Smart Home Surveillance: Governments Tell Google's Nest Hand Over Data
forbes.com
forbes.com
One of the things that the "computer revolution" spawned in the 90's was that there were a lot of "extra" computers around because everyone upgraded every 18 - 24 months. After a couple of rounds of upgrades, if you had kept the old parts, you had enough parts around to make another computer. In my house this typically became the "kids" computer and we would build it, them image it, and then use the image to restore it back to what ever it had been built to originally when the kids did something to make it non-functional.
Of course after a still longer period you had upgraded that "previous" gen computer and now you had a left over previous previous gen computer. And typically what I did was put Linux on it and have it for running this that and the other thing. These days a RasPi 3 is about as powerful as that generation -2 computer was.
Like a lot of people as my Internet speeds increased I started leaving computers on all the time as servers that I could access from anywhere. This was made easier (and without paying extra for a fixed IP) with dyndns, although these days it is easier still with IPV6 (no dyndns required if your ISP will give you an IPV6 prefix (so far this has been pretty easy).
So I think a number of services you use "in the cloud" might be implementable as local services where it is harder for the Government to get its hands on your data, (or at least it would have to serve you with a warrant and so you would know they were looking at you, an NSL doesn't work if the person being served is the person being observed :-)
We believe that the only way to have people trust AI is when we will make it possible to have privacy-respecting AI, we believe it is not only feasible, but it is our duty to build AI which respects people and is able to scale without presenting a danger to our societies
Same. Got excited, then saw it's shilling a coin [1]. From a branding perspective, this undoes the goodwill won by the privacy message.
They're promoting a security [1]. If a company can't bother with the law, I distrust their claims around privacy.
Also, if you're doing on-device AI, you have a natural business model: sell the device. (Maybe also subscriptions.) Adding in a token creates conflicts of interests.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts-and-bulletins/ib_co...
I know about Snips.ai for some time now, I was planning to play around with it soon, and then I learned about the token thing. I mentally put the project into the trashcan at that very moment, it only got out of there due to being repeatedly mentioned on HN as something legit.
And when we consider all this, we are thinking about:
- how can we remunerate people who want to share their data
- how can we ensure that people can buy apps without leaking information about who they are and what they do
- how can we incentivize the creation of an encryption-based machine-learning network which would allow to do private-by-design model training
and the answer to all of these was too build a decentralized AI
you can learn more about this on our blog:
- https://medium.com/snips-ai/decentralized-machine-learning-u...
- https://medium.com/snips-ai/token-curated-app-stores-dec6a0c...
And why do half of these sentences not make sense?
Back in my day, journalism in forbes was still shitty but at least with coherent sentences.
edit: A link in the article does inform me of 'rap crew' "O
n a June day last year, a skinny, dreadlocked 29-year-old rapper known as Tony Da Boss lay in bed in a redbrick apartment on a tree-lined street in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was not the kind of place you’d associate with a million-dollar criminal conspiracy. But Da Boss (real name Damonte Withers) was a leader of the FreeBandz Gang, an amateur hip-hop crew of twentysomethings who were into much more nefarious activities than laying down tracks."
jesus christ. get out of journalism and go write that pulp novel kicking around in your head.
'Rap crew' seems pretty self explanatory in 2018
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/468851579487780905/50...
The real question: Why do we let governments get away with this kind of behavior?
Fighting a technology arms race with the government is a losing battle. They can ask for private keys to be handed over - on threat of jail time if you don't comply.
We need to start at the ballot box.
Governments take time to adapt to new technology, so keep the new technology moving faster than the government knows how to deal with it........
Not many care anymore about privacy except basically, us, the tech power user community and then a few stragglers. This new generation just doesn't care because they never really grew up with any in the first place, just shoved right into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. They probably didn't go too depth into privacy laws, why your privacy matters in their grade school either.
Now the older generations (boomers, GenX, Xillenials) share way too much information, in my opinion. They get on FB, tag everyone in the photo, even those without a FB account. And share their phone number and directions to their house.
The closer the storage is to you, the bigger a hurdle the government needs to jump to access it. Closer tech is more private tech. It's also much more expensive to snoop on.
The ballot box approach will last exactly as long as the next terrorist crisis.
In reality, they have the guns and jails, write the laws, and can change their mind as they see fit as to what the laws even mean.
Playing in a rigged game.
1. A spouse going through your cell phone without your knowledge 2. A landlord requiring cameras in all rooms of your house to catch potential property destruction 3. A boss logging all computer activity at all times
I'd imagine the average person would be pretty pissed about all of the above. At some point though, when it gets scaled up to the federal government effectively having the power to go through anybody's phone records, cloud data, email, search history, and now surveillance cameras, a lot of people seem to be okay with that, because terrorism.
Terrorism is bad, but police states are worse, because at that point the government becomes the terrorist. If you're that afraid of terrorists that you're willing to give the government the power to spy on you (which is not even guaranteed to prevent terror attacks), maybe you should move to a rural location far away from any population center. Otherwise, it should be treated like any other crime. Perhaps we should think about why people become terrorists in the first place, and maybe get at the root of the problem, instead of increasing police power endlessly to try to solve the symptom and not the cure.
A better example might be an exec passing a policy requiring HR to have permission to see your X.
It's known that it costs us between 250 billion to 1 trillion dollars yearly, but pursuing the crimes isn't prioritized by the FBI/IRS because of the costs of litigation, the possibility of destabilizing the markets, and the war on drugs/terror.
The case mentioned in the article as the first one was a white collar crime: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/10/12/how-a...
When the government spies on innocent people en masse -- because they say they should have nothing to hide --, the government is the one doing harm to an innocent person, and it's the government who has something to hide.
Without accountability, and given the secret and anonymous nature of their interference, we can't trust that the government only spies on guilty people, because they will circularly claim that they are guilty because they are spied on.
And you shouldn't take solace that comparatively only a few innocent people get their lives destroyed, not just because it can happen to you, or because it shouldn't happen in the first place, but because not being accountable for their crimes gradually emboldens the government, and given advances in automation, to scale it up and encompass more of society until one day they come for you or your children.
Does anyone have experience with other brands that you might recommend?
I've got a couple cameras that have been running outdoors for years in rain, snow, and heat. At this point I'm just waiting for them to die so I can finally upgrade to the latest and greatest models.
But making something like this exclusive to CKs is a new and extremely unwelcome thing for them, and should be a real red flag even if it's not tied to the cloud.
The tech in home security cameras is basically a lens and a cable, usually some software with questionable UI. I'm really skeptical of companies that manage to take that commodity hardware and ask for hundreds of dollars.
It's also a field that's still iterating pretty rapidly, so tech that's priced at near disposable levels is extra appealing to me.
With most home devices I'm assuming there will be security issues, so the fact the Wyze team is at least transparent when they are working on a vulnerability (and hint at how they prioritize) seems above average to me: https://support.wyzecam.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009314072-S...
Wyzecam is considering adding 'RTSP' protocol to allow other devices to retrieve the video stream. Doubtful that it will be implemented as it directly impacts their business model.
From WyzeCam subreddit: "We want to create an ecosystem of products that work through our app. If people stop using our app, what are we providing (given that we don't make the hardware ourselves)? We don't have a specific plan for subscriptions at this point but we are considering it so that we could provide cloud storage options beyond our baseline.
We might enable RTSP (still working on deciding that). We also may add features to our app that would reduce the need for RTSP by making things work through the app itself. It's a bit up in the air right now."
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/wyzecam/comments/973bv8/wyze_cam_fe...
Here are the questions I'd ask in making your choice. 1) device storage vs onsite storage vs hosted remote (my dad wants to setup a system, I'm hoping we can share an off-site backup solution)
2) internet required vs CCTV (local lan only)
3) WiFi vs wired vs Power Over Ethernet (I'd prefer wired PoE, but I don't want to run cable at this time, I went wireless, this requires a phone app to setup in my case)
4) fixed camera vs pan/tilt (I'm planning a mixed system, pan/tilt for living room with fixed cameras looking at doors)
Obviously this is putting most of the setup/maintenance onto you. If you're comfortable with that and setting up a network I believe this is the most privacy-wise solution as the data should never leave your house
https://www.reddit.com/r/synology/comments/8mdioc/device_ana...
Edit: Downvotes, why? The Wire was a critically acclaimed series whose major themes included abuse of power, the use of technology to both surveil and evade surveillance, perverse incentives, and failure of institutions, among other things that are as relevant as ever in the post-Snowden era. But instead of pagers and burners we'd get tech circa 2018.
More like Homeland than The Wire, though. Or, uh, Black Mirror.
I'm not picking on Slack specifically here, but this is just healthy skepticism when dealing with cloud services all in all.
All bets are off with governments involved. There are lots of compelling reasons for secretly disregarding the already set privacy policy. Including but not limited to patriotism, anti-terrorism, child abuse, human rights, crime or flat out regime criticism, political reasons such as opposition.
Pick your providers carefully. You trust them more than you think.
I suppose they could not log anything that could allow correlation to a user/ip, but that creates a different security problem.
I don't see a real technical solution here other than doing all the processing locally.
Google does now allow you to supply your own encryption keys for some offerings: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/customer-supplie.... This is probably a better option for those who are clueful enough.
(Disclaimer: I work for an Alphabet company.)
They give you services for "free" (or cheap) so they can use your data for marketing analysis. The thermostat tells Google when you're home and when you're not, tells them when you go to bed and when you wake up. Tells them when you go on vacation, and with the Nest Mobile App, where you went for vacation. Tells them how frugal you are with energy.
This is a lot of valuable data to a marketing company, so of course they aren't going to lock themselves out of it.
Whenever I read copy like this, I read it as "no dragnet this time, nothing to see here! Keep buying Nest and other great products from Alphabet, Inc!" But is it possible that no NSL was ever sent and Google simply provides a data feed of all relevant info and video to their national security partners? (A generously paid-for feed, of course.)
I guess what I'm asking is, is an NSL required for Google to legally surveil its customers on behalf of the host government? Beyond sheer EULA license legal weasel-wording, I'm wondering if the fourth amendment restricts the US government from arranging for a dragnet-style data feed from some willing corporate partner.
it doesn't. NSA has had room 631 at AT&T for over a decade now. and, of course, everywhere else. there's almost certainly an API for government agencies that they can query without any new warrants -- think facebook, google, amazon, etc.
i remember back in the day people used to say that these things were just conspiracy theories.