So, on the one hand, I think one of the things that people miss when they talk to me about this stuff is that A) having a smartphone is a very new thing for me personally and B) Yeah. Ditch your phone. Leave it at home as often as you can. Don’t use it as anything but a phone if at all possible. I didn’t want a smartphone; I had to get one for work and I use it for work and basically ignore it once I get home and on weekends. SMART PHONES ARE ALSO BAD.
But the deal with what’s worse about google home isn’t specific to Google but crosses over into the question of how comfortable we are as a society with centralized data collection networks and what those networks do with that information.
Someone in the notes asked “what about Roombas?” and the deal with roombas is that they’re mapping your home and reporting back to the mothership with information about how your home is laid out. You know what I’d hate? I’d hate it if the cops had a map of the inside of my house. I’d hate it if I got an ad for Amazon home speakers configured for the layout of my living room.
My personal solution to this is “don’t own a roomba” but roombas are a very useful cleaning tool that could be a way for someone with limited mobility to maintain their independence. That’s a big deal, and it’s incredibly shitty that their options are “pay a high price to have someone else clean my house” “don’t clean my house” or “clean my house but allow data about how I arrange my furniture or if I get a roommate or if I built an un-permitted addition to be sent out to god knows who.”
There is right now, NOW, October 2019, Live, Real-time, an issue with Amazon’s Ring Doorbell service creating a gigantic linked network of surveillance cameras with data from those cameras being used by police. I have a problem with that. In fact I have five problems with that and so does the EFF.
The other reason that phones are a little bit different is that, at the moment, there is a very high barrier to access things like your location data or call history. There is case law protecting your privacy with your phone, to some extent.
That is NOT true of a lot of other smart devices; the technology moved faster than the law did and we’re in the same weird limbo we’ve been in since the 90s where some things that seem clearly wrong are perfectly legal (for instance, there are still plenty of places where posting revenge porn is not yet illegal - the ability to create and disseminate compromising sexual images of your ex moved faster than the law did in addressing that and for a long time the legal attitude was “well, guess you shouldn’t have shared those pictures” as though it would have been fine to sell photos of your nude ex to Penthouse or something).
You know what scares me? Amazon has a map of Spanish-speaking households in the US.
They don’t talk about having it, they’re not talking about selling it (except as demographic information to advertisers). It’s not something that you really think about because mapping the location of Spanish speakers in the US isn’t the Echo’s primary function.
But if you consider it for a second, then logically, yeah, somewhere out there Amazon has a map of all their Spanish-speaking users and all of their addresses and let me tell you, living in the US in 2019 that is not something that I want Amazon to have. That’s not really something I want anyone to have. And there are probably a ton of people on that list who *use* amazon with the language set to English, who speak to Alexa in English, but if there’s Spanish spoken around the device it notices.
It notices how many people live in your home. It notices if you have pets. It notices what days you go to work and for how long.
If you’re a gun owner your Alexa or Google Home or Siri Speaker or whatever probably knows that you own guns. If you use drugs your smart speaker probably knows. If you’re illegally subletting to keep your rent low enough that you don’t become homeless your smart speaker probably knows.
At the moment your local police department has to get a warrant from your cell phone provider if they want to know your location. The local police department DOES NOT need a warrant to watch you walk from your home to your office by using surveillance cameras mounted on your neighbors’ front doors, in fact the local police department teamed up with the tech company to sell those cameras to your neighbors.
Basically we’re living in a world in which there is a special, extra-aggressive police force that exists exclusively to track down people of “undesirable” origins and we also live in a world in which there are massive corporations that keep databases with the addresses of their customers footnoted with their demographic information as a means of increasing ad revenue and *essentially* I’m paranoid enough that I’m looking at this and going “hey you know how bad it would have been if there had been a live-updating list of addresses hiding Jewish refugees in the Netherlands in 1943? Is there a possibility that that’s exactly what we’re doing now only it’s hidden in the fine print of your refrigerator manual in order to intentionally hide that that data is being collected?”
Like, shit, that’s just in the US - the Philippines has an ongoing crisis of extrajudicial murders by police sanctioned by the government and wouldn’t you know it, the government that’s so busy doing murders is interested in building an IoT city.
AND ASIDE FROM ALL OF THIS
TOTALLY SEPARATE FROM ALL OF THIS
The nearly universally shitty security on IoT devices is a risk to people who don’t even HAVE the devices - the Mirai botnet took down internet access for a huge part of the United States and it was totally based on “smart” devices that didn’t have any kind of reasonable security - smart fridges, smart vacuums, baby monitors, IP cameras - all of it got sucked into a botnet that targeted major internet infrastructure with a DDoS attack.
At least with your phone *you* set the password, you use your thumbprint, you can install an antivirus or push an update. You can choose to use Signal or you can use TOR for Android or you can use a VPN. You can put whole-device encryption software on them. You can’t do that with most IoT devices. And Apple, for all that I fucking hate them, has at least had users’ backs when refusing to decrypt locked phones. I have no guarantee Amazon or Google home is going to hesitate to share information recorded from my password-protected device.
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