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we are being spied on, tracked, and groomed

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https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/06/police-offer-amazon-ring-free-exchange-access/592243/
Suspicion is currency. Selling consumers a 24/7 surveillance apparatus of their own making shrinks police oversight, expands the network of cameras blanketing American cities, and sends money to Amazon. That’s the trick of high-tech home surveillance: For users, it feels empowering. But it also creates a regulatory gray zone: When private citizens own the cameras, their footage isn’t subject to the same rules as police surveillance.

Read: The police officer “nextdoor”

“People only think one step ahead of themselves,” says Brian Hofer, the chair of the City of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, which advises the city on surveillance and privacy. “They aren’t thinking down the line. Securing your home is defensive. [Installing] cameras pointing at your neighbors’ houses and license-plate readers tracking their vehicles is a whole different ball game.”

Different for two reasons. First, Ring is part of a surveillance ecosystem far more sophisticated than a single officer reviewing footage. According to CNET, police in Indiana matched Ring footage of nearby cars against a license-plate-reader system to track drivers. According to a BuzzFeed report, Amazon included Ring footage in Facebook ads for the product, potentially showing Facebook’s users anyone caught on the footage—without their consent, and regardless of whether they were convicted of or charged with a crime.



Social Credit Scores

http://archive.li/Xtb7c
As consumers, we all have “secret scores”: hidden ratings that determine how long each of us waits on hold when calling a business, whether we can return items at a store, and what type of service we receive.

“Most people have no inkling they even exist,” The Wall Street Journal said in 2018. Most recently, in April, The Journal’s Christopher Mims looked at a company called Sift, whose proprietary scoring system tracks 16,000 factors for companies like Airbnb and OkCupid. “Sift judges whether or not you can be trusted,” he wrote, “yet there’s no file with your name that it can produce upon request.”
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Updated November 29th, 2019 at 1:42 PM by Mestral

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