Alexa Outsmarts George Orwell.

[Ninurta]

THEY should NOT be ALLOWED to listen to our PRIVATE conversations, READ our PRIVATE Emails, LOOK at our activities via our PRIVATE webcams, TRACK our locations via mobile phone services that we have CHOSEN TO SWITCH OFF, or use OUR PRIVATE BANDWIDTH to PUSH advertising that we don't want at us.

Indeed they shouldn't, but it has become endemic. It's the price of using their "free" services.

I work for a telecommunications company. They do not provide their own e-mail, but use Yahoo instead in some sort of nefarious agreement, including my work e-mail. Recently, Yahoo was bought out and merged with another company, a subsidiary of Verizon (which is not the telecom I work for - seems a bad business to let the competition control their e-mail, but hey, it ain't MY decision!). So when this new outfit took control of the e-mail, they imposed new terms of service and security guarantees. I read the security guarantees. They reserve the right to mine the TEXT of e-mails, not just the metadata, to collect information on users. Now, in the US, even the government is not allowed to mine the text without a warrant... but the private provider can as long as it's ToS.

The government has "secret" agreements with most major telecom companies, and has had since the Patriot Act went into effect. I'd bet dollars against donuts that those agreements include information sharing, of just the sort that the companies can gather, bypassing the law altogether on the government's part. I know how that works. As a private gun for hire, I discovered that the public guns for hire love you dearly, because you can do things they can't, legally. It's why they sought us out to work with them. I've had more than one official badge guy tell me he was glad I was there, because he didn't have to wait for backup or deal with the bureaucracy that calling for it inevitably entailed.

There are ways around that, ways to keep your text secure, but they ARE rather cumbersome. I don't much care about that particular arrangement - government can steal all my work e-mails their little black hearts desire. If I were CEO of my company, however, I'd be a little bit jittery about just giving them up to the competition company (industrial espionage being the lucrative trade it is) but that decision is above my pay grade. Not my problem if they want to just bend over and grab their ankles for the competition. It wouldn't be the first dumbass move they've made.

It's everywhere. The only way to avoid it entirely is to unplug and fall entirely off the grid.


.