With continuing advances in technology and declining costs, large-scale solar projects are popping up all over the commonwealth. Hundreds more seem possible in the coming years.
Many of these solar farms are being developed to offset the carbon footprint of companies like Amazon, who earlier this year announced a 618-acre project proposed on forestland in McKean County and another of 150 acres on farmland in Potter County.
Most solar farm projects in Pennsylvania have been proposed for farms and forestland. These locations are not only short-sighted and counter-intuitive to tackling climate change, they have the potential to lead to a cascade of other negative ecological impacts.
Trees are one of nature’s greatest inventions. According to Penn State Extension, trees are also ‘…without a doubt the best carbon capture technology in the world.’ They’re also protect and cleanse rivers and streams. They do this by slowing down, spreading out, and soaking up vast amounts of precipitation that could otherwise carry vast amounts of polluted runoff to the nearest waterbody. Along the way, pollutants are filtered out. Incredibly, streamside forests have been shown to dramatically increase a stream’s ability to cleanse itself of many types of pollution.
Although farmland doesn’t function like a forest, a well-managed farm has its own ecological benefits. For example, healthy farm soils are key to productive, nutritious crops. Keeping soils and nutrients on the land instead of in the water, also help infiltrate large amounts of precipitation.
Clear cutting forests and compacting and covering healthy soils for large-scale solar farms threaten to replace the vast array of benefits, with polluted runoff degrading streams, increased nuisance flooding, loss of critical wildlife habitat, and even the release of soil carbon back into the atmosphere.
In the spring of 2020, CBF released a report to help guide decision-makers on where solar projects should be located, called ‘Principles and Practices for Realizing the Necessity and Promise of Solar Power.’
In our state, better placement of solar projects starts with local municipal governments having up-to-date local comprehensive plans and ordinances that direct solar farms away from forests and farmland, streams, and wetlands. Ideal alternative locations include under-performing malls and their parking lots, abandoned mine lands, and other industrial locations.
Secondly, local governments need to include design standards that require native pollinator species be planted, which also reduces polluted stormwater runoff, instead of non-native species like turfgrass, or semi-hard surface like gravel that have little ecological value.
Taxpayers should advocate that companies, as well as state and federal governments, should not be proposing and subsidizing projects in less-than-ideal areas.
Regardless of whether you believe humans are the cause of climate change, the myriad of impacts from it are here and projected to get worse in the coming decades. With advances in technologies, generating energy from sources like solar is increasingly being seen as a viable, less carbon-releasing alternative to fossil fuels.
The decisions we allow our elected officials make on land-use issues like solar projects today will have implications for Pennsylvania’s health, well-being, and quality of life for generations to come.
Harry Campbell is science policy and advocacy director for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in Pennsylvania.
So what will the future bring under such circumstances? I see America becoming less democratic and increasingly feudal, with a middle class sort of becoming extinct. Small businesses such as mom-and-pop stores are already extinct because of Amazon; manufacturing and agricultural businesses are on their way down. What is to be done? With Congress in the pocket of the oligarchs, not much, I’m afraid. Soon there will be bans on ideological language, as it is now called by woke students and oligarch followers; words such as “woman” and “breastfeeding” will be banned.
It is the sine qua non of a successful coup to first and foremost ensure the takeover of the means of information: radio, television, and newspapers. That is what the Greek colonels did in the last successful European coup back on April 21, 1967. Some years later, a colonel tried to overthrow the elected post-Franco Spanish government but failed, having taken over the Parliament rather than the TV and radio station.
This, of course, is old hat to Central American banana republics, and an everyday occurrence in the Middle East and in every developing African country. And now for the first time, a rather developed country that has been a democracy since its creation almost 250 years ago has abolished (canceled) free speech—unless, of course, it passes muster with the three great American oligarchs who decide what we can say.
Before I describe these three great American men who have the ultimate veto over our free speech, a word about the new online network platforms that represent a new kind of power that poses a challenge to the power of the state. These network platforms began as decentralized entities, but turned into oligarchical weapons for stifling speech their masters did not agree with. Simply put, a very few are excluding a hell of a lot from a domain the courts have recognized as a public forum. In other words, to hell with the First Amendment unless we like what you say. Which today means sex offenders have a right to access online social networks, but an ex-president of the U.S. does not. “Corporate monopolies and the left have now teamed up to shut down free speech in the latest form of cancel culture.”
And it gets better. An independent social media site, Parler, was closed down thanks to Amazon (and Apple), which is like GM shutting down Ford because the latter represents competition. Throughout this, a few Republican senators have raised their voices, but no one really took notice. What is being shut down, actually, is news and opinions the three oligarchs do not wish you to know. It’s as simple as that. Corporate monopolies and the left have now teamed up to shut down free speech in the latest form of cancel culture. The alliance of leftists and woke capitalists is the most lethal since the Stalin-Nazi pact of 1939, and it aims to regulate all thought from school to retirement. Control, censor, and cancel are the order of the day in social media, as Big Tech now regulates speech—and eventually our thoughts.
So who are these great men who have replaced, say, George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Abe Lincoln as our heroes? I find what they have in common are their good looks. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s face gives the impression of being covered by a silk stocking like those worn by bank robbers; Jack Dorsey, the Twitter man, looks like a 1960s drugged hippy bum fished out from the San Francisco Bay; while the richest, the Amazon man Jeff Bezos, is a poster boy for a sex-pervert satyr threatening young virgins in a French blue film of the ’30s. Great looks go hand in hand with great powers—just remember how handsome Hitler and Stalin were. These last two would have been envious of Zuckie, Jeff, and Jack’s thought-control abilities, as it would have saved them lots of manpower wasted in the camps.
The above and other tech giants now dominate the Democratic Party, own much of the media, and can manipulate the social media platforms, where a growing proportion of Americans get their news. Congress is not about to do anything about this because the Democrats are in charge, and even if they were not, powerful lobbies by the techies would go into overdrive to stop any legislation against their monopolies.
So what will the future bring under such circumstances? I see America becoming less democratic and increasingly feudal, with a middle class sort of becoming extinct. Small businesses such as mom-and-pop stores are already extinct because of Amazon; manufacturing and agricultural businesses are on their way down. What is to be done? With Congress in the pocket of the oligarchs, not much, I’m afraid. Soon there will be bans on ideological language, as it is now called by woke students and oligarch followers; words such as “woman” and “breastfeeding” will be banned.
Over in Britain, where wokeness is as virulent as it is over here, Boris’ government has decided to do something about it. The education minister has decreed that universities that stifle free speech and torpedo Britain’s history will be denied funds. Ditto for charities and other such bodies that depend on government subsidies. This is a good first step, as the Brits want to defend their culture and history from a noisy minority of activists who are attempting to rewrite Britain’s past.
And yet, never in a million years would I have suspected that I would write such a column as this one. A civil right of every American to speak freely was the first thing I learned about this country when I arrived here from Europe at age 12. Yet Google, Apple, and the three controlled by the beauties I’ve mentioned above are denying that right to millions of Americans, and Congress is doing nothing about it. Time to call in the Marines—our freedom of speech is disappearing faster than the three beauties’ billions are multiplying.
Update (2210 ET): Parler CEO John Matze has issued a statement (emphasis ours):
Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.
We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.
This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out.
#speakfreely
* * *
Update (2130 ET): And so the hammer has come down late on Saturday, when Amazon officially kicked Parler off its cloud Web hosting service, AWS according to Buzzfeed. The suspension means that once the ban takes effect on Sunday, the website – which as of this moment is still up – will be offline until it finds someone else to host it.
* * *
Update (2100 ET): As expected, Apple removed Parler permanently from its app store on Saturday. “[T]here is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity,” the iPhone maker said, according to CNN which adds that Apple notified Parler of its decision in a message that said it had violated the company’s app store terms.
“The processes Parler has put in place to moderate or prevent the spread of dangerous and illegal content have proved insufficient,” Apple told Parler. “Specifically, we have continued to find direct threats of violence and calls to incite lawless action in violation of Guideline 1.1 – Safety – Objectionable Content.”
Apple’s notice said Parler’s responses to an earlier warning were inadequate, including Parler’s defense that it had been taking violent rhetoric on its platform “very seriously for weeks” and that it had a moderation plan “for the time being,” according to Apple.
A search for the Parler app as of 8pm showed that the app was no longer there, with the search query returning recommended substitutes:
“Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety,” Apple said in a statement to CNN Business. “We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues.”
Apple’s decision follows a similar move by Google to drop Parler from the Google Play Store, and after Amazon (AMZN) has come under pressure by its own employees to stop hosting Parler’s website on Amazon Web Services.
John Matze, Parler’s CEO, wrote in a message on his platform that Apple “will be banning Parler until we give up free speech, institute broad and invasive policies like Twitter and Facebook and we become a surveillance platform by pursuing guilt of those who use Parler before innocence.”
“They claim it is due to violence on the platform,” Matze wrote of Apple, whom he also accused of being a “software monopoly,” a particularly relevant attack right now given an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple from Fortnite maker Epic Games. “The community disagrees as we hit number 1 on their store today.”
Matze promised to share “more details about our next plans coming soon as we have many options.”
* * *
Earlier:
A coalition of Amazon corporate employees have demanded that the Seattle-based megacorp kick Parler off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform unless ‘posts inciting violence’ are removed, which would force the Trump-friendly Twitter competitor to find another host.
According to CNBC, an employee advocacy group – Amazon Employees for Climate Justice – said in a Saturday tweet that AWS should “deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration.”
Enough is enough. Amazon hosts Parler on @awscloud.
As Amazon workers, we demand Amazon deny Parler services until it removes posts inciting violence, including at the Presidential inauguration.
We cannot be complicit in more bloodshed and violent attacks on our democracy. — Amazon Employees For Climate Justice (@AMZNforClimate) January 9, 2021
More via CNBC:
Pressure has been mounting for Amazon to stop hosting Parler on AWS after other tech giants took action against the social media app in the wake of the deadly U.S. Capitol riot earlier this week. Google on Friday removed Parler from its app store for Android users, Google Play Store. BuzzFeed News reported on Friday that Apple has threatened to pull Parler from its App Store.
Parler, which launched in 2018, has emerged as a popular platform for President Trump’s allies in the last year by billing itself as a free speech alternative to mainstream social media services like Twitter and Facebook. –CNBC
To justify censoring Parler, critics have pointed to posts calling for ‘firing squads’ – like one from attorney Lin Wood (who some sayhanded the Senate to the Democrats by openly calling for Georgians not to vote in the runoff election unless the GOP candidates backed Trump’s election fraud claims).
In 2019, Amazon pulled the plug on their AWS partnership with Twitter alternative GAB over user posts. CEO Andrew Torba essentially blamed the CIA – claiming that a “PSYOP campaign started back in early December” in which newly created accounts were “popping up out of nowhere and making threats of violence.”
Torba’s letter continues:
After this week, it’s clear why this PSYOP was started: to take down alt-tech platforms and frame them for the January 6th protests that ended with the police killing an unarmed woman.
Almost instantly after police allowed protestors into the Capitol the New York Times started a baseless narrative that this protest was organized on alt-tech sites, and in particular on Gab, without offering any proof, screenshots, usernames, or evidence to back these baseless claims. I’ve recorded a video highlighting how this all played out. I hope you’ll take some time to watch it to learn how the CIA Mockingbird Media complex operates. The way we fight back is with truth and by speaking truth to their power, which is quickly fading.
Meanwhile, Parler has jumped to the #1 app in Apple’s app store.
Parler saw approximately 210,000 installs globally on Friday 1/8, up 281% from approximately 55,000 on 1/7, according to data from the analytics service Sensor Tower. “In the U.S., the app saw approximately 182,000 first-time downloads on 1/8, up 355% from about 40,000 installs on 1/7. Since Wednesday, the app has seen approximately 268,000 installs from across U.S. app stores,” a press rep from Sensor Tower wrote in an email. -TechCrunchAnd as conservatives scramble to download the app before it’s deplatformed at yet another social media giant, we now have to wonder if they’ll even be able to find a new home among a collusive constellation of big-tech – at least one of which used to value the phrase ‘think different.’
Here’s a Don Boudreaux letter to a college student writing a paper on what he calls “the social justice of wealth redistribution”:
Mr. Eden:
Thanks for your e-mail.
You ask: “Why shouldn’t government tax away half of Jeff Bezos’ wealth and give it to America’s poor people.” In your assessment, “this would be fair without hurting Bezos.”
My disagreements with your assessment are many, but I have time now to list only three.
First and primarily, it’s immoral to take stuff belonging to other people. Because Bezos acquired his wealth lawfully, to take it is wrong. Note also that he acquired his wealth in a manner that bestows enormous benefits on hundreds of millions of his fellow human beings, and that he has already paid billions of dollars of taxes on his earnings.
Second, Bezos’s wealth is now reported at $203 billion. With 34 million Americans currently below the poverty line, confiscating half of Bezos’s fortune and distributing it equally to these poor Americans would give each a one-time windfall of $2,985. A nice sum. But it’s not enough to transform their lives. More fundamentally, people’s lives aren’t transformed for the better by being given windfalls. Transformation comes from within, personally, and from better policies that allow the creation of more and better opportunities.
Third, Bezos’s net worth is what it is because the vast bulk of it is invested in Amazon and other productive enterprises. If he suddenly must turn over half of his wealth to the government, he would not draw it from his consumption (which is what you mean when you say that this policy would not hurt Bezos). He would draw it out of his investments. And resources currently used in valuable productive uses would become much less valuable when turned into goods and services for current consumption. And so to give each poor American $2,985 paid for by Jeff Bezos would require that far more than half of his fortune be seized.
You might nevertheless be good with this outcome, for it would still leave Bezos very wealthy. It would still not put a dent in his lifestyle. But the American economy would suffer greatly. Not only would the economy lose, in one fell swoop, well over a hundred billion dollars of assets – which means the loss of whatever outputs those assets produce – but lose also untold trillions of dollars of assets over time that would have been, but will not be, created. Like it or not, people do not invest heavily when government seizes large chunks of the fruits of their successes.
Sincerely, Donald J. Boudreaux Professor of Economics and Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030
Whitfield says police are becoming more savvy about the information in the smart speakers’ activity logs. He recalls a case where police found drugs in a household with multiple residents. Officers identified a suspect after seizing data from a smart speaker. Its log not only listed recent queries related to drugs but identified who spoke them. Google and Amazon speakers let users create profiles so the devices recognize their individual voices. This information helped police identify the suspect.
Remember all those conspiracy theorists and Luddites who told you they didn’t want Echo or Alexa devices in their home because those gadgets were spying on them? Well, they were right. That’s not even up for debate.
If you were one of those friends who mocked them and called them crazy, you were wrong. Just admit it.
If you are bewildered by what you just read, please, read on.
Those devices and technologies are ubiquitous and are being used to soak up data, private and personal conversations, interactions, and even movement. All of this openly discussed in mainstream outlets. Lately, this website has reported on the Nest, your phone’s location tracker, and other “smart” technology. We’ve even talked about how we all have “surveillance scores.“
Take a look at WIRED’s article by Sidney Fussell, “Meet the Star Witness: Your Smart Speaker.” In this article, Fussell details a murder case in which an Amazon Echo device was presented as evidence.
He writes,
In July 2019, police rushed to the home of 32-year-old Silvia Galva. Galva’s friend, also in the home, called 911, claiming she overheard a violent argument between Galva and her boyfriend, 43-year-old Adam Crespo. The two lived together in Hallandale Beach, Florida, about 20 miles from Miami.
When officers arrived, Galva was dead, impaled through her chest by the 12-inch blade at the sharp end of a bedpost. Police believe Crespo tried to drag Galva from their bed. She held onto the bedpost to resist, but the sharp end snapped, somehow killing her. Police charged Crespo with second-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty and was released on $65,000 bail, awaiting trial. In the months since the arrest, Crespo’s lawyer has presented a surprising piece of evidence in his defense: recordings from a pair of Amazon Echo speakers.
“I had a lot of interviews where people said, ‘Oh, are you aware that this could be the first time Alexa recordings are going to be used to convict somebody of murder?’” says Christopher O’Toole, Crespo’s lawyer. “And I actually thought of it the opposite way, that this could be the first time an Amazon Alexa recording is used to exonerate somebody and show that they’re innocent.”
When police and prosecutors collect smart home or speaker data, it’s typically used as evidence against suspects. The Hallandale Beach Police Department filed a subpoena for Crespo’s speakers, as they may have picked up audio of the argument Galva’s friend overheard.
The incident shows the growing role of smart home devices and wearables in police investigations.
In 2016, police in Bentonville, Arkansas, requested Amazon Echo data in connection with a man’s death, believed to be the first such request. Amazon initially tried to block the request, but later handed over the data. A murder charge against the defendant was later dropped, but the speaker, smart home, and wearable data has figured into multiple cases since then.
Requests for smart and wearable data has increased rapidly.
Fussell continues,
Earlier this month, Amazon said it had received more than 3,000 requests from police for user data in the first half of this year, and complied almost 2,000 times. That was a 72 percent increase in requests from the same period in 2016, when Amazon first disclosed the data, and a 24 percent jump in the past year alone.
Amazon doesn’t provide granular data on what police are seeking, but Douglas Orr, head of the criminal justice department at the University of North Georgia, says police now look for smart home data as routinely as data from smartphones. Data on a smartphone often points officers towards other devices, which they then probe as the investigation continues.
By amending a search warrant, police can “keep going to keep collecting data,” Orr says. “That usually leads to an Echo or at least some other device.”
As Orr explains, officers are getting more savvy about smart home devices, creating templates that simplify requesting data. Police departments often share these templates, he says, tailoring requests for the specifics of the case they’re investigating.
Google’s Nest unit reported increasing police demands for data from its smart speakers through 2018. Google then stopped reporting Nest data separately, including such requests in its broader corporate transparency report, which shows increased requests for Google user data.
In their terms of service, most major apps and websites include a clause warning users that companies may hand over their data if requested by the government. Law enforcement agencies file subpoenas or search warrants for data, detailing to judges what evidence they expect to find on the devices and how it may serve the investigation. Amazon and Google both notify users of a request for data unless the order itself forbids it. Any number of entities can request user data, but the companies say they prioritize requests based on urgency.
“Things like Homeland Security, they’re going to take high priority,” explains Lee Whitfield, a forensic analyst. “Other law enforcement requests will come in under that. And then things like divorce cases or civil cases, they have a lower ranking.”
In an emailed statement, an Amazon spokesperson said the company “objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands” from law enforcement and referred WIRED to its policy on government requests. A Google spokesperson also referred WIRED to its updated policy on requests.
Forensic experts tell WIRED that information from the devices is valued because it can offer a timeline of a person’s activities, their location, if they’re alone, and can verify statements made during questioning.
. . . . .
Orr has studied the types of data police can pull from smart speakers like the Amazon Echo. “Voice clips are only the beginning,” he says. Speakers keep time-stamped logs of user activity. Police can examine these logs to get a sense of what someone was doing around the time of an alleged crime.
Fussell then provides another example of how these devices are used by law enforcement.
He writes,
Consider a potential suspect who can’t prove where they were at 11 pm on a Thursday, because they live alone. Something as simple as ordering pizza through a speaker would show the time and location of the request and, if voice recognition is enabled, who made the request. “It might be benign information that someone was ordering a pizza, but it might also be an alibi for somebody,” Orr says.
Police increasingly rely on wearables and smart devices to verify the claims people make during an investigation. Sometimes, the tools can reveal a lie.
Heather Mahalik, a forensics instructor, recalls a Florida case in which a man killed his wife, then tried to impersonate her. The husband sent texts and Facebook messages from his wife’s phone in an attempt to blur the timeline of her disappearance. While the woman’s phone activity continued, her Apple Watch showed a sudden drop in heart rate activity that the husband claimed was due to a dead battery. Activity on the man’s phone synced perfectly with when he used the wife’s phone to post to Facebook. Her phone showed no activity except for when the husband picked it up to post, with timestamps matching his activity to the use of the wife’s phone.
“We were able to tell from his device that he would pick up the phone, take 18 steps, and it corresponded with the time he posted a Facebook post,” Mahalik says.
Connecting information from multiple devices is a common practice, analysts say. Information on one device can suggest evidence on another. This ability to string together discoveries leads to what another expert calls a phased approach to digital forensics.
“They ask for something, the investigation moves along, they find something else interesting, and then they request the next thing,” says Whitfield, the forensic analyst.
O’Toole, Crespo’s lawyer, says police subpoenaed Crespo’s social media accounts right away, then requested his voice recordings about four weeks later. Officers wrote in the search warrant that the speaker data may include “audio recordings capturing the attack on victim Silvia Crespo.”
O’Toole says he intends to introduce the smart speaker recordings in his client’s favor. Via email, a spokesperson for Hallandale Beach Police confirmed the case was still active but did not provide further comment.
O’Toole says smart speaker recordings are part of several cases he’s working on, including a divorce in which a woman subpoenaed data from a smart speaker that may have picked up the sounds of her husband with another woman..
Whitfield says police are becoming more savvy about the information in the smart speakers’ activity logs. He recalls a case where police found drugs in a household with multiple residents. Officers identified a suspect after seizing data from a smart speaker. Its log not only listed recent queries related to drugs but identified who spoke them. Google and Amazon speakers let users create profiles so the devices recognize their individual voices. This information helped police identify the suspect.
“I just don’t see this going away,” Whitfield says. “I think this is going to be more and more prolific as time goes on.”
Whitfield is right.
It will never go away.
Advertisement of these technological devices as a tool for convenience was a manipulative tactic to introduce technological devices for their real purpose – the tracking, monitoring, and recording of citizens so that no action – no matter how small – goes unnoticed. We are already living in a surveillance state and it’s only going to get worse.
Once begun, this bell cannot be unrung.
What are your thoughts on things you said in your own home being used against you by the police? Are you taking any steps to protect yourself from this type of data being collected? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Technology giant Amazon is working to allow customers to connect their credit card information to their hands, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The company has reportedly begun working with Visa on testing out the terminals, and has discussed the project with Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Synchrony Financial.
Amazon has already filed a patent for a “non-contact biometric identification system” that features a “hand scanner” to produce a picture of a person’s palm.
Technology giant Amazon is working to allow customers to connect their credit card information to their hands, so that they can scan for purchases with their palms at checkout areas in physical stores, people familiar with the project told The Wall Street Journal.
While Amazon’s plan is in the early stages, the company has reportedly begun working with Visa on testing out the terminals, and has discussed the project with Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Synchrony Financial.
The company previously filed a patent for a “non-contact biometric identification system” that features a “hand scanner” to produce a picture of a person’s palm.
The news offers a look into Amazon’s ideas on transforming the way people shop in brick-and-mortar stores, and how it could work with credit card companies to further integrate itself into people’s financial lives.
The company already has major plans to expand its Amazon Go stores, which allow shoppers to buy without cashiers or checkout, as well as its voice payment service called Amazon Pay.
Amazon will have to address concerns from card issuers and customers over how terminals would detect fraud and the amount of personal information the company will receive from the scans.
Data collected from the terminals would be stored on Amazon’s cloud and used to study consumers’ Amazon.com spending habits, according to The Journal.
An Amazon spokesperson declined CNBC’s request to comment.
I acknowledge my responsibility here as a consumer. I knew the array of seven microphones I had put in the center of my house could hear what we were saying and act on it. I also knew that things we asked Alexa to do were being recorded and sent to Amazon, and that I could play back these recordings and delete them if I wanted to.
MIT, buddies with the CIA, ought to know what they are talking about.
A lot of Baa Baa Baa’s are recorded from the sheeple.
A recent report from the MIT Technology Review claims that Amazon Alexa home assistant devices may actually be listening in on people’s daily lives even when not given commands.
The MIT Technology Review reports in an article titled “Yes, Alexa is recording mundane details of your life, and it’s creepy as hell,” that Amazon Alexa home assistant devices are listening in on people’s conversations, a theory that has been around for some time but has never been confirmed.
The MIT Technology Review reports:
Beyond all the things I’ve clearly asked Alexa to do, in the past several months it has also tuned in, frequently several times a day, for no obvious reason. It’s heard me complain to my dad about something work-related, chide my toddler about eating dinner, and talk to my husband—the kinds of normal, everyday things you say at home when you think no one else is listening.
And that’s precisely why it’s terrifying: this sort of mundane chitchat is my mundane chitchat. I invited Alexa into our living room to make it easier to listen to Pandora and occasionally check the weather, not to keep a log of intimate family details or record my kid saying “Mommy, we going car” and forward it to Amazon’s cloud storage.
The MIT Technology Review notes that constant recording is one of the unfortunate downsides of home assistants that constantly listen for wake words such as “Alexa!” or “Hey, Siri!”
The MIT Technology Review notes that this is essentially an inherent issue with the technology, writing:
I acknowledge my responsibility here as a consumer. I knew the array of seven microphones I had put in the center of my house could hear what we were saying and act on it. I also knew that things we asked Alexa to do were being recorded and sent to Amazon, and that I could play back these recordings and delete them if I wanted to.
But it’s actually quite frustrating to sort through them. You can scroll through months’ worth in the app, but after you select and listen to one, tapping the Back button brings you to the very top of the list again. Deleting hundreds of rogue recordings one by one in this way would take me a very long time. I could delete everything, including the legitimate recordings, in one go, but Amazon warns that this will make Alexa work less well, so of course I’m unlikely to do it.
Breitbart News has previously published a guide explaining how to stop Amazon employees from having access to Alexa recordings, however, this does not stop the device from recording users’ daily interactions but rather protects them from being listened to by Amazon employees directly. Read the full guide here.
Yes, we worked, but we had fun also. When you discover your cart has a scale model of the U.S.S. Indianapolis beneath a pile of plush shark toys, you know that someone else shares your warped sense of humor.
Having spent half of a year experiencing firsthand the labyrinthine bowels of an Amazon Fulfillment Center, I must ask:
“What are all the complaints about?”
Employment at Amazon was not perfect. Then again, no job will be. But for those wanting to establish themselves with a job history or get back into the routine of full-time employment, being at Amazon isn’t the torturous ordeal some have described. Coming off a year’s sabbatical and being a technical writer before that, work at an Amazon facility was a shining opportunity to regain some lost footing.
In retrospect, I can’t but be thankful for that. It wasn’t just the financial boon, but also the chance to persevere that elicited and encouraged growth and strength in both physical and mental senses.
Getting hired by Amazon was almost too easily achieved. Applying online hearkens back to the glorious days of spinach-green Game Boy screens. Pass a series of ridiculously simple mini-games and you are almost guaranteed an offer of conditional employment. Show up for a scheduled orientation a few days later and there’s a rundown of various tasks, basic processes, and of course the benefits.
Speaking of benefits, they are more than liberal for an operation of Amazon’s size and scope. Need time off? The company is fairly flexible about that. Employee discounts? Offered out the wazoo. Want to follow your dreams toward your one true career? Stick around for a year and Amazon pays for most of your school tuition and books. Want health benefits? You get ‘em, your family gets ‘em, your dog gets ‘em. The pay itself is better than average. The one perk that I saw employees constantly begging for but were forever denied was free Amazon Prime. And that’s no reason to gripe if it’s the worst that the corporate honchos refused to grant.
After that came the training: straightforward and comprehensive. It could be the most fluid and forgiving training regimen that I’ve seen. The learning curve was not particularly demanding, and new hires were given leeway as they gained a sense of their assigned tasks.
Every night’s shift began with everyone in the department doing “stand-up”: gathered around the supervisor of the evening, we were given a brief summary of the night’s work, a rundown of any issues, and encouragement about what to look forward to during the next several hours. A few stretching exercises and then it was off to the races. For the next ten hours we were on Jeff Bezos’ time clock.
Is the labor hard? At times, yes. Especially during “Peak Season” between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. Otherwise it’s much like… gasp!… real work. My schedule was Wednesday through Saturday nights, 6 p.m. until 4:30 in the morning. There were two fifteen-minute breaks and one unpaid half-hour for lunch around 11. The break room had six large-screen TVs and forty microwave ovens. The vending machines were loaded with enough confectionary to feed a Texas county…
My stowing during those first few weeks? Abysmal. In fact, I was the very worst of the lot from our orientation group. Getting fired would be a decision born within the circuitry of the Amazon master computer somewhere in Seattle, not any human judgment. My career came a few steps too close to ending during that first month or so.
Instead the managers on site approached me with concerns about my performance, and then worked with me to improve my effectiveness…
Safety was the highest priority issue at our facility. I believe it is much the same for other fulfillment centers. During every stand-up we were drilled with how to properly handle heavy merchandise so as to avoid injury. The “safe” routes of transit across the facility were clearly marked off: stay in the green and you’d be fine, but venture into the lanes delineated with red and you risked being hit by a forklift or other vehicle…
What truly earned my respect was how they accommodated a disability. For a decade and a half I have dealt with the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Mania and depression at times dogged my steps during those long traipses through the aisles as I worked. The average Amazon warehouse is so vast that at times two people can be a hundred feet apart with no clue that there are others in the building. And every so often the silence and sense of loneliness would intrude upon my labor.
So I told my managers about it. And they collaborated with me…
Amazon, we were told by managers themselves, isn’t likely to be a lifetime career for most people. And it doesn’t have to be. Six months after orientation I had been quietly told that I was being eyed for a management position. Instead they bid me all the best as I prepared for a rewarding career helping others with mental-health issues. I don’t know if that would have happened were it not for the time spent working at Amazon. And hey, I worked through an entire Amazon Peak Season with no time off. I can be proud of that accomplishment.
First steps are rarely glamorous. But more often than not they lead to a much better and brighter future. And when a person reaches that place, he or she can look back upon the oftentimes broken road that came before. And then revel in the sense of their own achievement.
That’s something that no “easy” job can grant a person. Or any handout for that matter.
Banks know many of our deepest, darkest secrets — that series of bills paid at a cancer clinic, for instance, or that big strip-club tab that you thought stayed in Vegas. A bank might suspect someone’s adulterous affair long before the betrayed partner would.
Only if you let them and are dumb enough to pay a strip club bill or pay your liquor store bill or buy your ammo or … with plastic.
NEW YORK – There’s a powerful new player watching what you buy so it can tailor product offerings for you: the bank behind your credit or debit card.
For years, Google and Facebook have been showing ads based on your online behavior. Retailers from Amazon to Walgreens also regularly suction up your transaction history to steer future spending and hold your loyalty.
Now banks, too, want to turn data they already have on your spending habits into extra revenue by identifying likely customers for retailers. Banks are increasingly aware that they could be sitting on a gold mine of information that can be used to predict — or sway — where you spend. Historically, such data has been used mostly for fraud protection.
Suppose you were to treat yourself to lunch on Cyber Monday, the busiest online shopping day of the year. If you order ahead at Chipotle — paying, of course, with your credit card — you might soon find your bank dangling 10% off lunch at Little Caesars. The bank would earn fees from the pizza joint, both for showing the offer and processing the payment.
Wells Fargo began customizing retail offers for individual customers on Nov. 21, joining Chase, Bank of America, PNC, SunTrust and a slew of smaller banks.
Unlike Google or Facebook, which try to infer what you’re interested in buying based on your searches, web visits or likes, “banks have the secret weapon in that they actually know what we spend money on,” said Silvio Tavares of the trade group CardLinx Association, whose members help broker purchase-related offers. “It’s a better predictor of what we’re going to spend on.”
While banks say they’re moving cautiously and being mindful of privacy concerns, it’s not clear that consumers are fully aware of what their banks are up to.
Banks know many of our deepest, darkest secrets — that series of bills paid at a cancer clinic, for instance, or that big strip-club tab that you thought stayed in Vegas. A bank might suspect someone’s adulterous affair long before the betrayed partner would.
“Ten years ago, your bank was like your psychiatrist or your minister — your bank kept secrets,” said Ed Mierzwinski, a consumer advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. Now, he says, “they think they are the same as a department store or an online merchant.”…
by Tyler Durden
MCViewPoint 