I am seriously interested in a device which will spam garbage to the smart devices in my house so that the companies monitoring my data will not be able to extract anything useful.
E.g. some kind of speech synthesizer which mimics my voice and sends engineered requests to Alexa while I'm not around.
E.g. A GPS spoofer that will occasionally tell my phone that I am visiting places I don't.
E.g. A browser extension to send random browsing info to trackers.
The second two examples I can get onboard with. But the Alexa example? Throw the thing out the window. Is it really so useful that it’s worth having a separate device to talk to it?
Having an Alexa and trying to maintain a positive feeling about privacy by spoofing it showcases one of the fundamental conflicts of our time: they want you to give up the rights yourself. Of course they will never tell you the full extent of what happens to your data or inform you in clear terms about changes — they just give you enough so you can lie to yourself about it probably not beeing soo bad.
In my eyes one of the few solutions you really have is to DIY these things, but while this has the pro of teaching you a lot, it costs time, patience and requires skill levels not everybody might have just to end up with something that might work okayish (depending on skill and time invested).
This is why I believe this has to be a law thing. Just like in other areas you can safely assume certain product standards (e.g. you can buy food in the supermarket and it won’t contain hard drugs that make you addicted) and these kinds of guarantuees need to exist for digital services as well. There needs to be a clear standard for what they are allowed to do and what not without me explicitly voiding those assumptions.
If/when I become bedridden, I imagine Alexa would be quite useful. Until then, no, I'll settle for heaving my sorry carcass out of the chair and pushing a button instead.
Sounds like you'd want this, but for it to truly work, you could also end up suffering. For example:
> A GPS spoofer that will occasionally tell my phone that I am visiting places I don't.
Sure, but the next time you want to see your Google Maps history, you'll question your own sanity.
> some kind of speech synthesizer which mimics my voice and sends engineered requests to Alexa while I'm not around.
Sure, but then you're liable for everything your spoofer says if it truly isn't distinguishable from your own voice. If it is distinguishable, then it defeats the purpose of hiding your true behavior in the first place.
> Sure, but the next time you want to see your Google Maps history, you'll question your own sanity.
Indeed I'd question my sanity, as I can usually remember roughly where I've been yesterday and don't see much use in looking up where I'd been a year ago. Of course I might be missing out on something, since I don't use Google Maps at all. (I prefer OpenStreetMap.)
In what kind of situation is being able to look up one's own location history actually useful?
It's useful when you start typing the name of a business into Maps and it auto-completes "Pla" into "Planet Pooch Dog Grooming" (where I take the dog frequently.) It can show me that result, instead of the 100 other businesses & addresses in the area that start with those 3 letters, because of this data.
> In what kind of situation is being able to look up one's own location history actually useful?
1. Remembering the name of a restaurant you went to two weeks ago.
2. Tracing your steps to look for something you might have lost.
3. Proving you were somewhere at a certain time.
4. Documenting a trip you took in the past.
The more personal information you generate, the more technology can help you. But if that information is tarnished or does not exist, then so too are the insights and benefits.
That android should not be by default tracking every user and sending a of that data to google since most users aren't aware it is even happening and most users have no use for this data. They know where they have been.
You're cherrypicking. A user does not need to know what or how much data they produce in order for that data to do useful work for them. I've already explained why a recent location history could be useful to a location-suggestion algorithm.
I once had a legal use for my location history that wasn't quite as dramatic. Someone damaged our car while it was parked. When the police asked at what time we arrived, I just pulled up my location history.
I was a bit frustrated when the police wrote down "around 8" instead of 8:14. :)
>Sure, but then you're liable for everything your spoofer says
I've actually wondered about the potential for this as performance art. Spoof some peoples voices, and have a bunch of Alexas read the script to some kind of play to each other. The play, of course, worded in such a way to trigger some Alexa's "report to law enforcement" features.
E.g. some kind of speech synthesizer which mimics my voice and sends engineered requests to Alexa while I'm not around.
E.g. A GPS spoofer that will occasionally tell my phone that I am visiting places I don't.
E.g. A browser extension to send random browsing info to trackers.