Amazon Wants to Surveil Your Dog
The New York Times has been running a series of related articles in recent months called the Privacy Project, which look at the state of digital privacy.
An article from this week is talking about Amazon's push towards objects and devices that are constantly aware of us, and are becoming more ubiquitious--leading to the title of the article, Amazon Wants to Surveil Your Dog and the header “Amazon is building the infrastructure to monitor us all,”
The thing to be aware of comes in one of the later paragraphs.
Her fear is that Amazon, through Sidewalk as well as other products, like its Ring doorbell cameras, is quietly creating Wi-Fi beacons everywhere. Each time our products come in contact with these devices, they transmit little bits of data. Mostly, this data isn’t highly personal (occasionally, it’s randomized), but it’s still enough to potentially identify and then track users. Again, this already happens with Wi-Fi routers and mobile phones. The big difference here is that Amazon is looking to own a substantial chunk of the network and the devices. That means having access to a lot of data.
This doesn't mean we need to start freaking out. It is just another reminder that we need to be aware of just what our technology is capable of doing, and how that affects our digital privacy.
I also recommend an article from the previous week, which is far more technical, but if you can glide past the jargon bits, is giving you some useful (and terrifying) information.
The Loophole That Turns Your Apps Into Spies: Just by downloading an app, you’re potentially exposing sensitive data to dozens of technology companies, ad networks, data brokers and aggregators.
By now you probably know that your apps ask for permission to tap into loads of data. They request device information, like advertiser IDs, which companies use to build marketing profiles. There’s data the companies explicitly ask for via a pop-up window, like access to contacts or your camera roll. And then there’s tracking that is especially invasive, like access to your microphone or your phone’s gyroscope or location tracking data.
What you probably didn’t know is that by downloading those apps and entering into those contracts, you’re also exposing your sensitive information to dozens of other technology companies, ad networks, data brokers and aggregators. Sometimes the information is shared with global tech giants; other times it’s with small companies you’ve never heard of.
The important bit comes a few paragraphs later.
In 2018, a researcher for Kaspersky Labs “found 4 million Android apps were sending unencrypted user profile data, such as names, ages, incomes, phone numbers and email addresses — and, in one example, dates of birth, user names and GPS coordinates” from the app to the advertisers’ servers.
The devicies we have around is every day--our cell phones, our smart speakers, even sometimes our refrigerators and cars--have the ability to track what we are doing, and aggregate that information.
We should be the owners of this highly personal and revealing information about ourselves, but as long as we insist on our internet and software and apps being free, these companies will continue to intrude upon our privacy, selling our data when they can't sell their proucts.
I highly recommend that you sign up for the Privacy Projects articles (which I fully realize is, of course, eating away a tiny bit at your privacy) because these articles are full of information you might not be hearing about otherwise.
~Michelle