Watching and listening

How smart are you to possess a smart car, smart appliance, or a smart lock? Not very smart, it turns out.

From Slate we learn,

We carry the world’s best surveillance device with us every day. Our cellphones have almost unlimited access to our daily lives—not just because we use them to talk, text, and search the Web, but because it’s really easy to turn on the GPS, microphone, or camera secretly from another location. If you’ve ever lost an iPhone, you may have used Apple’s “Find My iPhone” feature to remotely activate your phone’s GPS signal. Or, like this “very nosy mom” in the Wall Street Journal, it’s possible you’ve used the feature to find out what your kids were up to. If Apple really is working with the NSA as part of PRISM, the technical requirements to locate a person through their phone would be no more difficult than that.

Miri has written an excellent piece here. The conclusion:

What we need now is a good dose of old-fashioned capitalism (coupled with freedom, of course). There are billions of dollars waiting to be made by entrepreneurs who will develop privacy features for us ordinary citizens.

But will those features themselves be resistant to hacking? Or will those companies get leaned on in turn by this government, forcing them to give up the knowledge necessary to circumvent our own devices (again)?

The Brave New World is here, and Big Brother probably is watching YOU.