Smart Homes Of The Future Are Intended To Make Our Lives Easier But At What Cost.
Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple Home Pod, Nest Security Cameras, Amazon Security Cameras. These are all devices that can record you at anytime, unwittingly and send that information anywhere. This is what recently happened with Amazon’s Echo. A couple’s private conversation was recorded and sent to one of their contacts. This is just a small hiccup but it exposes the technology for what it truly is, a recording device to collect data on it’s users.
Simply put we invite these recording devices into our homes where we conduct our most private and intimate moments in life. And we expect these corporations that own the technology we use to just close there eyes and plug their ears while we have these moments. It’s just not how the business works, everything you do provides data, that data is then used by or sold to other companies trying to profit from your information. It’s now so invasive that the European Union recently passed the GDPR General Data Protection Regulation. Where they don’t allow these companies to track their citizens personal data. That is a step in the right direction and good for those who live in the E.U. because the rest of us have every app we download tracking our every move.
Just about every single app we now download to our phone for some reason requires access to our speaker, our camera, our personal photos, our contacts, everything. It doesn’t make any sense, and yet it makes perfect sense when your business is data driven. It’s so powerful to know when you eat, sleep, go to the restroom, what shops you frequent, what you buy, how much you drive, where you drive too, what websites you frequent, what photos you take, are you willing to tag those photos and interconnect them with others, how much exercise you get, what you talk about, what you text about. All this information is compiled into one tight little package about you. Where we can than in turn be swayed and directed into any number of funnels the powers that be want us to be shuffled into. Technology is a blessing and a curse, yes it has made our lives easier in many ways but we won’t truly know the consequences of it all because we could be on a completely different trajectory had we never been guided down the paths that our tech has guided us down.
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