| Title | Your privacy concerns with Kinect were not foolish |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | News |
| When | August 21, 2019 |
People were monitoring Kinect. Recently, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook had to admit that real live people sometimes listened in on the companys' digital assistants..
So, microphones listen and record, who knew?
Yeah, I know they need training data… But these are companies that could buy it for a penny.
It’s like those post GDPR warnings saying they care about my privacy. No, you don’t, mate, otherwise you wouldn’t ever ask for my data, opt-in (which it still never is) or not.
Just another reason why “nobody” trusts Windows 10 telemetry (or the one they had in Office 360 etc…)
Guess the Prism One wasn’t a bad name for the XBOX after all.
This seems like pretty small potatoes.
Everyone make fun of me for not using Siri, Cortana or any Alexa device. Go ahead. I’ll try not to cry. :)
etc.
So they are carefully watching my wife or I taking the dogs out for walkies? Or the hundreds of times that a car causes a flash of sun on the IR sensor? Good for them. :)
Great, no doubt somebody out there at Microsoft is now trading videos of my swinging penis.
Those poor fellas who had to watch me play Dance Central.
Nope, I’m with you on this.
Not out of privacy concerns, I just didn’t think they were at all useful.
Ditto the Bixby thing that came with my Samsung phone.
Hey, look, another argument against anything Microsoft in the living room!
-Tom
Fixed it for you. :)
Ring basically faces the street or is outside. A creepy neighbor could also record you and watch it over and over and over again or post it. There was always concerns about privacy.
When we get a benevolent company that provides for these kind of services, let me know. It seems we don’t have much of a choice other than take it or leave it at this point. It’s fine for some to choose leave it of course.
Take it or leave it is fine on your property where you control lines of sight. And a lot of people would not be ok with an anonymous stranger standing at their front door recording what they can see 24/7. And in this case, it is not just your choice, but the choice of every neighbor and everyone whos external camera is pointed at your property incidentally or which you pass by in your daily anonymity.
These are basically just more internet-streaming public cameras with geographic identifiable tags, so Amazon needs to be more careful handing over the keys to operations in other countries (like Ukraine). Little bits of data can be hard to use, but imagine being able to access data about who is home or leaving home with certain schedules, and combining it with, say, voter registration data and Facebook posts, if you are hoping to influence an election. Targets can be served “ad” content which shows up only when a vulnerable person is home alone, for example. This is the micro-targeted level of detail groups are working towards, and not just parties within the US.
If a stranger stands in the street and records you, including your front door, there isn’t much you can do about it. It’s not against the law. Hell in your backyard, we’re still trying to figure out what people are allowed to do with drones and those cameras.
I absolutely think they’re overstepping, but whether you are okay with something or not has nothing to do with the actual law or what these companies are allowed to do. Meanwhile a lot of people with modern phones are letting Siri and Google Assistant just gobble up with they say, by default too. In a Walgreens world, I’d prefer they not review that material at all, but that’s not the world we live in.
… in America. I’ve been told I can’t just put a camera filming the street around here, although I don’t think there’s many actual barriers for whoever does it.
Put a camera… where? On the side of your house, a post in your yard… like where did they say you couldn’t mount that camera and what law or ordinance did they site?
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-neighbor-legally-point-security-camera-property.html
tl;dr - Maybe, maybe not
Generally, any publically viewable areas like back yards are fair game – which is how companies like Google can record their Street View images across the United States.
Of course I was talking about the front door which is… publicly view-able, not really the land behind a fence, the doorbell being Ring’s best known product at the moment.
