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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)
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.
The Beam Brush checks up on your teeth-brushing technique. "... What I cannot understand is how politicians fail to understand what a future Kenneth Starr is going to do with data like this."
Bad example? You say that now, but just wait until we get a President caught brushing his teeth side-to-side and not up-and-down, then you'll be wishing for a Ken Starr to try and take him down.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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
If the commentator needs to personalize it, I would think that Janet Reno, would have been a far better example.
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.
but increasingly I think he is correct, living in freedom means using free and open software.
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.
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.
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.