Privacy, which companies were once happy to claim was all about personal choice, is now primed to affect everyone around you even more than it already did. Meta and Google’s smart glasses can record anything the owner is looking at or use artificial intelligence to describe it. Apple’s* Audio Intelligence feature turns every Apple Watch into a transcription machine that records or summarizes your day. Amazon’s Bee devices take that a step further and can record and transcribe everything. Dozens of other…
The only way we can assure ourselves that our devices aren’t under someone else’s control is for them to operate offline.
Putting our personal life’s infrastructure under the control of someone else (especially a for-profit corporation) will never end well for us.
Even in the rare instance when that corporate overlord doesn’t turn fully evil, there are dozens of examples of “smart” tech becoming bricks when the owners of the cloud server they rely on goes out of business, or simply decides to no longer support that product.
That’s a big part of why I’m doing this. Most of the Chinese note takers will become bricks once the company is shuttered and the service/app is closed down.
Plus, there’s no transparency. Company A makes the hardware, company B makes the firmware, C makes the mobile app, D the cloud service, F rebrands it, G sells it. And good fucking luck figuring out who you have to audit to use these devices in any kind of secure manner, since all the data is on Chinese servers, and you can bet your tushy it will be sold to the highest bidder.