Morlock Elloi on Wed, 28 Mar 2018 07:11:22 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> School of red herrings


It's interesting to observe the pace of the official narrative regarding CA/FB drama. It reminds of backup strategy of some animals, that are ready to ditch tail or leg to save the body.

Initially, CA was the bad guy, and then the fall guy. Some more acute observers noticed that it's FB that's the bad guy, and now FB is quickly becoming the designated fall guy:

https://www.sltrib.com/pb/opinion/commentary/2018/03/20/leonid-bershidsky-cambridge-analytica-is-a-red-herring-facebook-is-the-real-problem

Neither is true. These are just recently visible emanations of the surveillance infrastructure. Notice, as example, that these space surveillance systems are currently spared from the public attention:

- AMZN's real time consumer surveillance infrastructure is more advanced that anything FB has, because it uses autonomous 24/7 pickups ("Alexa", comically paid for by the targets themselves.) In addition, AMZN certification requires that all 3rd party devices using Alexa as a command pipeline report their state changes in real time - light and other switches, cameras, thermostats, etc., and, as of recently, to also have microphones reporting to AMZN.

- APPL Homekit ecosystem is very similar, and they have benefit of correlating with handset collections. BTW, they also plan on putting microphones in all Homekit devices.

- GOOGL Home not only tracks home events, but correlates both with handsets and Internet activity. They know how horny you are, how severe your diarrhea is, and when you left the house to join the privacy protest.

- and, just for good measure, to remind that NSA is today, and every day, recording the totality of US domestic data flow. On the upside, everyone can now be Krapp.

Focussing attention on FB will achieve exactly nothing. FB is actually not so bad, as they provide your diarrhea diaries to anyone that pays.

The other ecosystems are more closed and it's much harder to find out the full extent of conditioning that they are capable of. Meddling with elections was a skin job - ultimately irrelevant. Which is why you heard about it.





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