A hacker reverse-engineered his own Samsung TV and found alarming spying activity, including code that used connected devices’ microphones to listen to users.
A hacker reverse-engineered his own Samsung TV and found alarming spying activity, including code that used connected devices’ microphones to listen to users.
1996: cameras, microphones, radios, in your appliances? You’re schizophrenic
2026: removing the cameras, microphones, and radios from the appliances we use to spy on you is illegal.
This is why The X-Files doesn’t hold up as a TV show.
‘Agent Mulder, if this is correct, the government is tracing every phone call in the country’.
Not scary, we saw that on the news, that’s not a whackjob conspiracy theory that was on the front page of the Times’.
It is very irritating that ppl just accepted that. It wasn’t forced on us by law. We just… bought the stuff. It was so shiny! Now we have a mass surveilance apparatus that would make the Stasi blush.
Lots of us saw the terrible potential. But way more of us didn’t.
It was genius. Instead of installing surveillance systems in everyone’s homes, they marketed the surveillance systems as luxury products and let our consumerism do the work. Instead of forcing it on the general public, they made us want it to the point where they can cite consumer demand as the reason they don’t even offer products that don’t invade your privacy.
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Someone who was 55 in 1996 lived through an era where you could start a new life by moving a part of the way across a state in the US and nobody would think to research, or it wasn’t uncommon for people to have two whole families that never knew about each other (bigamy). Who cares about security cameras because nobody has time to look through all the footage? Who cares what you got up to in your 20s1 when you’ve got a family and a job in town?
Then storage got cheap enough to store it all, and computers got fast enough to look through it all (but there’s still no time to figure out who egged your car over a weekend). All those old people don’t have to live in the world they built, either, AND the world is built so it can’t be undone. All that data will always have value to someone, and storage is only ever going to get cheaper in the long term.
[1] Old busybodies need to get off their high horse judging people. Data miners are already working their way backwards looking for something of value, and if you spent a nine month summer in Europe sometime in the late 50s then it’ll eventually come it if someone bothers to look.