I only purchase Sony TVs, and I simply just connect an HTPC to them. If there are any smart features, I just choose not to accept the EULA and not to connect it to the Internet.
The Writing Tools are a gimmick, but the improvements to Siri on the iPhone 16 are great. I haven't used the visual intelligence yet, but I always thought Google Lens was cool, so I hope it works just as well. Image Playground and Genmoji are pretty stupid, I have no idea why they wasted time on that.
Message/email summaries are super weird. They show up when they want to, which is barely at all.
Say what you want about this Apple Intelligence stuff, but it's nowhere near as intrusive or annoying as Gemini or Copilot. You can turn it off and ignore it.
Recording people in public spaces is generally legal. Should it be unlawful to record your front porch? That'd implicate Ring and a whole bunch of other products. How about setting up a camera on your windowsill pointing out towards the street?
None of this stuff is settled. It's always in court, and audio and video are frequently treated completely differently from each other.
What about setting up a camera on your roof aimed at your neighbor's bedroom window, and livestreaming it online? What about secretly recording the conversation that you're having with someone in a restaurant? What about recording the comings and goings of the people who enter or leave a gay bar, or a mosque?
One issue I have with the Flock cameras installed in my city is that they are installed on public land (right next to the road) and paid for with tax dollars.
"going private is likely saving 90% over". How's that working out for your private US healthcare system? Some of the most expensive private care in the world. The toilet you mention is in one of the richest most capitilistic states in the world, they have super expensive public toilets alongside homelessness. In other countries they have cheap public toilets. I'm not sure public/private is the deciding factor. I think it's San Francisco.
It’s used by the governments, how can they pay for it if not with tax money? Would you be happier if Flock installed them for free in exchange for advertising space in town?
People are going to start making spray paint/foam attachments for drones so that they can equip their drone with a little can of 'fuck that camera right up'
it won't be cost effective to repair the cameras, so they'll go away.
No, what I think will happen then is that the govt will transition to flying cameras, but the problem with that will be expense and poorer performance for a while until batteries improve.
That's what laws are for, for us to decide if actions that are technically possible should be legally possible. Many products exist because of leaks in existing laws around privacy; maybe we tighten those laws up? That's the point of the discussion. In this case, a private company is creating a dystopian dragnet of personal travel information that is a function of the population travel volume that its devices cover.
If the right to privacy arrived at from this discussion kills a product line or a business, oh well. Human rights > profits, broadly speaking.
Is this not highly dependent on your location? In the US this is up to the state/county level. It is generally not illegal to film past your property line.
> It is generally not illegal to film past your property line.
In the US. In much of the world it is.
But again, enforcement of this is terribly weak. It is virtually impossible to verify, and even if the government somehow did, it is trivial to circumvent as you just have to tilt the camera a few degrees or slightly change the block-out zones on the camera, and you can't really see the difference from the outside. On top of the police having a vested interest in the breaking of this rule because it helps them tremendously during investigations.
Regulation to protect privacy is the only solution. Otherwise, the market will only accelerate the exploitation of your personal data in the pursuit of maximum profit.
Sure your license plate number is public, but selling the geolocation history of said license plate may cross a legal boundary. (Or it may not, but it certainly should.)
You're asking the right questions. Welcome to developing an awareness of the sprawling surveillance industry!
In short there are vanishingly few privacy laws in the US, and the few that do exist are mostly undermined by fake consent in EULA/TOS documents-that-nobody-reads. Even when a company somehow does manage to run aground of some law, they generally just end up with financial slap on the wrist while keeping their ill gotten data gains.
The best time to push for meaningful privacy legislation was over the past 40 years when all of these surveillance databases were being built out. But the second best time is now, especially as more people gain awareness of how pervasive and invasive this totalitarian industry has become. The records being created and kept by this industry would make a dyed in the wool Stasi agent blush, and Americans need to start rejecting this fallacious narrative that things that are reasonable for individuals to do at a small bespoke passing scale remain legitimate when scaled up to industrial levels.
https://nina.chat/news/120500000101270/icq-now-in-open-alpha...