Steve Wozniak Warns People To Get Off of Facebook Due To Privacy Concerns (tmz.com) 119
TMZ accosted 68-year-old Steve Wozniak at an airport, according to an article shared by a Slashdot reader. TMZ asked Wozniak for his thoughts on whether our devices are listening to us -- and if we're trying to have private conversations, should we be worried?
"I'm worried about everything," Wozniak replied. "I don't think we can stop it, though." But, everything about you -- I mean, they can measure your heartbeat with lasers now, they can listen to you with a lot of devices. Who knows if my cellphone's listening right now. Alexa has already been in the news a lot.
So, I worry, because you're having conversations that you think are private... You're saying words that really shouldn't be listened to, because you don't expect it. But there's almost no way to stop it. People think they have a level of privacy they don't. Why don't they give me a choice? Let me pay a certain amount, and you'll keep my data more secure and private then everybody else handing it to advertisers.
Wozniak was also asked if we should "get rid of Facebook and Instagram..." His reply?
"There are many different kinds of people, and some the benefits of Facebook are worth the loss of privacy. But to many like myself, my recommendation is -- to most people -- you should figure out a way to get off Facebook."
"Steve knows what he's talking about," explains TMZ's write-up of their conversation, adding that "the dude co-founded Apple, and he's very much plugged into Silicon Valley and all aspects of tech."
"I'm worried about everything," Wozniak replied. "I don't think we can stop it, though." But, everything about you -- I mean, they can measure your heartbeat with lasers now, they can listen to you with a lot of devices. Who knows if my cellphone's listening right now. Alexa has already been in the news a lot.
So, I worry, because you're having conversations that you think are private... You're saying words that really shouldn't be listened to, because you don't expect it. But there's almost no way to stop it. People think they have a level of privacy they don't. Why don't they give me a choice? Let me pay a certain amount, and you'll keep my data more secure and private then everybody else handing it to advertisers.
Wozniak was also asked if we should "get rid of Facebook and Instagram..." His reply?
"There are many different kinds of people, and some the benefits of Facebook are worth the loss of privacy. But to many like myself, my recommendation is -- to most people -- you should figure out a way to get off Facebook."
"Steve knows what he's talking about," explains TMZ's write-up of their conversation, adding that "the dude co-founded Apple, and he's very much plugged into Silicon Valley and all aspects of tech."
Joe Hallenbeck (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, for hobbies it seems like social media is a good thing.
But only for the parts that you'd want to share in public.
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The people who need to heed this lesson are too stupid - that's why they're still on Facebook. Preaching to the choir doesn't do shit, (but we already know that)
Turns out 40 years of easy-to-use computing... (Score:5, Interesting)
...has just allowed people to be drawn so far away from the practical concerns of personal computing that they don't even feel what is going on until its too late. Parents used to be terrified in the 90s to let their kid talk to strangers on the internet; now they'll leave a kid with an internet connected computer as a baby sitter with no qualms. We've been habituated to computers without maintaining any of the safeguards or justifiable feelings of concern which were felt when personal computers were new and scary.
Only now are people starting to realize that the reasons for concern never went away, and that their lowered guard has allowed all the worst-possible scenarios to happen.
Re:Turns out 40 years of easy-to-use computing... (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, how I miss the days of yore when one could defecate on someone else's face in private...
Even more than that... (Score:1)
They haven't been teaching their kids how to exploit the system so it doesn't exploit them.
I got all that keep you safe schpiel, but the most important things I learned was 'don't go online and act like a kid' and 'learn to keep details about yourself private until someone has given you a reason to impart them with your trust.'
Two different groups of parents (Score:2)
In essence, you are comparing two separate groups of parents: those with technical expertise and thos
Look of disbelief (Score:2)
No! Privacy concerns in Facebook? Who'd've though it? Nice to see you're on top of these things, Steve.
Block it all at the firewall. (Score:3)
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I tried remote-logging into my free* Facebook router with admin/admin, and it only gave options for blocking Google and Microsoft. Perhaps a trusted member of the community can recommend a HOSTS solution?
*with additional free special offers!
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ask APK, he has a HOSTS solution.
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
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Nuke it from orbit?
Facebook has been stalking me for years (Score:2)
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Not NSA. Not FBI. CIA [theonion.com].
Re:Apple is just as dangerous, if not as malicious (Score:5, Informative)
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Source code being open/closed doesn't have any bearing on what we know or don't know what is sending. But do you know how we DO know? Packet inspection.
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Source code being open/closed doesn't have any bearing on what we know or don't know what is sending. But do you know how we DO know? Packet inspection.
How does that work if everything is being sent over an encrypted channel that's verified so you can't man-in-the-middle it? You'll get the size and timing of the transmissions, but nothing more.
Apple fans have apparently never heard of cryptography, or steganography.
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"Source code being open/closed doesn't have any bearing on what we know or don't know what is sending."
Congratulations, that was the dumbest thing said on slashdot yesterday.
"But do you know how we DO know? Packet inspection."
Oh My sweet summer child. The data can be encrypted, or it can be hidden in other traffic using stenographic techniques. They can't send a ton of data without anyone noticing, but they can certainly process a lot of data on your phone, and send reports on the data back to Apple. Then t
s/stenographic/steganographic/ (Score:2)
It may be time for me to get glasses, I specifically thought I corrected that one
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Look up the new "Find My" feature if you want to see how much Apple cares about privacy.
The next version of iOS and macOS will have a feature that turns every iOS device into a Bluetooth listening device and an opt-out (or so they say) Bluetooth beacon. Whenever a device sees a "ping" from another Apple device using these beacons, they'll send their own location and the beacon's ID back to Apple. Turning a device "off" will stop it from listening, but not broadcasting. Apple will then keep all this device/l
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This is very easy to verify, I checked it myself and you should to. You shouldn't believe what a company tells you, but as its trivial to setup a proxy or check your router logs you can see what is being sent to Apple.
Now I know you're speaking bullshitese... How the fuck are you or anyone else going to be able to see what is being sent to Apple/Google/etc in today's age of HTTPS everywhere? The data at your proxy server or router has already been encrypted on the Apple device. You can't verify jack-diddly. It's called "end-to-end encryption" for a reason. The best you can do is block the traffic at your router/proxy, but good luck with that when your device needs to phone home to the mothership for updates and account d
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If, during one time period, the proxy records 10MB being sent to CompanyY, and 0.5MB going to CompanyZ, which do you think is capturing more data about you?
If CompanyY is processing my data at home, and CompanyZ is processing it on my device, then I haven't learned anything about which is collecting more data about me from this comparison. The only thing I can say for CompanyZ for sure from the provided information is that they're less likely to be wasting my cellular data allotment by spying on me.
This is why open source (and preferably Free Software, where you get some kind of guarantee that you can actually use the source for the intended purpose) is critic
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Encryption: You learn how Internet works (Score:2)
You "set up a proxy" or "check your router logs" to read the ENCRYPTED data that is going between your phone and the Internet??? Hilarious! That's some prime BS you've just posted. Learn how the Internet works before posting such nonsense.
And you learn how TCP/IP works, instead of bird-name-calling.
In case of client-to-server (or also in case of end-to-end) encryption, you can't see the content of the *message* without the encryption keys, but you can see the connection being made to server belonging to Apple.
Not only that, but it happens that the big GAMA giants use different servers for different tasks. You can have some guess at what might the encrypted content of the message be, given which server it's addressed too.
The only exceptions a
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You're such a child. It doesn't matter how often the phone calls home, only what it says at those times, and you don't know what it's saying because you are not permitted to know. It's trivial for Apple to collect information from your system during the update process. If they want to collect data from your phone, they'll just "break" it remotely, and then you will bring it to an apple store like a good little minion, since you have no other choice.
No one is arguing that Google isn't collecting lots of data
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Only if you set it to back up to the iCloud.
You don't have to turn iCloud on at all...you can happily work without connecting at all to iCloud, and you can backup locally to your own computer and password protect that.
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The key difference is that Google doesn't sell that data or allow anyone else to access it. Of course they use it to direct advertising at you, but they don't allow other companies to get at like Facebook does.
It's a valid choice for people to view (or block) targeted ads in exchange for services, rather than paying for them with money. What's important is that they understand how their data is used, and have control over who has access to it. Google mostly does that, even if it isn't perfect, where as Face
Apple is trying to stop it (Score:2)
You're saying words that really shouldn't be listened to, because you don't expect it. But there's almost no way to stop it.
There is an Apple is doing it. Pushing for devices to make heavy use of on-device capability for things like voice control, so that random speech does not have to go to a server to determine if it should be acted upon...
That is the future to push for if you care to preserve any privacy at all, to move as much computation as possible out of the cloud and onto local devices.
This could
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There is an Apple is doing it. Pushing for devices to make heavy use of on-device capability for things like voice control, so that random speech does not have to go to a server to determine if it should be acted upon...
You mean Google. Apple removed the ability to do on-device speech recognition ages ago. Now it all goes through an Apple server, which I think turns out to be an Azure server somewhere for some reason, because Apple doesn't even run their own servers. The whole "we respect your privacy" thing is advertising bullshit to try and handwave away why their speech recognition is so terrible.
Google, on the other hand, is pioneering doing complicated AI tasks on-device, and will be doing all speech recognition on-de
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That update is already out - and you can disable it by disabling bluetooth.
Fat lot of good that does if you need to use bluetooth for something. Like, oh I don't know, maybe connecting your wireless headphones to your headphone jack-less iPhone so you can listen to some music?
If Apple truly was privacy minded, they wouldn't have designed "Find My" so backhandedly. Why isn't there a feature to simply "Disable Find My" by itself? Forcing you to disable Bluetooth in whole to disable "Find My" is a cop-out. They don't want you disabling "Find My" is basically what they're saying.
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I think you're confusing "Find My" with "Find My iPhone." The current "Find My iPhone" system involves the device itself reporting its location back to Apple. The problem with that is that it's somewhat trivial to disable and can be blocked via VPN and proxies.
The new "Find My" system involves having every Apple device spying on every other Apple device, using a Bluetooth area broadcast of device IDs. (The ID is encrypted with an Apple key and combined with whatever the device thinks is the current time to
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Apple removed the ability to do on-device speech recognition ages ago.
Maybe but it is coming back with more recent devices.
You mean Google.
No, I am not an idiot, everyone here knows that if anyone is going to collect everything you say it's Google.
You don't need to store everything locally.
Good luck with that.
if you want to see "abuse of privacy," you should see the crazy "find my" thing Apple is building.
I know all about it, far more than you appear to, and it's nothing like you described, since it's to
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No, I am not an idiot, everyone here knows that if anyone is going to collect everything you say it's Google.
You're making the argument that we should trust a corporation, called Apple. Google gives us the source code, and if we buy devices with unlockable boot loaders, and incredibly pissed off PCs with craploads of RAM and disk, we can build it ourselves. Seriously, I've never seen anything with such massive build requirements as Android. You can tell Android's not Unix (let alone UNIX) because it's not self-hosting... But at least it's physically possible to build your own OS and install it on your phone. You c
Appeal to Authority (Score:4, Insightful)
"Steve knows what he's talking about," explains TMZ's write-up of their conversation, adding that "the dude co-founded Apple, and he's very much plugged into Silicon Valley and all aspects of tech."
Just because someone knows what they're talking about doesn't mean they're right, especially when it comes to opinions. It's helpful to know what you're talking about if you intend to lie, for example.
Re:Appeal to Authority (Score:4, Informative)
I am careful in all such interviews to say that Facebook is fine for anyone who likes it, for whom the plusses outweigh any minuses. I state that it's just wrong for me, myself, or others like myself. How can I not be "right" about that?
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I am careful in all such interviews to say that Facebook is fine for anyone who likes it, for whom the plusses outweigh any minuses. I state that it's just wrong for me, myself, or others like myself. How can I not be "right" about that?
I also think you handled the impromptu interview quite well. Consider that you've spurred headlines across multiple websites and news outlets suggesting people stop using Facebook, at the very least because Woz said so. I think that is nothing but good. Hopefully a few people will listen and that will be fewer Facebook users.
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It's a conservative, safe sort of "right". Easy-to-use computing has lead to people who are totally incapable of enumerating the pluses and minuses, because they are only trained in the rituals of manipulating illusory, high-level interfaces. Since computers have been given to people who are completely out-of-touch with the nature of the physical objects as-they-are, they rely on voices like ours to wake them up to the serious realities and ramifications. There are ways to keep in touch with one's "social n
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I agree with you on that. I was merely responding to the journalist's logical fallacy, which stuck in my craw, and hadn't read what you had said. My example was generic and not implying any lying in this case.
Didn't know/forgot you posted on Slashdot, by the way.
I can relate ... (Score:2)
... I'm retired IT and I like to do fun things with my desktop.
For that reason, I travel the webverse as stealthily as I can. The limitation to my level of obscurity is myself. I do what I can.
For my wife, I'm her go to guy for all things technical and she's OK to move freely about the country.
We're retired; have no one to answer to and stuff.
I deleted Facebook (it was never on my desktop) and I don't have Instagram or Twitter and that shit.
I do have all that on another computer, but it's burner shit. Faceb
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Best thing to do, if you have to use Facebook is isolation. Stick it in a virtual machine separate from anything and everything, and in the VM, run it under a sandboxed browser (SandboxIE comes to mind.) Microsoft has Windows 7 to Windows 10 VMs ready to download and use, so might as well use those.
Ideally, have it routed through a VPN so the browser doesn't know where you are actually coming from.
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It's actually called "Smart Punctuation"
And ... Apple decided to make it really difficult to turn off.
https://apple.stackexchange.co... [stackexchange.com]
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Try me.