definitely. A world where people are happy and healthy and live basically fulfilling lives. There are a few fanatics who opt out, and they’re unhappy. Go figure.
Unfortunately most people just don’t fucking care, or even consider it an issue.
Someone in my local HA community proudly shared how they had been able to use AWS face recognition with their own cams so they didn’t need to run face recognition locally…fucking absurd to experience someone tech-savvy willingly hand over these things and recommending others to do it too.
As a working dad with kids, I like my doorbell cam. My self hosted, non-cloud, local only doorbell cam that is.
My f’ing camera feeds are mine.
But what if some stranger loses their dog? You could have helped, but NOoOOOOooooo you had to be selfish with your privacy you MONSTER.
Correct. My database of my neighbors faces and biometric data are MINE. I am its rightful guardian
Well, cross the wrong street once and now you’re in somebody else’s neatly AI analyzed, uploaded to remote corporate servers and then handed to the government camera feeds…
The world is a joke. Everyone is “entitled” to their privacy, but it isn’t massively illegal to just have a camera running somewhere 24/7 or even recording in public with a phone.
I don’t use anything cloud based and much of my shit isn’t even allowed out to the internet.
It’s a drop in the ocean, for too many say “But it’s sooooo convenient and I’ve got nothing to hide” and open up all they got. Share camera’s with amazon, email address book with facebook etc. not realizing nor caring I make an appearance in their instances too and I DO mind.
“I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie. A colloquial fib we feel compelled to utter as a mock defense, like asserting innocence will assuage suspicion.
We all have something to hide. Probably many, many things to hide. Even just in the narrow context of the law, there are hundreds of thousands of laws that apply to any one of us at any given time, and you are almost certainly breaking some of them without even knowing it.
Personal security through privacy is so very, very important. I wish more people could see that.
“I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie
And easy to debunk. Take their phone, ask the pin. 9 out of 10 won’t. Open bank app ask pin again. You won’t get that far.
Let me put things this way:
- Hands up anybody who doesn’t believe that, if they can, Health Insurance companies won’t mine the shit out of your purchase data and Car Insurance mine the shit out of your driving data to try and fine tune your risk group in their models and find out any change if your conditions that impact their bottom line (and dump you if they can if you switch to a high risk group)
Even if one’s relaxed about data mining of private data for the purpose of serving you custom adverts, there are plenty of other use cases which can actually cost you money, not to mention the risk when the Authorities start running crime-predictive models sold to them by slimy Tech Investors with high enough rates of false positive that you run the risk of being tagged a “Terrorism” for some stupid shit like buying more bleech than the average person.
Even you think you’re above board on everything and about as boring and uninteresting a person as possible, there are plenty of ways in which others known everything about you might come around and bit you in the ass in very concrete ways.
people that tell me “they have nothing to hide” understand where I am coming from in terms of privacy when I ask them to write down their social security number on a piece of paper with their debit/credit card information
If you have nothing to hide, would you please consider installing 4K cameras in every corner of your house that publicly livestream your every action and also remove your front door?
Recent tv’s became thin client’s. Turn it on and it first need to download the app('s)
It may seem like a drop in the ocean now, but if things ever got to the point where we’re being divided up into groups, you might be oddly left out of every group. It’s not hard to de-Google, de-Meta, inconvenient at times, but maybe it pays dividends down the road.
The trouble with living in a panopticon is that becomes suspicious to not be on a list.
We’re already seeing that where people are suspicious when you don’t have Facebook or whatever.
What “global backlash”?
If there had been such a thing European citizens and companies would have not have spent the next decade putting their data in America’s hands and now be scrambling to decouple as American goes from Hard Neoliberal At Home Fascist Abroad to Full-on Fascists Everywhere.
For people paying attention back then it was painfully obvious back then that one could not trust one’s data in the hands of American companies or in fact any companies from a 4-eyes (meanwhile expanded to 7-eyes) country and yet the rush for putting personal and corporate data in American cloud systems were insane (not helped by the EU approving the US as a “safe haven” for data, something so outrageous after the the Snowden Revelations that I bet a lot of people involved were either customers of Epstein’s “services” or corrupt as fuck).
In fact, that massive surveillance cooperative operation expanding from 4 countries to 7 is also a pretty good indication that there wasn’t really a “global backlash”, otherwise countries like New Zeeland would be wary of joining it as it would get them cut out of international data networks and agreements.
Only countries like China seem to have taken the whole thing seriously and setup their own local stack of consumer and corporate data sharing and storing, and that seems to have been driven at least partly by wanting to do exactly the same as the 4-eyes countries were doing.
It’s kinda hilarious that propaganda in the US talked about “EU is always watching you” as a part of the propaganda against government regulations. While some places over there are starting to see the rise of fascist parties, I think awareness of the US’s fall into fascism is hurting their cause as people are a little more aware than they might otherwise be.
And while I don’t generally like any government monitoring, if I had to choose, I’d choose EU monitoring over US monitoring any day, considering how our democracy has long been secondary to capitalism (with our own special twist of that old socialist phrase, for us “Taking the resources of the many to concentrate in the hands of the few ultra-wealthy”)
Our oligarchs have corrupted the entire system, and our government allows us just enough to survive while funelling all the resources up to the oligarchs. They have more than they could possibly spend, and they still demand more More MORE M O R E.
Back to cameras: In this case, more data, more control, more intimidation, more fear.
The only place in the EU with surveillance anywhere as bad as the US was Britain and they aren’t in the EU anymore.
And this is just State surveillance.
When it comes to Private Sector surveillance, nowhere in the EU are things anywhere close to as bad in the US since EU countries have far tighter Privacy regulations and even outside the EU-wide regulations most countries have had pretty strict Medical and Banking data regulations for quite a while.
That Propaganda in the US is a mix of straight bullshit about government surveillance in Europe - which in reality is not much of a thing outside dictatorships or Britain - and the insiduious take of, anchored on the Hard-Neoliberal Fable that Public Is Bad, Private Is Good, not even considering private sector surveillance and its impact, when that’s a far worse problem in the US than in Europe.
Americans gate the government but live companies Europe us the opposite.
What “global backlash”?
Just another day of headline gore. Anything to get you to click past the headline.
I never for that. Why would countries become so dependent on another one. Like the west would crumple rich now if America vanished.
It is fascinating to me that the FBI desperately wanting to pretend that they’re relevant and doing actual investigative work in the Guthrie case stupidly confirmed that corporations are not only spying on us all, but feeding the data into federal databases for access without a warrant or any meaningful oversight.
Y’all, it’s wild that so much of what your dumbass, Infowars-obsessed grandparents told you is literally true and provable now.
A few people have said it, but I’m really glad my tech is always a few generations behind and I never bought into voice assistants or smart home technology. And I keep my phone in a faraday bag when not in use. That probably makes it somewhat harder for them to spy on me logistically.
My dad rips his name out of junk mail and shreds it. He doesn’t want his name tied to his address, which is ironic in the first place, given that he’s already getting junk mail. He’s been worried about hiding his identity, address, cars, etc from some unknown surveillance entity based around Red Scare beliefs. Still, a few steps short of foil hat types.
Then he went and got cloud-based cameras. He’s clueless about smartphone privacy already. He resembles his friends in his cohort. They protested “leftist government surveillance” and then showed me that they’d will invite mystery surveillance in with the slightest promise of convenience.
That’s why I only buy Chinese.
Even if they surveill they have no reason to hurt meAnd you’re absolutely certain they don’t sell the data back to US brokers or even authorities directly?
That’s a very short-sighted and unimaginative position.
Lmao. Idgaf. I get 0 money from ring income. Maybe they should stop fing me first.
You could, idk, maybe not buy prepackaged surveillance camera that rely on someone else’s computer to work.
Well ya, obviously. And I do that. But for most people that’s not an option. They just gonna get what they have available from Amazon and works via wifi
If I have to choose between buying into a US run surveillance state or buying into a Chinese run surveillance state, I choose to buy neither.
That’s why I only buy Chinese.
dude, buying people is illegal!
;-)
As if this hadn’t been obvious the very moment they started connecting their massive amount of same model cameras to servers under their own regime (aka " the cloud"). And as if nobody told you so.
Still, the more idiots that learn, the more of a chance we have at some sort of pushback or perhaps a slowing of it, maybe.
I loved that ad, it instantly brought the point I’ve been making for years home to the whole Super Bowl party.
Don’t have to force surveillance on people. They’ll literally pay money for it.
Imagine that 🤣
If anyone wonders why there are so many scams, it’s easy! The average consumer is in general are short sighted, gullible and naive. Of course there will be plenty who will to exploit that.
The Machiavellian part of me thinks Ring screwed up by not raising the stakes. Search Party and the way they advertised it makes you go "awww’ when you see the golden retriever and then “wait, WHAT?” when they show all their Ring doorbells going full surveillance mode in locating the missing dog.
A lengthier ad showing a pedophile being tracked down and arrested by law enforcement mid-abduction, their victim rescued, then the nonce being served justice may have had a more positive response.
I mean, “think of the children” has been the perfect strawman argument to justify mass surveillance, after all…
Sometimes stuff like this makes me at least a tiny bit happy to be living in a 3rd world shithole where the country isnt seen as prime-quality consumer habitat.
We need legislation with teeth before they manage to get this in every house. It’s going to happen. Your phone, TV, doorbell, car, crosswalks and street signs are all going to be recording and tracking you eventually. Just recognize that’s going to happen no matter what, and get real oversight and rules into place now. If we wait until it’s all locked, the ruling party will never let it end.
We need legislation with teeth
He said, while living under a dictatorship.
The contradictions in the US are crazy.
We’re living in this enormous Panopticon - a massive digital fishbowl - for tracking and harassing and arresting lawful citizens. But you can kidnap an Olympics announcer’s mom, live on camera, and no one can find you. No one can catch you. Even as Ring runs “Find My Dog With AI” commercials during the Super Bowl.
What someone did that?
Nancy Guthrie, 84-year-old mother of NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reportedly abducted from her Tucson, Arizona home on February 1, 2026,
What’s with that crude 2x4 protection assembly? You’re setting up a permanent camera fixture, and THAT’S what you use for protection? What’s it for, a junkyard? You couldn’t paint it, at least?
Planned Obsolescence, baby! You don’t make money running the Panopticon if your clients aren’t constantly paying 10x the asking price to endlessly repair and replace your shitty TEMU knock-off surveillance kits.
