Mass surveillance was just taken to a new level:in Massachusetts (so far, and the votes are still out), COVID-Tracker App Installs Itself Without User Consent, Including On Parental-Locked Devices.
Invasive much?
As more cities and states ease up on lockdown restrictions, and the emergency-use only Covid vaccines are becoming more readily available, the concept of requiring vaccine passports for travel, attending events and who knows what all else is getting a lot of press – a cause for concern, whether you’ve been vaccinated or not. According to the Cleveland Clinic: Already Had COVID? Vaccine Provides No Added Benefit. In fact, according to the study, “Of all infections during the study period, 99.3% occurred in participants who were not infected previously and remained unvaccinated. In contrast, 0.7% of infections occurred in participants who were not previously infected but were currently vaccinated. Significantly, not one of the 1,359 previously infected subjects who remained unvaccinated had a SARS-CoV-2 infection over the duration of the study.”
We’re hearing more and more about events where proof of vaccination is required. What about the deaths and serious injuries resulting from the vaccines themselves? Again, they were approved for emergency use only, as they did not go through the usual rigorous testing. Yet Reports Indicate Vaccines Causing More Injuries, Deaths Than Natural COVID-19 Infections. This is not about conspiracy theories. It’s a heads up to you, entrepreneurs and important to pay attention to everything: every coin has two sides.
The Memorial Day Weekend is fast approaching – the official kick off of summer, despite the fact that the official start of the season is still a few weeks away. Given all of the restrictions on our movements and impediments to travel, and since different rules apply in different places, we know that many of you can’t or aren’t traveling and perhaps haven’t been able to go see friends and loved ones for quite some time now, but not to worry: in the event that we’re ever in a lockdown situation again, Google is on the case.
As Futurism says, “they’re now debuting a new video chat system they’re calling “Project Starline,”… a dystopic 3D prison-style video chat… So basically, they’ve re-invented the virtual prison visitation phone booth.”
This just in: Wall Street A-Listers Fled to Florida. Many Now Eye a Return, Bloomberg News reported. For the record, “USPS data shows few New Yorkers moved to Miami, Palm Beach; New Jersey, California and Connecticut were most popular moves.”
In case you missed it, Google will invest $250 million this year in building out New York City office presence, while Facebook Bets Big on Future of N.Y.C., and Offices, With New Lease, and note to self, “With the 730,000-square-foot lease, Facebook has acquired more than 2.2 million square feet of office space in the city for thousands of employees in less than a year, all of it on Manhattan’s West Side,” the New York Times reported. Meanwhile, we saw Amazon buying Lord & Taylor building for $1.15 billion, “While Facebook has been in talks to lease the 700,000-square-foot Farley Building, Apple last month inked a lease on 220,000 square feet at 11 Penn Plaza,” said the New York Post. Why Is Jeff Bezos Buying Up Apartments in the Coronavirus Capital?, Realtor.com queried during the height of the pandemic.
Why indeed and lest we forget, all of these companies already had a considerable footprint in NYC even prior to the pandemic. While many formerly NY-based companies, shops and restaurants pulled up stakes – or were driven out due to high rents and property damage – seems that the various members of the tech cabal didn’t bat an eyelash, and rather, waited for real estate prices to drop, even though it seems some will still pay top dollar.
We’ve long been under glaring misconception that the tech uberlords are the smartest guys in the room. Is it that, or were they simply the first guys in the room? Pay attention:
Big Tech has been flexing its muscles more and more, censoring, deplatforming and demonetizing its users, not exclusively for political or ‘inappropriate’ content, or simply coming up with ‘creative’ ways to bring in more for me, but not for thee – because they can.
We know that, certainly since the Age of Social, the platform formerly known as the information superhighway has become a one-way street, but things are shifting and note to self: the cabal is starting to feel the repercussions.
Since we’re all spending so much time at home as a result of offices having been slow to re-open in many places, or people have opted not to return, we felt that it’s a good time to check in on the progress of the Internet of Things (IoT). Good place to start: this TED 2018 presentation on What your smart devices know (and share) about you. We’ve come a long way since then, baby – or at least technology has. Many of us are more or less stuck in our homes – and time to look at the data they’re collecting.
“There are smart lights, smart locks, smart toilets, smart toys, smart sex toys. Being smart means the device can connect to the internet, it can gather data, and it can talk to its owner.
“But once your appliances can talk to you, who else are they going to be talking to? I wanted to find out, so I went all-in and turned my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a smart home. I even connected our bed to the internet. As far as I know, it was just measuring our sleeping habits. I can now tell you that the only thing worse than getting a terrible night’s sleep is to have your smart bed tell you the next day that you “missed your goal and got a low sleep score,” said Kashmir Hill, one of the two presenters, and a journalist who covers privacy and security for Gizmodo.
We know that the lockdowns with the Covid flu went far in enriching the coffers of the tech cartel at an (even more) accelerated rate than usual (World’s Richest People Smashed Wealth Records This Week). At some point, it’s no longer about money: it’s about what that largesse can bring and in case you missed it, NSA Chief Who Oversaw Sweeping Domestic Phone Surveillance Joins Amazon Board As Director. “This is the very NSA chief (Keith B. Alexander) who was the face of the agency’s mass sweeping up of Americans’ communications exposed by Edward Snowden’s leaks. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit earlier this month ruled the invasive NSA program was “illegal” and that US officials lied about it… For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade.” ZeroHedge reported, and it’s a must-read, and note to self: “Crucially his tenure as Director of the National Security Agency went for nearly a decade, from August 2005 to March 2014. From there he founded a cybersecurity technology company in 2014, of which he’s still leads as Co-CEO and president, called IronNet Cybersecurity, Inc.”
The hire came “Just days after Amazon published a scathing letter (in the Washington Post, which, like Amazon, is also owned by Jeff Bezos) slamming President Trump for not allowing the American multinational tech company to get the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which instead was awarded to Microsoft.”
Never mind that Amazon Web Services is now authorized to host the US Department of Defense’s most sensitive data, including top secret Pentagon and NSA information (as of 2017) and also has “a monopoly on many services on the internet,” as Esha (@eshaLegal) noted, and “Even without an ex-spy chief with a less-than-stellar reputation in terms of privacy protection on its board, Amazon has faced growing pushback over its intrusive high-tech devices. Its virtual assistant Alexa was caught red-handed passively recording intimate conversations of unsuspecting family members, while its new fitness tracker ‘Halo’ promises to scan users’ bodies and track emotions in their voice,” RT reported,
This week, we thought we’d look at subject matter experts, taken from the lens of carbon emissions with lessons for both entrepreneurs, and investors.
The good news about the lockdown: carbon emissions, which we’ve been told are a danger and will wipe us all out in X amount of years, are decreasing, given that fewer factories are fully operational, and there are fewer commuters on the roads. On the other side of the coin, although COVID-19 Cuts Car Crashes — But What About Crash Rates? According to StreetsBlog (and underreported in mainstream news), “both car crashes and crash fatalities have more than doubled in the North Star State (Minnesota) since the virus began to accelerate in the state.” In New York City, more motorists died in the period between March 2 and April 8 — even though there are so few cars on the road, as Streetsblog NYC reported.”
Om Malik did an excellent piece recently entitled The Inevitable has happened. And in a hurry, on fairly recent past crises and the opportunity zones that they created for technology. Head’s up, people: take note of this current crisis, especially since we’re still in medias res and observing first-hand where the shortfalls are. Case in point: The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020.
It’s not tech,but it’s there.
Let’s face it: privacy is gone. Still, there are a few people out there in the wild who don’t use electronic payments, still shop at actual brick and mortars – where they may even pay in cash – and feel that they have no use for social media, with the possible exception of a Facebook profile, and only because they were missing too many of their friends’ and family’s social gatherings and announcements.
Since we’re nearly 20% of the way into the 21st Century, it may be time to change all of that and what better time than the holiday season? So we’ve compiled a short list of gifts that you may want to consider giving those on your list who are still living in the past:
23 & me or some other DNA-tracking/sharing genetic testing service. Who knows? They may discover long-lost relatives. Or an ethnic background that they never knew they had. Or you may discover that your friend is a criminal and you’ve given the police the break they had been looking for, since there are no rules or oversight when it comes to law enforcement collecting that information. Win-win!