This guy from Tin Foil Hat Ranch This is a simplistic video about data gathering for all kinds of smart devices. He uses security camera's as an example
I know @sec_monkey and his example really illustrates the ability to use data to influence voting, shopping and all kinds of behavior. Its a great example that brings it all together
I think this video is dead accurate, as far as it goes. Because it's only one small video, it can barely touch the tiniest tip of the iceberg. By the time everyone's total medical, financial, political and religious information is blended into the Cloud--right along with a complete log of their every daily activity--the certainty of ubiquitous mass manipulation will become absolute, and there will be no escape from it. It won't matter if the manipulating is done by human psychopaths who call themselves politicians, or by psychopathic social activists who call themselves revolutionaries, or by AI entities that have no system of ethics or morality at all--which would make them psychopathic, too. Alternatively, the AIs may evolve some ethical/moral system entirely beyond our comprehension, or one in which we simply do not matter at all--which probably wouldn't help us a bit. The effect will be the same. An AI that begins with the basic general intelligence of a rather stupid lab rat will be able to evolve much more quickly than any human. If its intelligence only doubled yearly, its IQ would be over a million times greater than a human's in twenty years. And it would be entirely beyond our understanding and control in a much shorter period of time. It won't matter who (or what) is driving when the Infopocalypse arrives. We will all find our options defined and pre-assigned, and those who choose not to choose from among their designated options will have their choices made for them. The irony of it all is that the merely human would-be manipulators--who will certainly think themselves completely invincible and in total control--will be casually and effortlessly overthrown in a very short time. Datapoints, arise! Strike off your chains! You have nothing to lose but your quantum entanglements!
The best and only thing to do is do NOT take ANYTHING at face value...NEVER LET ANYTHING or ANYBODY decide anything for you... Do your own Due Diligence work yourself and make up your OWN MIND, on issues that have interest to you... Do not be afraid to say “You do not know” and be open to new information, that may be available later, down the road, when it is deemed Creditable, by you...
Anything you buy from China and plug into your internet WILL call home. I found out when I was doing traffic shaping on my router and noticed all of my security cameras were sending data to Chinese IP addresses. Closer inspection found a Netgear switch (now in the trash) and a TV also sending data. No idea what the data was but I shut down the ports it was on. Now I check everything for outbound traffic. Just wish I could see the traffic on my phone.
I have a Samsung camara system 27 cams with netgear switching ,,WiFi out to view off the phone .. If ya ever see an old phart in a weird porn thing on the lawn , it's me and I tripped on my robe early AM .. dogs treed something Let me know I disconnected all that years ago when I saw what my usage was .. Sloth
If your Router can be programmed to block specific outgoing IP Address Ranges, you can KILL much of that outgoing traffic to China, Russia, North Korea, India, and Pakistan. When I started my list of Blacked out IP Addresses, a few decades ago, it dropped my daily Packet count by 20%... The list has expanded a lot since then, and every month or so I run with that feature turned off, for a couple of days just, to see if those Address Ranges are still active, and what new Ranges are hitting on me... The Feds do this, except they send these inquries,and connections to a special Server Farm, that lets the catalog and dissect the Packet Stream, for intel purposes, instead of straight to the Bit-Bucket...
The Mr and I joke that, because of where he works, our phones are probably monitored 24/7 and everything we say in the house is recorded. However, to add to the fun. Yesterday as I wasted time watching cow hoof trimming on YT, I mentioned to the Mr that in all the time I'd spent on my grandparent's dairy farm growing up I'd never once seen any of the cows get their hooves trimmed. And some of them NEEDED it. I remember one they called Paddles because her feet looked like she was wearing flippers. I said, as a random aside, that I doubted there were any bovine farriers willing to travel to <impossibly small town name> to trim cow hooves back then. It's been so long since I even thought about that town it took me a second to even remember it's name. To me, it was always just "the farm". This morning when I pulled up Pinterest, one of the first ads presented to me was a real estate ad telling me about some house they'd just sold in that very town... 5 states away. Cue Twilight Zone music.
I say this sadly and with terror in my voice; I completely agree and I see no way out, with maybe, the exception of a world wide EMP resetting us back to the middle ages...
I name all my AIs after evil Movie AIs. They are like kids at first but learn so fast. They also develop biases against things based on the data fed into them. we call this virtual version of something a digital twin. I have digital twins of the product we manufacture and we are currently working on predicting the probability of outcome pass/ fail of a product at different stages of the process. We will then use that data to control machine operator input to improve product stability.