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blogging, culture, faith, privacy, smart TV's, spying, technology
“Samsung has confirmed that its “smart TV” sets are listening to customers’ every word, and the company is warning customers not to speak about personal information while near the TV sets.” Link here
Sigh. Privacy matters! How in the world do you go about impressing that upon people who have grown up with reality TV, you tube, and a desire to actually be seen? How do you teach them that dignity matters, that boundaries and individual liberty have real value in a society?
Myself, I have a powerful aversion to cameras and I cannot stand to be spied on. I do not like being video taped or recorded. I feel rather violated. I’ve pushed the issue a few times, as in “this call may be monitored or recorded to insure quality control” and I’ve simply refused to talk to people. I don’t think so.
As to video taping and security cameras, I dislike those too. I’ve had a couple of odd experiences that made me feel as if a boundary had been broken, as if basic human dignity had been trampled on. “We’ve reviewed the security tapes and it wasn’t you,” should fill one with relief, but it just makes me feel as if I were a crime suspect deprived of a trial and unable to launch a defense because I didn’t even know the investigation was going on.
There’s just something really creepy about someone watching you go about in your bunny slippers buying bread and milk, completely unaware anyone is watching. That is the world we are living in today, but I don’t have to like it.
Listening in on us while we are in our living rooms however, that takes things to a whole new level. Or our bedrooms or anywhere we may be in our own homes. There’s this thing called human dignity, privacy, respect for personal boundaries, and it’s not just that our technology is now breaching the line, it is that our own hearts no longer seem too concerned about it. It is as if people cannot understand the potential abuse, how anything you say can and will be used against you by someone, somewhere, and that your ability to defend yourself no longer comes into play once the cat is out of the bag.
My husband, my own family, don’t really share my concerns. They’re more along the lines of, “if our TV wants to hear what we’re doing and thinking, let’s really give them something to talk about,” an idea that amuses me, but does nothing to ease my fears.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
I completely agree with you. Invading a person’s home with this type of mechanism isn’t correct.
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I agree! Strange times we’re living in.
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Lets’ Give em Something to Talk about.
That was a great tune!
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Ha! I love that song, Wally. I’m afraid my family takes it a bit too seriously, but considering the world we live in, perhaps that’s not a bad strategy. 😉
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Well I am no conspiracy theorist by any stretch, but people are watching and listening. The NSA probably paid Samsung to develop that.
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Surveillance paranoia is ubiquitous – and is now reality rather than an acute mental state. Still, I wonder about the logistics of having millions of surveillance minions watching and listening to us in real time. When do they go shopping or use the restroom? (Perhaps they are demonic entities and hence do not need to…) Who reviews the billions of bytes of useless quotidian human footage and then picks out the significant portions?
Back in the 80’s I was so paranoid I used to drape a dish towel over the micro-wave so the One World Govt. could not watch me eat a bowl of cornflakes while mumbling to myself. I guess, in the end, that paranoia is simply awareness. Still, I don’t want one of them Samsung things in my cave. And that means Iggy Pop was prophetic when he sang “She Gotta T.V. Eye on Me”. I love Bonnie R, however this song is a different genre.
Be very warned …
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Ha! Great song, Andrew. It’s not as if our culture didn’t see this coming, it’s not as if songs and science fiction hasn’t been written warning us about it all. What I wasn’t prepared for was how nonchalant and unconcerned we’d all be! It’s not unlike the mark of the beast, we will all heroically resist and defend the faith! No we won’t, we’ll all just enthusiastically rush to the bank to get our new debit card microchip.
Speculating as to why anyone would be interested in someone eating cornflakes and muttering to themselves, well if you can profile people, you can learn what psychological triggers to push to manipulate them. Politicians and advertisers have been doing this for decades. And pick up artists. So the next step is to simply program how people are going to think and feel about things, so you can create your desired outcome. Brainwashing, indoctrination, quite consensual, as in we will all support things we are told to support. Heck, we’re more than halfway there already. You just bypass our critical thinking skills and we will act without well, thinking critically. I have no idea why I must buy Bounty paper towels, I just “feel as if I should.”
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As a Reformed Christian in theology, I tend to downplay the “impending One-World cashless economy featuring the Mark-of-the-Beast-Who-Rises-from-the-Sea eschatology. But after reading your tech-spooky post, it begins to seem imminent. How does a good Calvinist deal with such things as spying T.V. sets and implanted smart-chips? If only I believed in “The Rapture” I could tell myself we will be airlifted out of this nightmare ha ha ha. Perhaps a thermonuclear rapture is on the menu. Only God and St. Paul know for sure… as Christ’s church we must remember that he is sovereignly orchestrating all events to fulfill His perfect plan for humanity although it gets pretty weird from our end. The most difficult aspect of cataclysmic “End-Time” scenarios for me is that they make you think that empires, evil kingdoms and godless nations implode suddenly. Although in some cases they do, generally they unravel in an agonizingly gradual way over several generations (like Rome).
I am very interested in the OBE experience of Howard Storm. I recommend his book “My Descent Into Death”. He died and was taken to heaven. Christ showed him the U.S. circa 2200 AD (Storm’s death-crisis occurred in the mid 1980s) and there was no tech whatsoever. People were living tribally in forest clearings like an earth-friendly New Age utopia.
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/notable/howard-storm.html#a04
I recommend Howard’s testimony to all of your readers, IB. You can find him on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=howard+storm
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It’s a crying shame that after spending all this money to get wired into the entire global media and communications communication network, I’m going to have to quit talking to myself.
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Ha! 🙂
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I refuse to quit…
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Numbers are to our advantage. Some of Jon’s work involves rewatching CCTV tapes when something goes wrong. It’s a very time-consuming job, even on fast forward it takes two or three men four hours to rewatch 24h of footage at a speed that you can discern anything at. That’s 8-12 hours of labour. And that’s just one video, looking for something very specific.
Imagine the hours of full-focus work that would be required to actually monitor every single Samsung Smart TV owner. You’re more likely to be snooped by a neighbour, pocket dial someone or be overheard in a supermarket than actually be listened to remotely by a company, in full context, for several hours. They might tune in, hear whether you’re talking about the ad or show, if you are they will listen a bit before playing solitaire on their computer and if you are not they will find someone else.
They are humans. They are humans who don’t know, and therefore don’t care about, you. And they probably dislike their job as much as any other human too. I’m not too worried.
It’s the same as with people’s concerns about the government spying on all our emails, phone calls and conversations remotely. You need three people, each doing an eight hour shift, to spy on one person. So at that rate 75% of us would be employed by the government solely to spy on the remaining 25%. Personally, I’m not that worried about spies.
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It may not as much work as you might think. If our government gets access to the data or some of the big corporations start selling each other data, they will mine it in successive stages.
Voice data can be converted to text, which is searchable. As time passes, even the video will be analyzed using face recognition technology and whatever else can be glean from pictures. As the resolution improves, there is no telling what people will try to get out of pictures.
Keep in mind what is already available. We all have email, twitter, blogs, and so forth. We all have phone records, billing records, credit records, and financial records of different sorts. We are each in a multitude of databases. What can the people with access to this information determine about us?
They can already determine our relationships with other people, products, and services. Who are our contacts? Where do we shop? What do we buy? Government would be interested in political relationships. Industry wants to know our shopping vulnerabilities. To what is your sales resistance lowest. What sort of advertising will work on us?
They can already determine our income and net worth? Government wants to know you are paying our taxes. If we donate to opposition political groups, government wants to audit us and strip every cent from us. Industry wants to know if we have anything left to spend.
What is my point? In the future, if any human takes the time to look at a video, he will do so because a computer says it is worth that extra effort.
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Again, it would take almost my lifetime to mine the last year in an inexpensive manner. We are still not at the stage where computers can analyse our behaviour properly, they can’t even understand our words properly without years of input and even that is fallible and doesn’t account for dialect and slang.
Plus, their attempts to control us so far have been laughable. Take for example reward schemes. I use a Nectar card, and, like most people who use it, I am using it to save money, not spend it. A while back Sainsbury’s started giving out Nectar vouchers for the most expensive products Nectar shoppers had ever bought and for branded versions of the good they usually buy. As most people who use reward schemes use them for money saving, most Nectar card users checked the actual monetary value of the points and chose not to redeem them. Now Sainsbury’s simply offers money off products we actually buy (to encourage us to buy more of them) and vouchers for extra points or money off when we spend an exorbitant amount in one go. Perhaps this round will fare them better, but I have a feeling that all their data mining will fail and the Nectar supermarket experiment may end in the next few years. Still, I end up with £50-100 a year for buying the exact same things I buy every week, so may as well milk it until they give up.
Likewise with advertising, promotions, politics, media, etc. The only market that isn’t already controlled or brainwashed is the one that is consciously aware of the scam. And you can’t beat consciousness.
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@superslaviswife
I wish you were altogether right about this. You are right about the problems, but you are missing what others see as opportunities.
Our government is an inefficient organization, but even they won’t try to search all the information they have. Devious people will identify those political organizations and people they consider a threat and look for people who have relationships those political organizations and people.
Remember how the IRS targeted Tea Party organizations. If somebody like Obama has his way, the donors will be next.
What a tyrant wants is to intimidate his opponents. Did Joseph Stalin have any interest in efficiency? Did he even use computer technology. Of course not. Stalin jus put anyone who might threaten his regime in a gulag, and that was enough to frighten the rest of the population into submission. Yet I bet Stalin and Lenin would have had an easier time of it if at the beginning they could have quickly constructed a relatively accurate enemies list. They might have avoided much of the civil war that preceded their takeover of Russia.
Private industry will not try to mine all of the data either. They will slice and dice the data. Each company is already using customer data to target customers with advertising. To do that, they don’t try to mine all the data. They only process the data they consider profitable.
Note also that six years is considered a computer generation. So in six years our would-be lords and masters will be able to process ten times as much as much data, and they will have better, more efficient programs to do it.
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True, Tom. We’re already seeing problems with our data collection, stolen identities, hackers releasing SS numbers and addresses of fed employees, cops recording cell phone conversations, and facebook determining what is and isn’t politically correct speech. So while a centralized and efficient government targeting and manipulating us is bad, an inefficient and ineffective one failing to protect our data is also bad.
I’m laughing too, I guess you really have to live in a small town to fully get a feel for the damage that a loss of privacy can do. Just gossip alone can totally destroy lives. People can be kept out of employment, housing, ostracized bullied, have their businesses censored.
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@insanitybytes22
Failing to protect our data is a big problem, alright. Recently, the Chinese hacked into OPM and stole a bunch of personal data on government employees. They will find some way to use that information. It is a different kind of war.
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I actually work with a lot of computational linguistics students. We are far further than a single computer generation from automated analysis. Computers still don’t understand apostrophes, or the word “can”.
And each computer generation also brings with it a new generation of kids in the loop with these things. Think about how in the early days of the net we had to actively tell everyone not to trust people they met online, and about Nigerian Prince scams. Now it’s automatic.
The current people in my age group (22, so 16-30) are far more anonymous, can use things like bitcoin and token coins and game items as barter, can create hundreds of isolated identities online… I could donate to anyone completely anonymously if I wanted to. I could work out a bomb plan for an important location or event if I wanted to. I could disappear if I wanted to.
The internet is deeper, darker and more convoluted than all this. There are horrific things out there which young people like me can just locate, but the government, agencies and corporations cannot find for the life of them. If a twenty-something could already invent a complete new identity, buy a hundred illegal snuff films in complete anonymity with no paper trail and no digital connection to their “real” digital identity, then I seriously doubt that the 16 year olds of today will be caught for donating to the “wrong” political party. Some will, but the internet is an impossible thing to control without literally going Chinese on it… And even in China people regularly break the government lockdown without getting caught.
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The biggest threat to us is actually a generational divide. The current way of raising people pits each 2-5 year generation against each other.
Kids are age-segregated at schools.
People with a certain age gap should not be considering each other a potential partner.
Culture is pumped up to change for each age group.
Nanny state encourages people to report each other to “nanny”.
Working women, elderly care homes, all day schooling and weak marriage discourages families from banding together.
This already permits a 1984-esque scenario where if a kid sees their parent voting for the “wrong” party, or a parent catches their child drinking underage, some people already report their own flesh and blood.
It won’t be long before, however anonymous and buried our data is, our own children and grandchildren are handing us over for not agreeing with nanny. That is where we will truly fall through the cracks.
Self-sufficiency, tribalism and family values need to be brought back to save us from that.
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@superslaviswife
Very interesting and thoughtful replies. Much more than I expected.
Note that the government runs the schools. Even in private schools, to conform with government regulations and manipulated societal conventions, we segregate children by age.
Consider what has happened to our education system. Instead of being about educating children, more and more it is about controlling children — socially engineering their religious beliefs, their attitudes about race and sex, and their political inclinations.
The competition for control is intense. In most parts of our nation, we have now have four layers of management: Federal, state, local, and school boards. The Federal government has no constitutional authorization to be involved. Many, probably most, state constitutions either require or authorize state involvement, but all state governments do is usurp local control. Even large local governments do absurd things. For the sake of control, they create these humongous schools. Private organizations can build an entire K-12 school for just 250 children. What does government do instead? They build elementary schools for a 1000 children and high schools for three or four thousand. Therefore, when children could walk to school, we waste millions on school buses, and we do it just so that some people can control how other people educate their children.
Most of us want things our own way, but the quest for power and control drives some people. It feeds their egos; it gives them a false sense of security. Hence, for the sake of control, they are destroying our educational system, subverting it from its primary purpose, teaching wisdom. And we are letting them do it.
Because the Internet allows a free exchange of information, it drives the control freaks nuts. Therefore, what they are doing with our education system, they will try to do the Internet. Consider Obamacare as an example. The medical community now has legal a requirement to put all our healthcare data on the Internet. Supposedly, that is about efficiency (Government knows how to be efficient?), but it gives our leaders the power to control how the medical community communicates on the Internet, and it also puts our data where our government can get at it. Expect to see more stuff like that. Mandates fashioned to look like “improvements” that provide our leaders more control.
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And, again, the impact on people who are aware of it is minimal. And with free access to the internet, more and more people are becoming aware of it.
Connectivity facilitates corruption, but it also facilitates escaping corruption and uniting to defy it.
However, once more, like 1984, we need to be on the lookout not for things that give OTHERS access to our information, but for anything that would restrict our OWN access to it. When our doctors can freely share our symptoms with supplement companies but will not tell us what’s actually wrong with us, for example, trouble starts. Or when an injunction is brought up over something that is affecting hundreds of thousands of lives.
But, once more, we come back to the fact that anyone can access anything today. All you need is to desire that access and you will have it. So that will be harder for them to manage. Perhaps another actor’s mishap, or another war, or another big sporting event will distract people some more, but then the food on your plate and the roof over your head is threatened, they will need something stronger to keep you from finding answers.
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Thanks for sharing this. Freaky.
fiddledeedeebooks.wordpress.com
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This is actually out of the book 1984. Seriously. They had televisions that listened to everything and the protagonist had to literally hide from it. It’s kind of disturbing how often I see things in the real world and remember the time I read 1984. Mr. Orwell hit the nail on the head.
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I know, right? We are now living our science fiction!
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This was exactly what I thought of too! Society is going down the same path.
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Throw out your TV or get an old one from a thrift store if you really want to watch DVDs or things like that. We did.
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Actually this is rather funny, considering some things. We, for example, own two computers — the one connected to the Internet, and one which is not — an old desktop used for the math and foreign language software, and for the children to learn to type. We do not have Smartphones, and do not plan to have them in the near future. We have an old tube TV with a DVD/VCR player which works some of the time — if it doesn’t work we just use the old desktop to play a CD or DVD. So quite frankly, when people get all upset about this, I can’t help but think that if they were just willing to give up a bunch of useless entertainment that isn’t fit for anybody to watch anyway, they wouldn’t have this problem. If they aren’t willing to give it up, then stop complaining. You’re bringing it on yourself.
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