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Coddled, Surveilled, and Monetized: How Modern Houses Can Watch You
Presto Vivace (882157) links to a critical look in Time Magazine at the creepy side of connected household technology. An excerpt: A modern surveillance state isn't so much being forced on us, as it is sold to us device by device, with the idea that it is for our benefit. ... ... Nest sucks up data on how warm your home is. As Mocana CEO James Isaacs explained to me in early May, a detailed footprint of your comings and goings can be inferred from this information. Nest just bought Dropcam, a company that markets itself as a security tool allowing you to put cameras in your home and view them remotely, but brings with it a raft of disquieting implications about surveillance. Automatic wants you to monitor how far you drive and do things for you like talk to your your house when you're on your way home from work and turn on lights when you pull into your garage. Tied into the new SmartThings platform, a Jawbone UP band becomes a tool for remotely monitoring someone else's activity. The SmartThings hubs and sensors themselves put any switch or door in play. Companies like AT&T want to build a digital home that monitors your security and energy use. ... ... Withings Smart Body Analyzer monitors your weight and pulse. Teddy the Guardian is a soft toy for children that spies on their vital signs. Parrot Flower Power looks at the moisture in your home under the guise of helping you grow plants. The Beam Brush checks up on your teeth-brushing technique.
Presto Vivaci adds, "Enough to make the Stasi blush. What I cannot understand is how politicians fail to understand what a future Kenneth Starr is going to do with data like this."
IMHO, anyone who implements this and gets burgled should have known better.
The spooks will also love this.
The Advertisers will be frothing at the mouth at the thought of getting access to this.
'Dave, as you seem to have spent the last hour sitting on the John, perhaps you might be interested in a padded seat for your 'throne'?'
etc etc etc
This is just getting silly. Our private lives are NOT FOR SALE (or Spying)
The more it can be used. For good or evil.
I always cringe a bit when I see the "put web cams in your house! For security!" commercials. It's just a mater of time until Xfinity or what not get's compromised and all those web cams you use to check your kids get used by other people... to "check your kids".
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I went to the hospital a while back and they started collecting all sorts of private data. They even insisted on getting a blood sample, probably for some kind of DNA database. Then, when the doctor left me alone for a minute I looked on the counter at his clipboard and there it was. The smoking gun. He had PAGES of information on me. So be warned, the government is already doing everything it can to monitor the population.
Sure, he did all kinds of dirt-gathering in order to try and impeach Clinton, but no one took him seriously. He lost a Supreme Court appointment, his case against Clinton was essentially turned into a laughingstock and ultimately thrown out. The only people who actually cared about the Monica Lewinsky affair were the people trying to use the case to score political points against Clinton and Starr himself - sort of like Benghazi today, except replace Ken Starr with John Boehner. I'm 90% sure the only reason Starr was even appointed as a special prosecutor was because he was the only person who would take a case like that.
Ken Starr was, and continues to be, a clown. Am I afraid of Ken Starr? No.
A better example would've been the NSA or FBI, who I'm sure could obtain and use data like this to incriminate people for actual crimes that could land them long prison sentences. The worst Ken Starr could ever do is accuse me of having sex.
If I remember my Popular Science correctly there are/were plans for toilets that can detect how healthy you are by examining your waste products. Pretty soon only the middle of the Pacific is going to be far enough away from surveillance.
The cows are always very receptive to free food and housing from their masters. Surely they must notice that others suddenly go missing, but as long as they are comfortable today tomorrow seems so far away and unimportant.
Humans claim to be far more intelligent but I don't get a chance to see them prove it very often.
Here, let me turn down the thermostat for you.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This is so scary! If somebody learns every detail of the motions I make when I brush my teeth, they will basically have all the info they need to turn me into a zombie servant of the NSA-corprotocracy! And now they also want to know the humidity in my house!? Goddamn it, didn't our founding fathers say that the moisture content of our residence shall not collected? I'm so outraged! Now excuse me while I upload all my photos, featuring everyone I've ever associated with, to Facebook.
You could just live in a regular house without all that crap.
Erm, in what spittle-flecked, buzzword-fueled delusion does *any* soi-disant 'businessperson' imagine that anyone would subject themselves to this? Even the clueless will be ripping this stuff out of their walls pronto once the (obviously irresistible) media sideshows get started.
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
I haven't bought any of this, don't know anyone (personally) who has bought any of this, and don't know why anyone would buy any of this.
I guess, however, some people may have more money than brains. I wish they would put it into Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Rockethub, instead of this crap.
"What I cannot understand is how politicians fail to understand what a future Kenneth Starr is going to do with data like this."
A heating tax ...
A sleeping tax
and if you don't pay the sleeping tax more than 178 days in a year, you are living elsewhere and you need to pay a secondary habitation tax.
....we've used one now for a while, and it is a great device (hardware), but the learning algos (software) need improvement, I think. Sometimes it learns too well and gets overly aggressive with predicted settings, making it difficult to re-train. Remote access is great.
Eventually, this type of information will be used to crack down on people who are exceeding their "energy quota" as energy becomes increasingly scarce and the carbon credit culture becomes increasingly fascist. People will be carted off for keeping their homes too cool in summer, too hot in winter, or having drafty windows, inadequate insulation, etc. And God forbid we build a nuclear reactor or fix our decrepit energy grid. Let's build more "green" wind farms, instead. Not that I'm bitter!
but your credit history, Hospitals Are Mining Patients' Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick
In the words of stallman and an innumerable mass of others, hackers must unite to make these new tools truly subservient to their owners. FitBit manufactures a vital signs system that has a GIT project designed to make the data yours, not the clouds. WiThings by default wishes to beam your data to a shared hosting server somewhere in europe, but dedicated hackers have worked to show users how that data can be intercepted and secured within the confines of the users home, for the users benefit, and no one elses. Virtually every other application, from home automation to thermal monitoring and control has a hackerspace alternative to the glitzy and well-marketed mainstream platform, especially DVR and home surveillance systems.
its incumbent for us as well as others to realize however that privacy and security from these devices is our soverign responsibility. If you choose home automation then ensure the applications and technologies you see fit to expose yourself and family to are held to an ethical standard of operation and always subservient to you, the user. here are a few options:
Instead of smartthings consider leviton home automation systems and invest a bit of time to learn how to install them. nothing has impressed my guests more than a room with futuristic proximity-based lighting controls.
be vocal about your electrical metering equipment. in my case I wrote a formal complaint to my power company about the digital meter that had been quietly installed at my home. The meter was removed and the old one returned to service.
instead of nest consider thermal controllers similar to johnson and honeywell but at a fraction of the cost on amazon. 1wire sensors, a raspberry pie and a relay board maintain the temperature in my home and garage
I have a camera system for the back yard and garage, but they relay to a PCI board and are stored, encrypted, in 30 day rotations. I transcode 10fps weekly's for occasional review over SSL into webm files.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Really, the only big problem I see here, is who and what is retaining data.
For most of us here, whipping up home brew solutions should be extremely easy infact. Raspberry PIs sell for $30 a piece. Get one for each room, along with some cheap sensors and webcams and wifi dongles, a cheap nas to store data on, and voila, at less than $100 a room you got a home brew smart home that records data locally and can be setup with some sort of master delete switch without a huge amount of effort.
functioning health care system. HR 676, Medicare for All
but increasingly I think he is correct, living in freedom means using free and open software.
I'm the biggest privacy nut there is... but figuring out when I'm coming and going? come on... 8am to 5pm I'm at work. Wow! You've totally just invaded my privacy!!!
No, the real issue is what the NSA is doing. They're reading my damned mail, listening to my calls. This story and others like it are just red herrings to make us think we're addressing privacy issues when all we're doing is changing how consumer products operate. I don't care if Google knows more about be so they can better target ads at me. The real problem is the information being collected by the government with the goal of capturing, imprisoning, torturing and even killing their targets.
Once the NSA is no longer an agency, I'll care about Google. Until then, if I'm concerned, I'll just not use their products. How do I "not use" the NSA?
Just ask them to quote you the price. Even if they hem and haw about the price "varying between labs, subject to insurance adjustments" etc, the question alone has been enough to get my doc/NP to back down repeatedly in dictating which tests I should get. And if they shine it on that easily, I'm pretty sure it was non-essential to begin with.
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
The funny thing is that people are not only complicit in having their rights taken away, they're PAYING to do so.
If I had fewer scruples, I'm sure I could find a way to make money off this as well.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
"fail to understand what a future Kenneth Starr is going to do with data like this"
What kind of idiocy is this?
Ken Starr? KEN FUCKING STARR?
Good grief! We have, TODAY, the fucking IRS actively infringing on the rights and liberties of law abiding actual fucking citizens, directed, and we ALL KNOW THIS, directed by the fucking PRESIDENT, and covered up by the Senate, by the AG, by the complicit media, by basically the entire fucking leftist establishment. We have coverup after coverup of the worst imperial president in the history of the free world being aided and abetted by these same organizations, running guns to Mexican cartels, incompetance at every level, dead ambasaddors, graft and corruption on a never before seen scale, the dismal failure of the ACA and on and on it goes. And you fucking asshole idiot liberal fuckity fucks are calling up the name KEN STARR to in some way warn your reader about the potential for state abuse of power?
ARE YOU ASSHOLES REALLY THIS FUCKING OBTUSE?
GOOD GREIF WE ARE SCREWED.
YOU STUPID STUPID FUCKING JERKS.
ARRRRGHHEEHHGHGHG!
Fuck you all.
I always feared Big Brother's spy camera would come to my house.
What I never even *dreamed* is that not only would we accept it when it came, but that we would voluntarily pay $500 for it and even hook it up to our cable box and home network so it could monitor that too.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
"What I cannot understand is how politicians fail to understand what a future Kenneth Starr is going to do with data like this."
They understand the thing, they just don't care at all.
What do these systems cost without the inbuilt subsidies that monetize your information?
I'm presuming they seem attractive to people generally because they seem to be inexpensive. Some of this low cost is due to the ever-decreasing costs of the hardware, both in terms of on-site devices (eg, cameras, sensors) and the back end "cloud services" that enable end-user analytics and web connectivity. But a lot of this cheapness seems to involve subsidies provided by monetizing the information they gather and selling it to third parties.
I'm curious what these services would cost if they were offered without any monetization. Would they be cheap enough to be appealing?
I'm mostly thinking of turnkey solutions, not DIY systems where people cobble together their own collection of hardware and software. These may be cheap in dollar cost outlay but if you factor in the cost of labor, time and expertise are pretty expensive and not available to most people.
In return for letting Google and who knows who else monitor every aspect of your life 24 hours a day, you can save yourself the enormous hassle of turning on a fucking light switch.
I call it the Internet of Things I'm Not Going To Buy. Ever.
GOD MY CELL PHONE CAN BE USED TO TRACK MY MOVEMENTS?!
What we need is a cell phone system that won't do that.
I'll bet that 80 percent of slash dotters don't understand how they work - at all, and that in order to work - at all, yeah, you are pretty much gonna be tracked.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I'm in my early 40's, and I'm just now seeing the Powers That Be (PTB) do and monitor things that I had only envisioned in my paranoid fantasies in the 80's when I first read '1984.' Throughout the whole time I was always modestly comforted by the 'safety in numbers' idea; if I'm not out shooting people or blatantly planning the overthrow of the government, then the PTB won't have the human resources to go after me and I should be left alone.
But now it's getting scary because the PTB don't have to watch me, the digital monitoring, and more importantly the digital analysis, has made it to where they can keep tabs on everything you do without spending human resources to do it. There is no longer safety in numbers because the algorithms can build the list and it can be executed efficiently.
So what's next? I'm not thrilled with some of my activities prompting which browser ads that I see, but I am bothered that companies could change their pricing strategy based on whether or not I'm motivated enough to change to another vendor when I'm not satisfied. I'm even more bothered that insurance companies know my private health records and could deny me coverage because of them, even if they were obtained with the expressed statements that conversations with your doctor are private.
Crap, I always used to roll my eyes at the Wearers of the Tin Foil Hats, but maybe technology has caught up to their paranoia. It's not going to be long before a fly lands in a printer and someone mistakes my name for someone else and my life is ruined.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Call me a curmudgeon, but I just don't see the need for most of this crap. Why even have a light switch that even has the capability to report you back to galactic central?!
My manual light switches (horrors!) work just fine. I don't see it as even a minor burden to flip them on-and off. Heck my 22 month old has managed to figure them out, and actually finds them fun (actual horrors!). Only a couple of them have required a hardware upgrade in the last ~35 years of their operation (how many web-connected things can claim that!).
My thermostat is mostly on a basic automatic cycle to be cool at night and comfy during the day. We don't find it to be a big deal to set it to manual or off when we are gone for a while. We chose to live in a moderate climate where further optimization would net us less than our rounding error every month (heating and cooling are 2% of our gross income).
I just see most of this auto-magic web based crap as an attempt to fix problems that don't exist, or are so minor they aren't worth fixing. In my mental calculus is the likelihood that these things will have bugs, break, and require a lot of tinkering to keep them in a hassle-free operating condition long enough to have a positive ROI.
But again, I am a curmudgeon.
IMHO all this tech is basically good, but I should point out that I also consider a large wooden horses to be basically good things, too. (They can be neat works of art, or convenient sources of fire wood.) That doesn't mean I'm saying you should wheel all the ones you find, through your city gates! There are other issues besides the utility value of wooden horses. It's the tech that should be celebrated, not necessarily all the products that use it. Tech and products are two very different things, even if related.
There's a pretty easy way to judge the ads for this stuff: what protocols does the product speak? Do you already have software in your repo that speaks that protocol?
And of course, you don't necessarily have to use someone else's service to get the device to work, right? (I'm not even saying you necessarily shouldn't use their service, but if you have to then the product is almost certainly garbage.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I bought the Automatic for $99.95. I had a number of issues with it. When I found out about Metromile for free I decided to give that a try as well.
There were a number of things I liked about the Automatic app but the Metromile just seemed to work much better (didn't lose trips) and it was free. If you're gonna be tracked while driving, I'd recommend the Metromile device.
A one-time neighbor about ten years ago told me: "Oh, no; I don't want a new TV. They've got cameras in them that can watch what you're doing."
At the time, I smiled politely, while thinking he was a total loon. Nope; just prescient.
plutocracy!
Sure, the system needs to know where the phone is. What we need is an ethical provider that doesn't hand that information out without a court order and that doesn't log it beyond what is actually necessary for troubleshooting.
Yeah, I know, ethical company.
you know they had a solution for this many years ago, unfortunatly it gets harder and harder to find the solution. you know what it was?
Pay phone.
> I'll bet that 80 percent of slash dotters don't understand how they work - at all, and that in order to work - at all, yeah, you are pretty much gonna be tracked.
You are making the mistake of believing that the way it is now is the only way it could be.
For example - once upon a time pagers were hugely popular and they didn't constantly broadcast your location because they were one-way. If we wanted to, we could have gone in that direction instead of the way we did. Cell phones *could* work in such a way that they didn't talk to any towers until they had received notice of an incoming call via one-way communications. They could even have been passively monitoring what towers were in the general vicinity so as to be prepared for rapid call setup. Given that texts are unreliable anyway, we could even be doing one-way texting the same way we did pager messaging.
But we didn't do that. Instead we went with a design that enables 24x7 tracking even if you never even touch your phone. Too bad. But your accusations of technical ignorance are really just a demonstration of your own technical ignorance.
The problem is not with the tech, it's how the tech is used. Things can be connected to each other, but don't have to hook into a company's servers. The amount of data and processing needed is small, almost trivial, or companies wouldn't offer the services for free.
If it wasn't obvious, the alternative is to have open communications protocols, more processing in some nodes, and some central house node that stores most of the data. Nobody is doing it because it's much more difficult, it's not as profitable and it may be a greater security risk. Maybe people will reject the current generation of smart houses, and this could be possible.
> But your accusations of technical ignorance are really just a demonstration of your own technical ignorance.
You do realize that only kooks are so worried about "teh Guvmintz iz trakin uz!!" that they would give up the cellular concept for your bizarre "beep me, and I'll look for a pay phone" concept.
And frankly dear Coward, I know exactly how pagers work. And there is no way in hell I or anyone that actually had some adroitness in technology would ever design a mass communication system around that. I'm surprised you didn't try to make a call for fax machines instead of cellular comms.
Now turn in your computer for a nice secure abacus.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
...it's giving me a measure of temperature! That's SPYING ON MY SURROUNDINGS.
Around half of Americans are renters. You won't see any of these things in rental units for decades. Rental units use the cheapest available everything at the time of construction and they're not ever updated. They become the bad part of town over 50 or so years as they decay, and eventually either they are town down or become decrepit. At nearly every apartment I've ever lived in, virtually everything was original: 40-50 year old wiring, 1960's or 1970's mercury-style thermostat, nothing ever electronic. For a few years, I lived in an expensive apartment building that was only around 15 year old. Even everything there was the lowest tech possible.
Do I care that rich people living in multi-million-dollar homes have privacy-violating things? Not until decades from now when they start actually appearing in the places where most people live.
Pretty much the only difference in what I would call the core infrastructure in my apartment from 1970 would be the lightbulbs have been switched to CFL. I could re-wire the wall switches to be electronic, and do a few things here and there, but why bother? I don't own the place. I'm a technie, and I just don't care about any of these things.
What I cannot understand is how politicians fail to understand what a future Kenneth Starr is going to do with data like this.
It's one current Barry Sotero who is doing the spying, not a future or past Ken Starr.
And he's doing it to you and me, not to public perjurers.