Old Folk Paranoia

I suspect that the ghosts of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley will not haunt you for the mixed references to 1984 and Brave New World. ????

Big Brother wasn’t monitoring the residents of Oceana, only Party members. It was the constant broadcasting of fear that kept people in line and thinking that leaders like Putin (of Orwell’s Eurasia), and Xi (of Orwell’s Eastasia) would bother to notice prols like you and me. It seems that it is working.

I suspect that the lackeys at Tesla have long ago become bored of my occasional utterances when I am in my car.

My thermostat is connected to the internet. I am quite confident it hasn’t been listening to me. It certainly hasn’t engaged me in conversation. The same goes for the water leak sensors in my crawl space, my internet-connected cameras in Canada and Mexico, and my wifi enabled doorbell. My Sonos speakers and my internet-connected television talk to me, but like my wife, I am quite certain they don’t listen to me.

And of course, I know that regardless of how I set location services on my phone, my location is always known as the cel phone towers triangulate my location, ensuring I have the best signal.

I do find it humorous when people who cross borders, fly on airplanes, use credit cards or debit cards, transfer money, etc. and post messages, using an internet-connected device, worry about internet-connected devices.

In 2019, government auditors said the FBI had access to more than 640 million face photos and that the FACE unit had run more than 390,000 facial recognition searches over the previous eight years.

A Government Accountability Office audit in 2021 found that 20 federal agencies, including the U.S. Postal Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service, had used facial recognition in some capacity, though most of the agencies did “not have awareness” of which tools employees were using and had “therefore not fully assessed the potential risks.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/07/facial-recognition-fbi-dod-research-aclu/#

Read that again… “… these agencies did “not have awareness” of which tools employees were using and had “therefore not fully assessed the potential risks.

I suggest there are more important things to be thinking about than how people open their glove box.