The NSA is going to love this

I’ve been telling people that 1984 is coming, but no one seems to care.  Here’s one more indication:

Samsung SmartTV

The Samsung SmartTV has a built-in microphone that is equipped with voice recognition technology that allows users to give verbal commands to the TV. In order for Samsung to convert your speech to text, the voice commands are sent over the Internet to a third-party for interpretation.

However, since the TV is “always on,” the microphone is recording every word you’re saying at all times. Even in its SmartTV privacy policy, Samsung acknowledges that all spoken words, including personal or other sensitive information, are sent unencrypted to the third party.

Eh, what could go wrong?  It’s not like high tech firms would give in to government pressure to invade the privacy of tech users.  No need to fear the NSA ever getting any of that info.

I’ve argued that it’s up to the younger generation to figure out how much privacy they want.  My only request is that we stop having students read 1984 in high school.  If that’s the world we want, then let’s stop pretending it’s some sort of dystopia.

Fortunately we don’t have a war that seems to go on forever, and that the government uses as an excuse to have all sorts of extra powers.

Update:  Et tu, Ford?


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32 Responses to “The NSA is going to love this”

  1. Gravatar of Tom Brown Tom Brown
    18. July 2015 at 08:22

    I guess your not going to like the brain implants then? … but think of the convenience!

  2. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    18. July 2015 at 08:25

    Tom, You are right. If the government could monitor everything we did, then they could keep me out of dangerous situations, where I might hurt myself.

  3. Gravatar of Tom Brown Tom Brown
    18. July 2015 at 08:48

    Exactly! I knew you’d come around. Can you now see the benefits of web enabled toilet paper?

  4. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    18. July 2015 at 09:12

    Now that’s going too far!

  5. Gravatar of Steve Steve
    18. July 2015 at 09:15

    “Can you now see the benefits of web enabled toilet paper?”

    Tom, that sounds like a good idea. With embedded RFID it could transmit health information back to the iWatch, give a more complete picture of our nutrient absorption, upload to our e-Health records, and share with our doctors. Social media sharing would be strictly optional but it would be important to “Wipe Left” and not “Wipe Right”.

  6. Gravatar of Scott Freelander Scott Freelander
    18. July 2015 at 09:45

    Yes Scott, I was already thinking about this with regard to the wide release of the Amazon Echo, which is a voice controlled device for controlling some features of the home while offering verbal access to internet features. It’s always on, listening, waiting for certain key words that spring it into action.

    I take a longer view of this. We’re bound to have some excesses in various directions with new technology, but I won’t be surprised if we get it approximately right in the long run. Let’s remember, that even decades ago the FBI under Hoover was doing all sorts of illegal wiretapping and other surveillance, and despite the problems in that era, we came out of it alright.

    Yes, this is bigger and more pervasive, but are the people doing the monitoring as disturbing as Hoover? Of course, there’s tremendous potential for abuse, even by the well-meaning, and maybe the next administration will have some awful people running surveillance programs, but at least these sorts of programs have supposedly been cut back with recent legislation.

  7. Gravatar of edeast edeast
    18. July 2015 at 09:50

    Humans may be a self-domesticated species. https://www.pelicanbooks.com/the-domesticated-brain/preface
    Our corporate/gov system as an exoskeleton. The Neanderthals were probably ‘smarter’. I think they mated with Asians ‘twice’ and Europeans ‘once.’ http://www.genetics.org/content/early/2013/02/04/genetics.112.148213.short

    With crispr here ‘we’ get to make our own future. But it sometimes feels like Oisin returning from Tir na nog and seeing a more pathetic species replacing the old civilization.

  8. Gravatar of Steve Steve
    18. July 2015 at 10:27

    OT: This scene from the Capitol looks like it was designed by the same people as the 432 Park tower

    http://www.myhungergames.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/465995_416791778337479_159746560708670_1894318_1982466924_o.jpg

  9. Gravatar of Steve Steve
    18. July 2015 at 10:30

    Speaking of Hunger Games, the EU has just commissioned a $3 million ‘investment’ in dinnerware, featuring crystal, china, gold embossing, silver platters.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/11747506/eu-diplomats-plan-fine-dining-service.html

  10. Gravatar of Jim Glass Jim Glass
    18. July 2015 at 12:26

    There will be no hostile violent Skynet. Much more likely we will entirely voluntarily become the Borg because we *like* the ease of communal-mind GPS rather than trying to figure out paper maps and then having to fold them all back up again, and enjoy the benefits of targeted marketing zeroed right in on our personal interests…

    If some future reboot of the Terminator franchise wants to keep the conceit of a post-human vs computers conflict dystopia, it should start with the machine intelligence having a very friendly voice on everybody’s phone, with maybe an Oscar Wilde-ish sense of humor which one day goes a little bit off-balance into a hissy fit over some minor human annoyance, and suddenly sends everybody’s self-driving car into the nearest river or school bus leaving the survivors to starve without deliveries from Peapod.

  11. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    18. July 2015 at 14:24

    I’ve long believed that if tracking chips were implanted into everyone’s bodies, crime would fall by at least 50%. Since today my car’s catalytic converter was sawed off and stolen by some unseen criminal, the idea sounds more attractive. It wouldn’t be that far from police collecting data on people’s license plates, which already happens quite a lot today.

    Google and Microsoft already know everything about us, so what’s the big issue? Your searches in Bing are already fully integrated with the ads you see in Skype if you’re signed into your computer with your Microsoft account. Google Analytics already knows about most of the sites you visit if you’re signed in with your Google account, use the Google search engine without an add-on, or simply use the same IP address often and visit a lot of Internet sites or the Google search engine. 99%+ of all computers are fingerprintable:
    http://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf

  12. Gravatar of Morgan Warstler Morgan Warstler
    18. July 2015 at 15:16

    Being a privacy advocacy doesn’t require privacy:

    1. It requires freedom from prosecution. It requires fruit of poison tree. It requires literally, the information can’t be used against you – we just make your microphones YOU PAY FOR just like your wife. It’s your property and your property can’t give testimony against you. Only microphones the govt pays for can be used against you.

    2. it requires a $1K tax credit for surveilling our govt:

    http://www.morganwarstler.com/post/52547186796/radical-surveillance-of-the-government

    “If there are 20M political or technology hobbyists, we get $20B less tax revenue and $20B more in government sunshine EVERY YEAR, building layer upon layer of citizen driven protections.

    This will spawn an industry and a culture of government watchdogs, that put drones out to scenes of the crime, that watch street corners and neighborhoods, and the big data analytics and hosting that allows this stuff to be actionable to everyone.

    Let the citizenry be the watchers, explicitly have a distaste for government, beg the private sector and private citizens to solve the problems, and then with a republic amped on its own power, we’ll more carefully construct government policy towards its own people.

    We want a raging technologically adept Sparta. We are Americans, not British.”

    The public sector must live in abject fear.

    I repeat, E. Harding – we just put sensors in public employees – they get ZERO privacy – bank accts wide open, every interaction with a citizen, is judged on CUSTOMER SERVICE- like any old telemarketer.

    After you legalize all the “shame” things – sex, drugs, etc. After you do 1 and 2 – the privacy problem is solved. watch away!

  13. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    18. July 2015 at 16:04

    Scott, I presume the people in 1984 were well meaning, as was Hoover. But again, it’s not for me to decide, it’s for the younger generation to determine. My only request is that we don’t kid ourselves—1984 is 1984, regardless of whether there are “well meaning” people in charge. Stop teaching the book.

    Steve, Yikes, I’ll have to make a note to miss that film.

    Jim, I still prefer paper maps, they are much more accurate than GPS. I’d say 90% of the time I ignored GPS I was right and it was wrong.

    E. Harding, If it’s no big deal then I presume you agree with me.

    BTW, I often hear stuff like that, but if so why can’t they get back those IRS emails, or Hillary’s emails? Is all this stuff actually stored somewhere?

    Morgan, I like the idea of cops and other public servants wearing cameras, so we can tell when they are being abusive. But the best solution is to abolish them.

  14. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    18. July 2015 at 16:22

    Scott, I presume the people in 1984 were well meaning, as was Hoover. But again, it’s not for me to decide, it’s for the younger generation to determine. My only request is that we don’t kid ourselves—1984 is 1984, regardless of whether there are “well meaning” people in charge. Stop teaching the book.

    Steve, Yikes, I’ll have to make a note to miss that film.

    Jim, I still prefer paper maps, they are much more accurate than GPS. I’d say 90% of the time I ignored GPS I was right and it was wrong.

    E. Harding, If it’s no big deal then I presume you agree with me.

    BTW, I often hear stuff like that, but if so why can’t they get back those IRS emails, or Hillary’s emails? Is all this stuff actually stored somewhere?

    Morgan, I like the idea of cops and other public servants wearing cameras, so we can tell when they are being abusive. But the best solution is to abolish them (where possible).

  15. Gravatar of Gordon Gordon
    18. July 2015 at 16:28

    “It’s not like high tech firms would give in to government pressure to invade the privacy of tech users.”

    One of the things from the Snowden disclosures that didn’t receive much press is that the NSA didn’t even need to coerce high tech firms in some cases. It managed to steal the private encryption keys from various tech companies and account passwords from others.

    Whenever there is a major cybersecurity breach such as the one involving U.S. government personnel data, no one ever bothers to ask if the security vulnerability may have been known by the NSA. The NSA has an extensive database of security holes it can exploit but it never alerts tech companies of these potential problems. This is a violation of the NSA’s mandate to protect the U.S. cyber infrastructure but this never enters into the debate about the NSA’s activities.

  16. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    18. July 2015 at 16:32

    I like the idea of cops and other public servants wearing cameras, so we can tell when they are being abusive. But the best solution is to abolish them (where possible).

    -?! Why? I say “where necessary”.

  17. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    18. July 2015 at 16:48

    BTW, I often hear stuff like that, but if so why can’t they get back those IRS emails, or Hillary’s emails? Is all this stuff actually stored somewhere?

    -I’m guessing Hillary’s emails are in the “Sent Mail” folders of hundreds of people. Maybe there’s some way some of these are recoverable, but I doubt it. So are the IRS emails. And Hillary used a private server, so this doesn’t apply to her. If she was using GMail, 100% of her emails would be easily recoverable. And I see nothing scandalous about using a private email server; I expect that from any leader.

  18. Gravatar of Morgan Warstler Morgan Warstler
    18. July 2015 at 21:48

    E. Harding

    Hillary’s emails are in the hands of countless foreign govts and at least a few hackers.

  19. Gravatar of mbka mbka
    18. July 2015 at 22:43

    But… Scott… *I* care!!

    Long view: in the 70s and 80s there was a vicious debate in Europe about privacy and data protection because of the then-new, and primitive, capabilities of cross referencing by police. Remember Europe had terrorism in the 70s and 80s and was going through the same surveillance and police enforcement hysteria the US is now going through since 9/11.

    In a nutshell, people were upset about data collection and data abuses that now seem laughably quaint. There was a campaign to ignore or willfully sabotage a census that was going on in Germany for example, even though it was supposed to be anonymous. Europe came out with a bit more sensitivity to Google at al. than the U.S., but still ended up adopting the same technologies.

    Now we have a totalitarian world in terms of data, where almost all can be known about any of us, or already is. The entry point for 1984 isn’t the smart TV btw, IMO it’s the hand phone. If need be, it can be hacked to transmit all communications to HQ at any time, including location. Much more perfect than 1984.

    Where to go from here, well there is one possible optimistic upshot. A lot of failings turn out to be very common. Things that people would have been mortally ashamed of just 30 years ago are now a minor embarrassment, if at all. Example, people post nude selfies of themselves all the time. There must be hundreds of millions of nude selfies in the cloud. It’s as if one’s own nudity had ceased to be considered necessarily private. The internet and the obsessive “sharing” has people discover how similar they really are to one another. I see a real decrease in the things people are ashamed of. And to me that’s a good thing for most part. The 60s preached liberation from convention but were pushed back by the neo moralists of the 80s. Now in a twist of irony, the mechanisms of exposure to shame become blunter and blunter. You can’t make headlines by “uncovering” stuff that was already in plain view and of which everybody’s guilty.

    There are two basic mechanisms of privacy and anonymity: one is, to remain hidden. The other is, to be indiscernible in the crowd. It may well turn out liberating to discover that we’re all human in more or less the same way.

  20. Gravatar of benjamin cole benjamin cole
    18. July 2015 at 23:39

    Even better when we go to cashless economy.

  21. Gravatar of Scott Sumner Scott Sumner
    19. July 2015 at 04:35

    Gordon, Great comment.

    E. Harding, So google is storing a record of our searches, but not actual content like emails, etc?

    mbka, Good comment. So it sounds like you agree with me that we should stop teaching 1984.

    BTW, I wish you were right, but our society today seems much more puritanical than in the 1970s and 1980s. Think about films for instance. Maybe I’m missing lots of cultural change because I’m too old. Or maybe it’s because I’m American and you are not. Of course no one can deny that the Islamic world is more puritanical than in the 1970s—women used to wear miniskirts in Kabul.

  22. Gravatar of mbka mbka
    19. July 2015 at 07:08

    Scott, completely agreed that the world has become much more puritanical since the 70s. I was a child in the 70s and I don’t even understand the moral high grounds people argue from. In the US the backlash was worse than in Europe though, it seems (excluding the UK). You still see actual nudity in TV ads for bath soap in Europe.

    BTW speaking of the islamic world, I had a glimpse of 70’s West Africa as a boy, and you bet it was the roving 70’s there too. Today, pretty much anywhere, people are much more careful with what they think or say or do. The world has regressed in social development as it has progressed economically. It has become sanitized for our protection. And the global village is now just like a real village, where everyone backbites and everyone knows everything, remembers it eternally, and no one dares to really say what (s)he thinks.

    I just see this ray of hope, and that’s what I meant above. The destruction of privacy that we’ve been seeing may have passed its worst-of-both-worlds phase of little privacy combined with still haughty standards. And maybe it will turn into a more enlightened live and let live arrangement with lesser standards and more of the protective anonymity of the crowd.

  23. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    19. July 2015 at 11:21

    Google stores your emails, Clinton just didn’t use Google.

  24. Gravatar of E. Harding E. Harding
    19. July 2015 at 11:21

    *for email.

  25. Gravatar of Chuck Chuck
    19. July 2015 at 13:43

    Just don’t do anything to upset the powerful and you’ll be fine.

  26. Gravatar of Saturos Saturos
    20. July 2015 at 06:25

    Slate Star Codex has put this blog into its blogroll! We’re listed under “Stray Dogs”, which sounds bad, but that is a subheading under “Celestial Blogroll of Benevolent Knowledge”, which is a neat enough reference to make up for it. Hope this sends us more viewers/commenters.

  27. Gravatar of Floccina Floccina
    20. July 2015 at 08:08

    Who should opt out of that one? Is it would be terrorists? Would be criminals? All Moslems? Confederate flag loving southerners? Steve Sailor? In other words, what words are likely to get one in trouble.
    Most people would say, who cares what I say, nothing that I say is bad.

  28. Gravatar of flow5 flow5
    21. July 2015 at 13:30

    You have NO idea. My neighbor watched me and my wife in my bedroom via my SONY TV…posted pics on the internet…

  29. Gravatar of flow5 flow5
    21. July 2015 at 13:33

    Oh, he hacked my wireless PC too…then attempted to hack my on-line bank account before the FBI took over.

  30. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    21. July 2015 at 16:23

    mbka, Good post, and I’m just an old reactionary.

    Saturos, I see, you only come back here because of Scott’s blogroll.

    Seriously, All my readers would do better turning off my blog and reading his.

    Floccina, That’s right.

    Flow5, Glad I don’t have a Sony, I have a Samsung—Oh wait . . .

  31. Gravatar of D.I. Harris D.I. Harris
    23. July 2015 at 16:08

    As a young person, I think that privacy is an outdated safeguard. I think that the sooner we get rid of privacy, the safer we’ll be.

    Privacy did help people in corrupt regimes, for sure. Not having anyone know you were Jewish or gay would have helped a lot when the Nazis took over.

    But is this the best protection?

    I think it is worse than protection: I think it engenders the very totalitarianism it aims to counter. I wear my lack of privacy on my sleeve, and shout, “I will not be ashamed of who I am.” Let people talk about me for all my public depravities. I care not. The moment I show shame is the moment I validate their negative opinions of me. The moment I demand privacy is the moment I agree that what I am should be hidden.

    I will not be hidden. I will not be cowed. I am a freak, and proud of it. And I stand proudly so that everyone can see that it is nothing to be ashamed of. And I stand proudly to inspire others to embrace their own depravity.

    That, I believe, will do more to prevent a totalitarian government in the future than privacy ever could. Totalitarianism has always tried to weed out difference, and it succeeds because people think that difference is bad””even though they themselves contain a lot of what is labelled bad. But because everyone has privacy, everyone feels alone with it, represses it and doesn’t see it as normal. Everyone feels like they themselves are bad, and so lashes out at the oppressed people to show that, “YES, I TOO AM NORMAL AND NOT LIKE THESE PEOPLE!” Just like people who have homosexual desires are generally the most homophobic.

    When I see the death of privacy, I see myself being safer. The social conservatives who try to shame me won’t feel so confident when their depravities are on display.

    It wasn’t privacy that started the gay rights movement. If gays could have been closeted without fear of exposure, the gay rights movement would never have started. It was a bunch of queers who didn’t fit in who said, “We will no longer be ashamed for who we are. We will show ourselves off proudly, and f*** anyone who doesn’t like us.”

    Those people made the world safer for me today. I am grateful for their courage and openness. And I aim to make the world safer for my children by allowing them to be themselves without shame, without the need to hide away parts of themselves behind walls privacy lest they be judged.

    In a world where everyone accepts everyone else for who they are without shame, on what grounds would someone be able to oppress?

  32. Gravatar of Benny Lava Benny Lava
    23. July 2015 at 18:01

    I am really curious about the views expressed about the change in moralism from the 70s to today. It would make a good blog post.

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