Yup it's wild to me how much anxiety there is about cameras while no mind is given to microphones. Conversations are much more privileged than potentially seeing me in my underwear.
That said the most sensitive information is what we already willingly transmit: search queries, interactions, etc. We feed these systems with so much data that they arguably learn things about us that we're not even consciously aware of.
Covering your camera with tape seems like a totally backwards assessment of privacy risk.
I’m just going to assume you’re a man, and don’t generally worry about things like revenge porn. Because that is a bigger concern to me than you, it seems. Sure, I don’t want my sound to be recorded either, but that’s why I put a cover on the webcam AND turn off the physical switch on my (external) microphone. They are both easy things to do.
> Yup it's wild to me how much anxiety there is about cameras while no mind is given to microphones. Conversations are much more privileged than potentially seeing me in my underwear.
It depends on the person, I don't think you could gain much from me? I don't say credit card numbers out loud, I don't talk about hypothetical crimes out loud. I don't say my wallet seed phrases out loud. I also don't type in my passwords. Yes you could probably find out what restaurant I'm ordering delivery for, but other than that I suppose my conversations are really boring.
The cost of feeding your entire years speech to an LLM will be $0.5/person. I'm sure summarized and searchable your conversation will be very very valuable.
There seems to be widespread anxiety regarding cameras, but hardly anyone ever talks about microphones. Are conversations not much more privileged information than potentially seeing someone in their underwear?
"All Apple silicon-based Mac notebooks and Intel-based Mac notebooks with the Apple T2 Security Chip feature a hardware disconnect that disables the microphone whenever the lid is closed. On all 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air notebooks with the T2 chip, all MacBook notebooks with a T2 chip from 2019 or later, and Mac notebooks with Apple silicon, this disconnect is implemented in hardware alone." [1]
I'm inclined to believe it. If someone managed to prove Apple's lying about it, there would be serious reputational (and other) risks to their business. I also can't imagine how they would benefit from such a fabrication.
That said, I still use "Nanoblock" webcam covers and monitor for when either the camera or microphone are activated.
It's clear Apple define "Hardware" as "Not using the main CPU". They've pretty much admitted it's firmware based, otherwise the T2 chip simply wouldn't be involved to be mentioned.
It is implemented in dedicated small CPLD that cannot be flashed by any software means. My understanding of relation to T2/SEP is that this CPLD serves as a kind of "IO expander" for T2/SEP which also hardwires logic like this.
The T2 chip is mentioned in the quoted passage as an indicator of the architecture version, not necessarily an indicator that the T2 chip is directly involved
Obviously the camera is also 'disabled' when the lid is closed regardless of the controlling circuitry. So while that's a good feature, it's not relevant.
Nobody but Abby and Ben care if Ben is caught admitting he cheated on Abby.
But naked images of Abby can head off into the ether and be propagated more or less forever, turn up on hate sites, be detrimental to careers etc.
If your threat model is leaking company secrets then sure, microphone bad, as is anything having access to any hardware on your machine.
So sure, maybe people ought to be more concerned about microphones as well, rather than instead.
My point is that the threat model is backwards. The threat associated with a camera is the least severe compared to anything else a malicious person could do with access to your computer. Recored conversations, chats and email, browsing history, etc are all much more likely to result in harm if leaked than a recording of you innocently in your home.
> Nobody but Abby and Ben care if Ben is caught admitting he cheated on Abby.
That destroys families, standing within a community, and very often careers.
I don't think it is backwards, personally. The threat of public humiliation, and the capability for someone to spy on what you do in your own home, is worse with the camera.
> chats and email, browsing history, etc are all much more likely to result in harm if leaked than a recording of you innocently in your home.
This is far less of an intrusion for most people than recording what they are actually doing in their own home IRL. People know that information can be hacked, they don't expect and react quite differently to someone actually watching them.
> That destroys families, standing within a community, and very often careers.
Yes, but it doesn't stay on the internet forever in quite the same way.
Now I get to some extent what you're saying - aren't the consequences potentially worse from other forms of information leak?
Maybe. It depends on how you weight those consequences. I'd put (for example) financial loss due to fraud enabled by hacking my accounts as far less important than someone spying on me in my own home. Even if they didn't use that to then extort me, and were using the footage for ... uh ... personal enjoyment. I think a lot of people will feel the same way. The material consequences might be lesser, but the psychological ones not so much. Not everything is valued in dollars.
I think we may just be bumping into cultural differences here. I grew up in a household were being naked around family members was common. I spend time in clothing-optional spaces. I rarely draw the blinds on my windows, etc. I'm not concerned with what other people think in this way and such images could never be used to extort me. Consider the case of Germany - people there are extremely concerned about their privacy and data protection. At the same time public nudity is an entrenched cultural norm.
It's also known that people are not very good at assessing risk. People are more word about dying at the hands of a serial killer than they are of dying in a car crash or slipping in the shower. I feel you're underplaying the psychological harm of having all of your data crawled through by a creep (that would include all of your photos, sites visited, messages sent, everything).
All I can really say is that if someone gained access to my machine, the camera would be the least of my concerns. That's true in nearly every context (psychological, financial, physical, etc).
Empirically, most low level extortion does seem to be about leaking video. I would see a threat model based on 'criminal wants to extort me for money'. As more reasonable than 'creep wants to look through my computer for creeping'. And it seems like extortion focusses on video, so that is the bigger threat. Even if it is less invasive.
I presume the reason behind this is that video is much more likely to be re-shared. Sending bob a zip of someone's inbox is unlikely to be opened, and even less likely to be shared with strangers. But send bob a video of Alice, and he might open it. Heck, he might not know what the video is until he opens it. So even if he is decent, he might still see it. And if he is less decent and shares it, strangers are much more likely to actually view it.
I think extortion in the form of "I've encrypted your data, pay to get it back" is much more common. Ransomware. It's scalable, automatable. Extortion of video is harder to automate.
I think, though am prepared to be wrong, that you'll probably find yourself in the minority there.
It's not just about nudity and extortion, but someone having access to watch you, whenever they feel like, in your safe space. That sense of violation that people also feel when (for instance) they have been the victim of burglary - the missing stuff is often secondary to the ruined sense of security. There's a vast difference between leaving your curtains open and having someone spying on you from inside your own home.
Is it rational to put this above other concerns? That's a whole different debate and not one I'm particularly interested in. But it explains why people are concerned about cameras over 'mere' data intrusion.
I'm not arguing a point here, but I'm curious what the actual number of instances exist where someone is naked or in some other extortionate way (accidently of course) potentially exposed from the position of their webcam. I too would be much more concerned about my microphone, where I know one had conversations that in front of or next to my machine that I wouldn't want "out there". In terms of where my camera is, I woukd imagine they would catch me picking my nose every so often but that's about it.
This raises a different but related question. In what world should a victim of a crime be extorted for doing innocent things in their home. If a peeping tom took a photo though a window, could that be used to extort someone?
When people are extorted for these kinds of things it's usually catfishing that leads to sexual acts being recorded. That's not related to cybersecurity.
Despite these machines, a person can easily spend an hour or two every day on common household tasks like cleaning the kitchen and doing laundry. That’s time that many people would love to get back.
There are ways to address this problem, but in any case this is still ultimately a very good problem for property owners to have. Their property value has increased dramatically. Being forced to move is inconvenient, but you do so with a large bag of cash.
That big bag of cash won’t buy a community where you know most everyone and have friends of decades or more whom you support and support you in return. Social connections take a long time to build and are hard to replace with cash.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Everyone wants their home to be worth more and more year over year but doesn’t want to incur any obligation for it.
How do you square that with the idea that communities and social connections are more important? Look at what California did with prop 13. It’s a disaster by all accounts. We need to switch models not create more complicated exemptions around property taxation.
Land Value Tax is more equitable and doesn’t have the intrinsic volatility and unpredictably of how we do property taxes today which is assessed in the unit value not the land and only punishes under utilization and vacant land holdings. This encourages building and to some extent smaller parcels of land per unit built
I would rather have my home than a bag of cash. I’m not even old, but I did grow up here and it has immense sentimental value to me. My grandma lived in her house for over 65 years, and died in it. I doubt she would have moved for anything short of multigenerational wealth.
It's the case for all large tech companies. Headcount increases in software engineering projects result in diminishing returns per-individual, but the increase is still there (if managed correctly). For example a 100 person team may not be 10x as productive as a 10 person team, but they may be 5x as productive. A 1000 person team may only be 3x as productive as 100. And so on until you have many thousands of engineers that can slowly move mountains and maintain massively complex and interwoven systems.
Also, development headcount begets support headcount. For every 10 new engineers you hire, you will need to also hire a manager for them. For every 20-30 engineers, you'll probably need a PM to steer the product and a PjM to handle all the additional communication/process overhead. For every 2-3 managers, you'll need an admin who manages their schedule and meetings. As the team grows, you'll need more people purely working on infrastructure, internal tools, build&release, security, legal, maybe doc writers, and so on, and they all need managers too. Suddenly you have 10K people.
Whenever we see these big layoffs, someone inevitably comes out of the woodwork to naively ask, "Why does Company X need 1,000 people?? I could do what they do with 8 engineers!" This is why.
Given that your article (from 2022) states Hertz will pay $168 million to people accused of stealing cars, it seems pretty unlikely Hertz is still making that mistake. Seems totally safe to me. Have there been any recent instances of this?
You raise a great point. Maybe they’re good citizens now. On the other hand the Italian restaurant down the street from me was shut down from multiple health code violations including roaches. They’ve reopened. But I’m super hesitant to trust a restaurant that couldn’t stay on top of their roach and other health problems. Or see Apple settling their patent infringement claims and now we’re here again with another patent infringement case. Maybe I’m just too cynical now. I think I’m going to need to see some glowing reviews and press about how Hertz is doing great with customers again.
Laws like this really don't address anything then. Children will continue to find and circulate "dangerous content."
As a mid-thirties millennial, I saw the transition. Kids shared paper pornography in the 90s, and had access to the most extreme and anonymous version of the early internet. I don't think either inflicted the kind of widespread harm mass surveillance proponents would suggest.
> Friendly reminder that prior to the popularization of the internet 20-30 years ago, there was absolutely no equivalent situation where you could have the kind of anonymity the internet provides.
It also wasn't possible for every action and thought a person had to be monitored by governments and corporations. We've gone way too far in our assault on privacy and desperately need to claw rights back.
I can't believe that this seems to be such a minority perspective.
I find it horrifying how many people seem to default assume that censoring is a good thing.
The internet may be harmful but it's not just a few explicit sites that you need to worry about. It's the whole thing. Either teach your kids to make good decisions or block them from the internet in full. There isn't a middle ground that works really. We are absolutely rocketing towards the worst kind of dystopia and it seems like a lot of people are on board with it.
Copying/sharing media is not the same as stealing from a store. We already had this debate like 30 years ago - "You wouldn't download a car!" Unless you really believe that borrowing a book from a friend deprives the author of a sale and that that's equivalent to pickpocketing $10 from the author.
Google has every right to restrict who gets to access their services (although antitrust concerns do come up) and every user has the right to control the software on their devices.
> Copying/sharing media is not the same as stealing from a store
This is different, you aren't copying youtube videos and sending them to a friend using your own resources, you are using their server capacity to watch it yourself.
So you are costing Youtube money just like stealing from a store costs the store money. So the old "copying is not theft" argument doesn't hold here. It does work for torrenting etc, but not when you stream directly from their servers.
Sure but the post I was responding to starts with "Would you use the same justification for pirating movies? Or for stealing from large supermarkets?", that's what I was responding to. Also in this context the situation is amusing to me given that YouTube's early success was built on pirated content. That continued for a long time even after Google's acquisition.
With respect to server/network resources, like I said Google is free to restrict access as they see fit.
> the post I was responding to starts with "Would you use the same justification for pirating movies? Or for stealing from large supermarkets?", that's what I was responding to
The post you responded to didn't say that those two were the same, it clearly shows those two as different levels of bad if you read the next line:
> "Not a pointed question, I just find it genuinely interesting where people draw the line."
So your point here is just you not understanding and reacting with a meme since his post sounded a bit similar to an argument you have seen before.
> and also brain can involve some quantum mechanics
A neuroscientist once pointed this out to me when illustrating how many huge gaps there are in our fundamental understanding of how the brain works. The brain isn't just as a series of direct electrical pathways - EMF transmission/interference is part of it. The likelihood of unmodeled quantum effects is pretty much a guarantee.
