There is no alternative, all financial businesses will freeze accounts under any suspicions. Way to have a degree of mind peace is to have a handful of accounts with funds split across them. If an account gets frozen then it's business as usual pretty much. Takes months for investigations to complete at times.
Moving to a country where banks have at least some legal service obligation, such as the UK, although even then those regulations often don't cover businesses.
This is not about tracking, having your biometrics means they can resell the data to other providers (e.g. palantir or some other hellish enterprise). With that, the places and means of following you in real time are practically limitless...
There have been so many dystopian movies about this kind of tech, it's a good insight of what comes next.
The reason Google and Apple stopped innovating is simply because they make too much money from their current products and see every innovation primarily as a risk to their existing business. This is something that happens all the time to market leaders.
Grape Brick style: "It is of the utmost importance that you do not do the following with your longbow. Lest you maximize its lethality, please take care to avoid carrying out these specific instructions with your new purely decorative longbow. At all times, ensure that the bow is never fired in the direction of the vital points outlined on the anatomical chart (FIG. 1)"
The USA hosts 35 million foreign visitors per year. These enforcement actions are absurd, but if you have your documents in order and are planing a normal tourist trip. you will be fine.
Even during normal times with proper documentation I was detained for a few hours. This is something completely different. I’ve seen deportations immediately for wrong documents. I haven’t seen 14 days of arbitrary detention before for correct documents.
I don’t think the latter is happening. The multi-day detentions have all been related to actual immigration violations. Again, something I oppose very strongly but the notion your life will be severely negatively affected if you show up at the border as a normal tourist with normal travel documents is just incorrect. The worst thing that will happen is they send you home.
Canadian entered to work without a valid visa, as the article states, her visa had been revoked in November and she was aware of this - she should have arranged a visa at an overseas consulate before crossing the border
German backpacker was detained for hours not days
German tattoo artist arrived with a tourist visa with supplies for working
German fiancé — not a normal tourist case but yes this seems to have been a mistake by CPB
Again, the conditions and duration of detention are absurd but normal tourists are not being detained for days
> Canadian entered to work without a valid visa, as the article states, her visa had been revoked in November and she was aware of this - she should have arranged a visa at an overseas consulate before crossing the border
I'm not seeing that.
>After a long interrogation, the officer told me it seemed “shady” and that my visa hadn’t been properly processed. He claimed I also couldn’t work for a company in the US that made use of hemp – one of the beverage ingredients. He revoked my visa, and told me I could still work for the company from Canada
The notion that you will be stabbed by a muslim in the tubes is also just incorrect, yet look at the public perception. It's the same in this case. The USA is degrading fast in the public opinion abroad and this will have consequences.
I'm not saying that's not what Americans want, maybe they do, but Trump is basically pissing away all leverage the US has with the rest of the free world. It's a shame.
They detained a green card holder who didn't break any laws and tortured him for weeks. They deported a French scientist over private speech after searching his phone. Why do you think all this is just going to be okay?
The situation is not good but let’s not lie. Green card holders returning from overseas have always been at high risk of encountering issues upon reentry. Overseas visitors working informally have likewise always risked detention and deportation. The gentleman in Boston was treated very badly, but his detention lasted hours, not days. Ordinary tourists are not being detained. I am a US Citizen who worked in the EU for some time and was detained upon initial arrival into the Schengen area while they checked into my work visa. The French scientist situation - very concerning, but they were just sent home. Hardly a reason to withhold a visit “unless your life depended on it”
This is disingenuous at best. It's not just anectodal evidence. People are concerned with the clear trend. Abuse of visitors is increasing indiscriminately, where will it stop?
I would be scared of that as a tourist, and I guess a lot of other people would be as well. Not just because of being denied entry but for the possible investigations one could face
I don't know what actually happened, but the current reporting is that he was turned back for other reasons:
U.S. Says Decision to Turn Back French Scientist Had Nothing to Do With Trump
The Department of Homeland Security said the academic was denied entry because he had 'confidential' data from an American lab, not because of his views on the president’s policies.
More accurately, people who travelled to the US in recent years were fine. The assumption that will continue to be the case is something every traveller needs to consider for themselves. It's not unreasonable for people to choose not to travel, just in case.
Honestly this seems to be a really short sighted view, none of the people that got arrested there really had reasonable grounds to be arrested, although I guess that legally they are "in the clear", but I am no expert, and this is high profile only because of the situation is absolutely absurd, and we are only two months in.
How many cases are not reported and as bad as this or worse? Am I willing to be gambling this?
Returning green card holder, who have always been subject to scrutiny. His treatment was absurd and unacceptable, but not a situation that would be faced by an ordinary tourist or business traveler.
What is meant by "returning green card holder" exactly? Return from a holiday abroad outside of the USA, or leaving the USA to live elsewhere for some time with no obvious intent to return?
A permanent resident getting beaten is not a concern to you? Tourists have even less rights in US view than those, your arguments seems lacking any logic.
I wanted to bring my family to US for few weeks vacation but fuck hell no, you don't go to places where they insult and attack you for no reason.
The current crackdown is absurd. But let’s be honest - this specific situation with the German backpacker is nothing new. If you show up at the border for an extended trip with no money, you are subject to extended examination. This happens all over the world.
I would like to meet the person who bought an Alexa device at any point in time thinking "now here is finally the privacy protecting AI assistant I have been waiting for."
There are exactly two companies which make a device capable of actually integrating with every home automation and voice control, so given the options, I assumed Amazon would have fewer evil ideas than Google, seeing as the mechanism for Amazon profiting off the data directly is clear and the mechanism for Google has 100 teams building different products to consume that data in 1000 ways I can't begin to consider.
So yeah, given the dichotomy, it seemed like a clear privacy decision to me.
But why do we need these in the first place? I have a free Apple home that I can’t find much of a use for aside from being a speaker. Is it that hard to get the weather or turn lights off from your phone? I definitely don’t want to order products from an audio interface. What else am I missing?
What if you aren't currently holding your phone, with it unlocked and the (probably slow to load) app open? What if you don't have switched outlets, and want to turn off lights either a) when the room is still dark, or b) when you're leaving the room?
Voice assistants are not a revolution in home living, but lets not go too far in the other direction and ignore that they do still have useful features.
Almost every instance of "useful features" described, yours included, seem much more like novelties than true utility to me. I get that this is the old man in me.
Same as AI. It's almost like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel for useful products, since capitalism demands people churn out endless useful products, regardless of whether they actually exist or not, so we're trying to make not-useful products into useful products to appease the machine...
I can generally speak to my iPhone and have it recognize and carry out what I say when it's still in its holster on my hip.
Anything that's set up in HomeKit is directly accessible through Siri, and IME most smart-home devices these days support HomeKit, even if they have their own apps as well.
So I don't need to have any app open, or my phone unlocked or even in my hand, in order to turn on and off the smart outlets I have in my house.
(That said, I also have a HomePod mini, because not everyone in my house keeps their phone on their person at all times—plus it's a nice speaker for the kitchen.)
I've participated on their forum for years and a I've seen enough of the code to feel good about it
certainly more confident than the alternatives, and I know with certainty the voice assistant I'm running doesn't leave my home because I configured and verified it myself
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