Your IoT devices may be turned against you
Internet of Things (IoT) devices are trending right now, and chance is good that more and more devices will come to market that may make things easier on the one hand, but may cause privacy issues on the other.
You don't have to look further than at smart home devices that listen to your commands to provide you with information or assistance in controlling various other gadgets or parameters such as the heating.
Like your browsing or call history, these conversations that you have with digital assistants or smart devices, spark the interest of law enforcement and companies.
Engadget reports about a case in Arkansas where police wanted Amazon to hand over any audio recordings that the company stored on its servers of a suspect's Echo device. Amazon appears to have declined the request, but police said it managed to pull data off the speaker. No information was provided on the data though.
While listening devices are designed to only respond to user commands, the past has shown that these things are not overly accurate when it comes to that. It can very well happen that an Internet of Things device listens to conversations by accident.
What is particularly interesting about this case is that the police managed to retrieve evidence from other smart home devices the suspect had installed in the home. The police was particularly interested in a smart water meter that showed that a large quantity of water was used in the night of the murder.
The deceased was found dead in the suspect's bathtub,and investigators allege that the water was used to wash away evidence on the patio.
Privacy implications
People need to be aware that their devices can, and probably will, be used against them. This is not limited to smart home devices, not in the least. Windows 10 comes with Cortana, a digital assistant, and both Google Android and iOS ship with personal assistants as well that you can talk to.
Then there is Amazon Echo and other smart home devices, TVs that may be listening in, services that may listen in for marketing purposes and track you across devices, and even apps may do it.
It is clear that we will see an increase in requests by law enforcement and others in the future to access data that smart devices have collected.
As Billy Steele over on Engadget points out, it will be interesting to see how law enforcement and the companies that create these devices will find the right balance of respecting user privacy.
Now You: Do you own smart devices?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.