Privacy

In researching my previous article on "toothbrush botnets," I stumbled across an article about a "smart" toothbrush with "AI voice tips." Okay.....been brushing my teeth for quite a while and never ever thought, "I really wish my toothbrush would tell me what to do...."

If you had "WiFi toothbrush botnet" on your bingo card for 2024, put an X in that box.

I just stumbled upon an interesting enterprise: Federated Computer. It offers many of the features of Software as a Service (SaaS) like Office 365, Box, and Dropbox, but guarantees complete privacy of user data. Other services are often mining user data and feeding to third party ad marketers and/or feeding your data into their AI bots.

There have been some privacy-oriented email providers around for some time (e.g. Proton email, but this is the first one I have seen that offers such a wide range of services.

Amazon's Alexa is ten years old! How time flies! I might have guessed the old girl was seven or eight years old. But she's been around for ten years, and apparently is a big loser--as in "billions and billions."

I have maintained for years that privacy has value. It has value to the person or organization who owns their data, and that value can be monetized. Organizations like Facebook monetize in an unfriendly way, selling everything they know about you to the highest bidders. There is no "opt out" option; if you want to use Facebook, you are the product.

The "big three" of social media--Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube--have become the targets of increasing criticism around the way they choose to allow some users to post "acceptable" content while censoring other types of content. The companies' defense is to claim the protection of Section 230, a portion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

According to an article in
Wired magazine, it is becoming commonplace for law enforcement to "wiretap" your smart speaker by asking Amazon or Google for transcripts and timestamps of recorded activity. Police have to file a search warrant or subpoena to do so, but users of such devices may not be aware that what the tech companies are recording and storing could be used by law enforcement.

A giant of the community broadband movement passed away a few weeks ago of a heart attack at his home in Texas.

Gene was a dear friend and I am now very glad that I was able to have dinner with him this past April at the Broadband Communities conference in Austin.

Without providing personal detail, I have had two incidents this week where an email and a separate conversation both resulted in emails the next day from Amazon suggesting that I guy products related to the email and the conversation.

The email was sent to several people, and two of them were Gmail accounts, so I think it is logical to assume that Google is scanning all gmail messages and passing stuff on to Amazon--Google has admitted as much.

Someone has finally identified the market opportunity to sell a home assistant that protects your privacy. Devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home are sending everything that happens in your home to the Amazon or Google mothership: what music you listen to, what you are talking about, what programs you watch, what you buy....everything. Apple's HomePod also sends everything to Apple for processing, but Apple has a much stronger commitment to protecting customer privacy than Amazon and Google (the latter two don't really promise any privacy protection).

SportClips has decided that it does not really want to cut your hair unless you give them your full name, your email address, your phone number, and your birthdate.

For a haircut.

Some months ago, they instituted an online scheduling system so that you can schedule your haircut. And of course, there's an app for that.

Companies like Amazon and Facebook are selling camera-based products that are designed to be used inside the home and outside the home (e.g. the Ring doorbell).

More than twenty years ago, as the Internet became more common, some prognosticators began talking about the "smart house," where lots of household devices would be interconnected and make our lives one of ease.

At that time, I wrote a somewhat tongue in cheek article for a professional newsletter about a "smart house" gone wild, somewhat in the fashion of the Hall 9000 problem in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Less than five minutes after I clicked on an Amazon link to look at a flashlight on sale, I got an email from Amazon saying, "...based on your recent activity, you may be interested in this other flashlight..."

Really? Is business so bad for Amazon they have to spam their customers? If they are doing this to me, they must be doing it to all their customers, so every day, they are sending out hundreds of millions of unsolicited emails.

These companies are abusing their customers, and it won't turn out well.

I have been writing about the dire threats to privacy for many years, and the recent disclosures about the extent of Facebook privacy abuses is, perhaps, finally raising more awareness that Facebook is not actually "free" in the sense that Facebook users don't pay a price. Facebook users pay with their personal information, not only when they register for an account, but every time they post anything.

In a win for personal privacy, Google has announced that the company will no longer read the email of their personal Gmail account users.

Google has been scanning Gmail email to identify what kind of ads to place in Web browsers for its users.

LinkedIn may not be entirely dead, but in the past several months, I've received nothing but "business friend" requests from sales people and consultants trolling for business. LinkedIn has enabled "lazy" sales work. Just browse LinkedIn for keyword matches for whatever you are selling, and then send a "link" request. I turn them all down.

I was a very early LinkedIn user, and have yet to find it particularly useful. I've never let it have access to my address book, and I rarely use it reach out to people I already know--email and the phone are far more efficient.

This weekend, while I was busy wasting time watching a Youtube video, there was an ad for a WiFi-enabled slow cooker.

Facial recognition software is now in wide use by groups as disparate as Facebook, local police departments, Homeland Security, and the NSA. What it means is that whenever you post a picture of you, family, or friends anywhere online, someone can easily identify every single person in the picture, and very likely determine from the caption or comments where you have been and what you are doing.

I would say that now, about half my LinkedIn invitations are coming from marketing trolls who obviously want to sell me something. I deleted three invitations this morning, from an insurance rep, a CPA, and a car repair shop. I don't know of any of these people.

LinkedIn seemed like a reasonably modest "good idea" when it started, but I can't say I have ever used it for its supposed intended use--networking.