Google has been caught collecting location data on every Android device owner since the beginning of this year (that’s for the past 11 months)—even when location services are entirely disabled, according to an investigation conducted by Quartz.
This location-sharing practice doesn’t want your Android smartphone to use any app, or turn on location services, or even have a SIM card inserted.
All it wants is to have your Android device to be connected to the Internet.
The investigation revealed that Android smartphones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers, and this data could be used for “Cell Tower Triangulation”—a technique widely used to identify the location of a phone/device using data from three or more nearby cell towers.
That would be one benefit I can see to having an active in-person team accompanying you everywhere. I’d just assume everyone I meet has a cell phone, and any cell phone near me will have the mike on, the cameras active, and a group of people actively listening and watching. As a result, this discovery has no effect on me, though it would be nice to not have to concern oneself with such things.
It is getting to the point you cannot partake of technology without inviting in an incredible vulnerability from the machine though. Sadly people don’t seem to mind.
Whether you’re interested in talking to Google’s Home platform, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Amazon’s Alexa, there’s already a lot of options for smart speakers. All of those assistants are now accessible through third-party devices, which is great, because quite often a smart speaker does double-duty as a family’s stereo. But why limit a smart speaker to just responding to your demands and playing music?
A speaker on either side of the robot’s head produce decent sound, but can’t compete with the Amazon Echo or Google Home as a stereo replacement.
That’s a question UBTECH is hoping to answer with Lynx: A 20-inch tall humanoid robot that relies on Alexa for at least part of its smarts. Did I mention it will cost you $800? For the price of having eight Amazon Echo speakers strewn about your home, you can instead have a tiny robot companion that can follow you around your house relaying sports scores, reading weather reports, streaming music, checking on your pets, and even teaching you basic yoga moves.
God only knows what NSA hacker teams will be doing with that thing one day. I could see waking up one night with that creepy little thing sitting on your chest like a succubus, waiting to strangle you. Or drawing down on you with your own pistol.
At the bottom of the article were gifs of Boston Dynamics latest achievements in robotics, which are also not confidence inspiring:
Bear in mind, when I see those, I do not just see the old Robocop Movie where the giant Mechbot with the Miniguns blows away the corporate executive in the boardroom, or a Terminator-style dystopia. In the immediate future I also see a lot of blue collar workers suddenly out of work, and potentially penniless, as a few geeky executives surround themselves with Mechbots with GE Miniguns for arms to protect the massive fortunes they have amassed producing a mechanized blue collar bot-army of droids that never unionize, never take a sick day, and work for almost nothing compared to the real humans they replace.
Interesting times are coming, one way or another.
Tell others about r/K Theory, because there is no future but what we create
I do not understand the purpose of the tracking and surveillance. I assume it would be some sort of financial gain to Google, but I cannot figure it out. Can advertisers use the data? On the other hand, it could be some sort of domination game. Are Larry Page and Sergey Brin that evil?
Apple and Samsung must be doing the same thing. But why?
More and more, I am convinced these companies, when they emerge, are identified as opportunities, and are quickly penetrated and essentially taken over. Page and Brin probably know, because they are smart guys, but it is not necessary.
You see Google. I see a Google-like Edgar-suit over a surveillance infrastructure that is like the Bugman Alien from Men In Black.
Unless the oligarchs can program their bot army to also throng the shopping malls and shop til their batteries are exhausted, the notion that the rich can get richer without the participation of the masses is absurd, especially when a subset of the masses are the skilled technicians necessary to keeping the bots running.
The future is just as likely to be stripped of technology as it is to be suffocated by it. Our modern marvels each exist at the end of an incredibly complex structure of production, which is far more vulnerable to a long term disruption than was the “secret” of making concrete before it was lost for over a thousand years.
“a few geeky executives surround themselves with Mechbots with GE Miniguns”
then China hacks them and the execs are turned into sushi as their bank accounts are emptied.
So, is all this going to be before the apocalypse or after? I’m not really following the timeline here. Thank you for elucidating!
I remember when I was younger and saw Star Wars, The Phantom Menace on dvd with some nerds from work for the first time. The scenes that unnerved me the most, and still do, were the ones with the droid army. A fully mobile artificially intelligent legion of mass produced combat drones able to do the bulk of the functions a well developed military could. Then they played Attack of the clones and it sent a chill down my spine for similar reasons.
I never saw an apocalyptic future with terminators looking to kill me wherever I might be, or squidlike machines working tirelessly to keep me plugged in and generating electricity. If anything, the closest thing to my nightmare of the future is the recent Robocop reboot. At least, at the beginning of my nightmares.
Unsurprising. The amount of power drain with data turned on vs. off (DATA vs. location) was a clear indicator the device was sending some kind of info out to Googtube’s servers. Be it conversation or location, it was more than evident.