A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
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A "NEMA node" is a standard power outlet.
This article is bait designed to trick surveillance opponents into destroying their own credibility by complaining about innocuous stuff instead of problems that matter. It's on par with an article fearmongering about "dihydrogen monoxide," except worse because it's not satire.
The article does make note of that. The concern they bring up isn't the node itself, but that some regions might be installing equipment on those nodes without public consultation:
If you already care about what Flock cameras collect, NEMA nodes deserve more scrutiny - because they don't require a ribbon-cutting ceremony to get cameras added later. The standardized interface means capabilities can be upgraded or swapped in during routine maintenance, with no new hardware footprint announcing the change. Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) deployments extend this further, pulling in vehicle telemetry from roadside units and connected cars. Specific regulatory frameworks governing data collected by these nodes remain limited and inconsistent across jurisdictions, much like those exposed when secretly tracking users without meaningful oversight.
So it's not the node that is the problem, but putting in rules about how they can be used.
Okay, but it's not as if installing stuff on poles has meaningful public oversight even when it requires hard-wiring. It might make such deployments ever so slightly more likely by reducing the labor costs a little bit, but is otherwise entirely irrelevant.
If there's ever public input into that sort of stuff at all, it doesn't come at the putting-hardware-on-poles phase; it comes at the budgeting or procurement phase. And even then, that's only if there's a specific project with a specific budget line-item: at the political level of "we're proposing to spend $X million on a contract with Y vendor to provide Z service," no politician knows or cares whether the shit is hard-wired or plugged into a socket, or whether that changes over the course of the contract! It's nothing but a minor implementation detail.
...Actually, speaking of which, I should correct myself: complaining about it may not damage your credibility after all. But that's because most politicians' eyes are just gonna glaze over before they even understand what the fuck you're talking about well enough to nitpick.
This was posted earlier and those Nema Nodes were just normal sockets found in homes and everywhere. Doesn't necesarily mean anything.
Your house also hides outlets that can add cameras, air sensors and 5G gear with no public vote or new hardware!
Fucking hell they won't be done until we do not have even a bit of privacy left!