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Funny how, a decade ago, they called us “tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists” for suggesting such things and we were shunned by “respectable” folks in the web community afraid to lose their favoured status as Big Tech’s bottom feeders.

vimeo.com/96727211

#BigTech #SiliconValley #ventureCapital #capitalism #surveillance #BigWeb #web #SmallTech #ethicalTech #privacy #humanRights mstdn.ca/@teledyn/113489107039…


@bjb @jrredho

It is called Active Listening, and Alexa has a patent on it.

buttondown.com/creativegood/ar…


in reply to Aral Balkan

> Today, six years after that patent was granted, we can that this idea has progressed [..]:
>
>> Thousands of people catching trains in the #UnitedKingdom likely had their faces scanned by #Amazon software as part of widespread #AI trials, new documents reveal. The image recognition system was used to predict travelers’ age, gender, and potential emotions — with the suggestion that the data could be used in #advertising systems in the future.

#Dystopia duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=dysto…

in reply to Aral Balkan

I wouldn’t have that thing or anything like it in my house. I can’t remember if it was Brave New World, or 1984, but there was a device in one of those stories that pretty much is an Alexa. Having a mobile phone is more than enough monitoring already. I don’t even use shop loyalty cards for the same reason.
in reply to Aral Balkan

I hadn't seen it yet, glad you brought it back, can I use it in my lectures?
in reply to Catarina :mastodon_oops:

@catarinac Of course :)

Here’s a more recent one: m.youtube.com/watch?v=1rhzge9r…

And there are many others; please feel free to use any of them – duckduckgo.com/?q=aral+balkan+…

in reply to Aral Balkan

I remember "The camera panopticon" from about that time.

Just then I had worked on a social network a couple of years before, and it was very clear to me that if you don't pay for a service, you may be a user, but you're not the client, you're the product.