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Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State
(greenwald.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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I don't use anything cloud based and much of my shit isn't even allowed out to the internet.
It's a drop in the ocean, for too many say "But it's sooooo convenient and I've got nothing to hide" and open up all they got. Share camera's with amazon, email address book with facebook etc. not realizing nor caring I make an appearance in their instances too and I DO mind.
I was looking for a new TV last month, the salesman said it was "sacrilege" when I told him I had no intention of connecting the TV to the internet or using its online functions since I will have a media PC connected to it. I was just interested in the quality of the screen.
I had to revert the firmware on a TV because it effectively bricked itself when the software was no longer supported. I don’t connect these things to the Internet. They will simply display what I tell them to.
What a twat
I was looking for a phone that didn't have a camera. I told him I already have a camera that is NOT a phone.
He was aghast.
They definitely make them, but it's mostly for the government. I don't know if you can get and use one outside of their contract.
Did you find one?
Well, sort of. I'm now using Google Voice as a land-line.
For portability I have a personal Hot-Spot and an old iPad that is NOT chipped for phones. I can use the iPad's browser, with my Hot-Spot, to get to my Google Voice account.
I can get voice and pictures and text but for the most part it's at HOME.
For portability I think I would use an older android phone loaded with your OS choice.
The iPad and phone both have cameras anyway just the phone is lighter. Keep it no sim and in airplane mode
Good advice, Thanks.
I did buy a used phone at the thrift store and put that in the car so I had a clock.
Mind you the issue here is that an old Android phone will likely have an outdated kernel. Even if there is a custom ROM for it. Leaving you vulnerable, which isn't great.
Added plus of the cell phone is it can also still call 911 even without a sim as long as you take it off airplane.
Or at least it should be able to, changing the OS could impact that
The town I live in is 3 blocks long. The fire department is in the middle block. I can crawl to the ambulance.
“I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie. A colloquial fib we feel compelled to utter as a mock defense, like asserting innocence will assuage suspicion.
We all have something to hide. Probably many, many things to hide. Even just in the narrow context of the law, there are hundreds of thousands of laws that apply to any one of us at any given time, and you are almost certainly breaking some of them without even knowing it.
Personal security through privacy is so very, very important. I wish more people could see that.
In a little town in the Netherlands life was good. The planning committee actually had smart people who made sure to plan the town according to the people’s needs. Kosher butchers, for instance, were placed near Jewish community centers. They could do that because the town had kept records on who lived where, including the people’s religion. It really was a utopia.
Then the nazis invaded, got their hands on those registries, and with utmost efficiency cleared the town of all jews.
I don’t know if this story is true. I read it (probably much better worded) a few years ago. But it honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true.
It's plausible and that's enough.
The point is whether or not it happens, as a parable it's validity is sound. Point is, if even if the current government has nothing but good intentions and would never use the information to do anything you don't agree with, and you are in perfect agreement with the current government. There is always the risk of either the government changing or someone stealing the information from the government that could weaponize it in ways you would never want.
what's crazy to me is the people who defend this type of stuff, are the ones that are also terrified of gun registration... because you know if one day a gun ban were put in place, having a list of where all the guns are would make confiscation easy and legal. But they don't realize that it's just as likely for them to hunt people who spoke out against the government, or were the wrong race.. or hell, just possibly see that you have a gun because you took it home on a ring cam.
100%.
And today Germany still makes you register your religion. You'd think they would have learned....
You can clear your denomination from your file. I don’t know if it survives in a changelog, though.
And easy to debunk. Take their phone, ask the pin. 9 out of 10 won't. Open bank app ask pin again. You won't get that far.
Every time I hear that I always say the same thing.
It isn't enough that you have nothing to hide.
All that's required is that the general public think they have access to information that someone might want to hide.
Once the public thinks that data can exist or is accessible all that's required is for them to lie or fabricate the required data.
"It would be very unfortunate if there was questionable content 'found' on your phone"
Let me put things this way:
Even if one's relaxed about data mining of private data for the purpose of serving you custom adverts, there are plenty of other use cases which can actually cost you money, not to mention the risk when the Authorities start running crime-predictive models sold to them by slimy Tech Investors with high enough rates of false positive that you run the risk of being tagged a "Terrorism" for some stupid shit like buying more bleech than the average person.
Even you think you're above board on everything and about as boring and uninteresting a person as possible, there are plenty of ways in which others known everything about you might come around and bit you in the ass in very concrete ways.
When I was a kid in the 90s, there used to small fringe groups talking about global warming and everyone else rolled their eyes. Now when it's too late, people have started caring.
Privacy, security and anonymity are at that place now. Anyone talking about how fucked up it is that even your TV and fridge is mining all the data it can, is considered to be a fringe alarmist. People are going to wait till the world is on fire before taking this seriously. There was an uproar when WhatsApp changed its terms of service a couple of years ago and that died down and nothing changed. The uproar from this (and Discord) will also die down and nothing will change. Maybe one day people will see this as relevant to their lives and take it seriously.
people that tell me "they have nothing to hide" understand where I am coming from in terms of privacy when I ask them to write down their social security number on a piece of paper with their debit/credit card information
Assume either Trump will go after anybody saying anything critical about him and the party, or imagine AOC takes over the government and going after anybody saying something positive about Trump. Without privacy, you're f-ed either way.
Yeah that’s not gonna happen. I get what you mean, but she’s not some despotic arch-trump.
Only in Fox news reality, I know
If you have nothing to hide, would you please consider installing 4K cameras in every corner of your house that publicly livestream your every action and also remove your front door?
It may seem like a drop in the ocean now, but if things ever got to the point where we're being divided up into groups, you might be oddly left out of every group. It's not hard to de-Google, de-Meta, inconvenient at times, but maybe it pays dividends down the road.
The trouble with living in a panopticon is that becomes suspicious to not be on a list.
We're already seeing that where people are suspicious when you don't have Facebook or whatever.
Recent tv's became thin client's. Turn it on and it first need to download the app('s)