Reply to post: Aww, the Stasi would be proud

Facebook's new always-listening home appliance kit Portal doesn't do Facebook

Milton

Aww, the Stasi would be proud

As one of the crusties who's old enough to feel (yes, bizarrely) a little nostalgic for the Cold War—it turns out western societies were, on balance, healthier then than they are now: for every step forward made with PC tolerance, we've made two steps backwards into the internet-fuelled Age of Stupid—I cannot help wondering why anyone with the remotest scrap of intelligence would voluntarily pay money for a microphone to install in their most private retreat, their home.

Once upon a time (and for all I know, it's the same in Putin's kleptocracy today) a conversation with a Russian or an East German might well be punctuated with a brief silence and a finger pointed upwards: which in the language of the times meant, "They are probably listening."

We now live in an era where some western governments have arrogated to themselves spying powers and invasions of privacy which even the KGB and Stasi didn't contemplate. And democracy is more fragile than ever, with populist little-Hitler vermin up on their hind legs from the White House to Turkey and beyond. The large internet companies are notorious for harvesting every fragment of data they can, selling you for a profit, and cosying up to ever more authoritarian governments at every turn, and almost daily acknowledging the compromise of millions of people's private data.

And many of you actually want to install always-on listening devices in your homes? So you can save your poor little tired fingers from a dozen keystrokes ...? Really??

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