New ask Hacker News story: Google's "Find My Device" network – The upcoming assault on user's privacy
Google's "Find My Device" network – The upcoming assault on user's privacy
4 by pyeri | 3 comments on Hacker News.
My post relates very much to this one[1] which is a month old. Like their Samsung device, this feature is now coming to my Redmi device also. Today only I received the email with subject, "Your Android devices will soon join the Find My Device network" . As always, the *real* privacy nightmare stuff is always hidden in between the large boring paragraphs or the fine print as they say. Here is the part which I think is the most problematic: > How it works > > Devices in the network use Bluetooth to scan for nearby items. If other devices detect your items, they’ll securely send the locations where the items were detected to Find My Device. Your Android devices will do the same to help others find their offline items when detected nearby. So, your devices are also supposed to co-operate by sending data to other devices which may want their location detected while offline. We are made to believe here that this data pertains to only our location and nothing else but once this thing becomes too ubiquitous, one can easily see the scope for surveillance capitalism by the powers that be? This is very much like the Microsoft's recall scenario, I don't see much difference between this and that. At least there, the data is very much still on the user's device and doesn't leave its shores, this is arguably even worse. For such technology to be palatable to the power user, they must at the very least, be prepared to open source this code. I think recall would have still got some acceptance had Microsoft made the code open source. This whole "you trust me but I won't trust you" business is highly cynical and doesn't usually have a long shelf life. [1]: https://ift.tt/Ts84Q57
4 by pyeri | 3 comments on Hacker News.
My post relates very much to this one[1] which is a month old. Like their Samsung device, this feature is now coming to my Redmi device also. Today only I received the email with subject, "Your Android devices will soon join the Find My Device network" . As always, the *real* privacy nightmare stuff is always hidden in between the large boring paragraphs or the fine print as they say. Here is the part which I think is the most problematic: > How it works > > Devices in the network use Bluetooth to scan for nearby items. If other devices detect your items, they’ll securely send the locations where the items were detected to Find My Device. Your Android devices will do the same to help others find their offline items when detected nearby. So, your devices are also supposed to co-operate by sending data to other devices which may want their location detected while offline. We are made to believe here that this data pertains to only our location and nothing else but once this thing becomes too ubiquitous, one can easily see the scope for surveillance capitalism by the powers that be? This is very much like the Microsoft's recall scenario, I don't see much difference between this and that. At least there, the data is very much still on the user's device and doesn't leave its shores, this is arguably even worse. For such technology to be palatable to the power user, they must at the very least, be prepared to open source this code. I think recall would have still got some acceptance had Microsoft made the code open source. This whole "you trust me but I won't trust you" business is highly cynical and doesn't usually have a long shelf life. [1]: https://ift.tt/Ts84Q57
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