<nettime> School of red herrings

[Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com>]

It's interesting to observe the pace of the official narrative regarding 
CA/FB drama. It reminds of backup strategy of some animals, that are 
ready to ditch tail or leg to save the body.
Initially, CA was the bad guy, and then the fall guy. Some more acute 
observers noticed that it's FB that's the bad guy, and now FB is quickly 
becoming the designated fall guy:
https://www.sltrib.com/pb/opinion/commentary/2018/03/20/leonid-bershidsky-cambridge-analytica-is-a-red-herring-facebook-is-the-real-problem

Neither is true. These are just recently visible emanations of the 
surveillance infrastructure. Notice, as example, that these space 
surveillance systems are currently spared from the public attention:
- AMZN's real time consumer surveillance infrastructure is more advanced 
that anything FB has, because it uses autonomous 24/7 pickups ("Alexa", 
comically paid for by the targets themselves.) In addition, AMZN 
certification requires that all 3rd party devices using Alexa as a 
command pipeline report their state changes in real time - light and 
other switches, cameras, thermostats, etc., and, as of recently, to also 
have microphones reporting to AMZN.
- APPL Homekit ecosystem is very similar, and they have benefit of 
correlating with handset collections. BTW, they also plan on putting 
microphones in all Homekit devices.
- GOOGL Home not only tracks home events, but correlates both with 
handsets and Internet activity. They know how horny you are, how severe 
your diarrhea is, and when you left the house to join the privacy protest.
- and, just for good measure, to remind that NSA is today, and every 
day, recording the totality of US domestic data flow. On the upside, 
everyone can now be Krapp.
Focussing attention on FB will achieve exactly nothing. FB is actually 
not so bad, as they provide your diarrhea diaries to anyone that pays.
The other ecosystems are more closed and it's much harder to find out 
the full extent of conditioning that they are capable of. Meddling with 
elections was a skin job - ultimately irrelevant. Which is why you heard 
about it.




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