Amazon, Google And The Death of Privacy
16:12 Wednesday, 18 June 2014
Words: 786
Why does Amazon need a phone?
Seriously.
Why?
Well, yeah, they want to suck you into their marketplace, but they don't really need a phone to do that. The Kindles, tablets and set top devices can pretty much cover that for you. And when I do order stuff from Amazon on my phone, I use their app.
Amazon needs a phone for the same reason that Google needs a phone, and needs a certain number of people to use Glass.
Neither Google nor Amazon are in the business of making money by selling shiny widgets. Apple does that.
Google and Amazon are in the retail business. Google sells information about you to people who want to influence you, usually to buy stuff. Google is likely also in the business of influencing you for its own ends. Amazon wants you to buy stuff from them, or their "affiliates." And if influencing you can help them do that, they're in the same business as Google.
These two entities are in competition with one another, and to a lesser degree, with Apple.
Both Google and Amazon are "big data" companies. Amazon appears to be moving more toward big data and logistics and somewhat less toward strictly consumer retail, though that will likely remain its core business.
Amazon needs a phone for the same reason Google does. They need access to user data. They need to know who the customer is, everything they can find out about them, so they can exploit that data in some way. With Android, Google was able to route
around Apple's privacy features. Android was always intended to provide greater access to more "intimate," more "granular" user data. iPhone scared them because Apple would potentially control access to the user data, so a successful iPhone potentially limited access to the vast quantities of data Google required. Just meant that Android had to look like a cheaper iPhone.
Google is not in the phone business, it's in the data collection business.
Amazon needs the same thing Google needs. If Google can better influence/direct consumer behavior, it's a competitive threat to Amazon's goal to sell you everything. Amazon has to have access to the same level of data Google has, which means it needs to reside on a phone where the OS can gather data and report back to the parent corporation the information they need.
Glass is about even more "intimate" or "granular" data. It lives on your face. While Glass users are peering at the world through Glass, Google is peering back at them, studying their faces, noting their physiological responses. Discovering when users are in a state of "arousal," which is a physiological state that makes individuals more vulnerable to influence or suggestions.
Glass doesn't have to reside on every face. What Google can do with Glass is use the data to refine the models of consumer behavior based on data gathered from Android users. It's like a lens, that can make an image sharper, just like, well, glasses.
But Glass is creepy and dorky.
Amazon, on the other hand, is a little more clever.
It wants access to the same physiological data. So it puts front facing cameras in its phone that are, by design, on every time you're using the device.
Ostensibly for a better "user experience," a new "user interface."
Bullshit.
It's a surveillance device.
It's not a data problem. Most the time, it's probably just going to be controlling the interface. But Amazon will be able to program the phones to activate collection features in particular contexts. When you're on Amazon, for instance. It won't take a picture of your whole face and upstream that to "the cloud," or live stream a video of your face to Amazon's mountain fortress headquarters. It doesn't have to. The OS will be programmed to note the size of your pupils, how they are changing, whether or not your face is flushed, it can probably measure your heart rate as well, it can look at the corners of your mouth. These data points and their direction and rates of change will be timestamped and encoded along with your browser history and uploaded to the cloud, where models will determine how best to exploit your current emotional state.
They'll be able to gather data on users' reactions to news reports, advertising efforts, "viral videos." Any topic they are interested in, and how people are responding to it as they view it through the device that is always with them, that they use most intimately, Amazon will be able to tap into how people "feel" about it. And then use those feelings for their own purposes.
Amazon Fire is Google's Glass.
It's a surveillance device.
Weekend Update
06:09 Saturday, 18 June 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 78.76°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 639
Note that it is nearly 79°F outside this morning. That's partly because it's a bit cloudy, so radiative cooling is less effective. It also means I can't get a handheld hi-res shot of the moon this morning.
That temperature is from the National Weather Service, I just checked my home Wx station, and it's 77°F here, so "Yay!" I guess.
We bought a Fluke IR thermometer to measure the temperature of a pizza stone in a little propane pizza oven we bought. I've been using it lately to measure the temperature of the exterior of the house. It's possible that the readings may be a little off because I don't know exactly what the emissivity of these surfaces are, but they're close enough and I'm really just interested in the differences.
When I step outside the front door in the evening, I'm immediately hit with heat radiating from the walls of the house. You can tell it's not just the air temp, it's the radiative cooling of the stucco walls.
So I was curious the other day, and in the late afternoon, after the sun been shining on those walls for a while, I took some measurements. The wall proper is painted a dark reddish color, while the trim is an off white. The wall measured 135°F, the lighter trim 110°, a 25 degree difference!
The interior wall of the garage on the opposite side was 95°, while the air in the garage was 94°, so there's fairly good agreement between two different sensors. The interior of the wall inside the house was 84°, while the air temperature was 77°, which is what the thermostat is set at.
The walls are insulated, so they seem to be doing a fairly decent job, slowing heat transfer from the exterior wall to the interior. The reason why the house must be actively cooled is because insulation alone doesn't do enough. Without the AC, the interior of the outside walls of the house would be the same as the garage, 95° and what the AC is doing is removing the heat that's being radiated into the house from the interior of the outside walls.
So while the AC cools the air to 77°, the walls remain at 84/85° radiating that heat into the interior, so the air temperature rises and the AC comes on to cool it back down.
To me, the AC runs a lot. It's an efficient unit, but it has a big job to do. If the exterior was painted a lighter color, it wouldn't have to work as hard. What I don't know is how much of a difference it would make. I'm inclined to believe it would be fairly significant.
I mentioned this to Mitzi, that we might think about repainting the house a lighter color whenever it comes time to repaint. She wasn't pleased, she loves the color of the house, which is something I really don't care about.
I think building codes should be revised to mandate painting homes in hot and sunny regions lighter, more reflective colors.
Moving on...
Got the Moderna booster on Thursday. My three previous vaccine doses were all the Pfizer product, I decided to get a Moderna booster on the chance that a different product might offer an enhanced level of protection, though neither is especially effective against Omicron.
None of the Pfizer doses left me with any noteworthy side effects. I think my arm was sore on the third one. Moderna was a different story. Didn't sleep well at all Thursday night, headache and general achiness (evidently, that's not a word). Friday was similar, though Tylenol took much of the edge off. Feeling normal today. But, grateful for the booster, whatever help it offers.
That's it for now. A walk is waiting for me.
✍️ Reply by emailJust Enough to Feel Stupid
08:10 Saturday, 18 June 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 80.02°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 954
I'm not a programmer, a "coder." I know a little bit about programming. I've certainly read a lot about it. Took a course called "Calculus with computers" my plebe year at the Naval Academy. That was two 5-hour "D"s I never really recovered from. Many years later I took a 100-level programming course in Pascal. I actually enjoyed that. And, I spent many years typing in Applesoft BASIC programs from magazines in one of the many Apple IIs I've owned over the years.
So, I know a little bit about programming. And most of it is probably more than 30 years old.
One of the things I kinda know about programming is that data, the stuff you want the program to work on, has a type. Computers are not smart, so you have to be very explicit in what you're telling them to do, so they have to know what kind of thing it is you want them to work on.
Examples of types are integers, floating point numbers, strings, arrays and so on. Now, I'm going to be talking out my butt here, because, as I said, I'm not a programmer and what little I know is obsolete.
I have the impression that the people who develop programming languages have a goal to make it easier for people. One of the ways they've tried to make it easier is to be less strict, less explicit about things like data types. They're trying to make the compilers and interpreters smart enough to look at the data and figure out what it is themselves. And, who knows? Maybe that's working?
Well, one of my problems getting my head around AppleScript is that it's intended to be almost conversational, human readable. But to me, that just means the computer and I just end up talking past each other.
I kinda/sorta understand objects, they're a data structure and they have various characteristics, called properties, and they all have a type. But since we're so sophisticated now, we don't always say stuff like "string" (which is, usually, text or numbers to be treated as text), we say "text." Okay. Well, now we don't have "arrays" anymore, we have "lists."
I grew up learning about arrays, arrays have a data structure that includes the index value, where or what element of the array you want to work on, and that index value was usually assigned to a variable so you could manipulate it, so the big thing about arrays was the index variables.
Well, again, AppleScript kind of fools you being so conversational. In my case, I had Photos, the app, which is an object. And it contains a bunch of other objects, like folders and albums. But does it contain "photos"? No, it contains "media items," another object. And in media item, was the data I wanted to put into a note in Tinderbox.
So, how to tell Photos what media item I wanted the data from? Well, one way seems to be to just tell it the name of the media item. With >100K images, that takes a certain amount of time to locate. But we're used to selecting data in our apps to copy, paste, export, delete and so on. And so there's an object called a selection. Perfect!
"AppleScript! Do some stuff to the selection!" (Almost typed Applesoft!)
And, of course, nothing happens. Which is why I really don't do more of this kind of thing.
It seems possible, it seems reasonable, it seems like it should work. I must be doing something wrong.
[Omit lengthy description of emotional turmoil that ensues.]
Turns out selection is of type list. In hindsight, I can see where this makes sense. You can select multiple objects and regardless of the number, it's still just the selection.
But AppleScript needs to be told how I want to process this list. I didn't know I had a list. I just had a media item that was my selection.
So it seems, despite being called a list and not an array, the language cares first about its position or index value within the list (array). If you don't tell it how you want to deal with the index, or give it some way to deal with the index, it just stares at you and blinks. (I guess that's not even possible. "Gives you a blank look." Happy now?)
But if you tell it repeat, hah! Then it's happy! Okay, it starts with the first item in the list and goes until it gets to the last one. If it's only one, it's only one! And for oldsters like me, AppleScript doesn't have a zeroeth element, the index always begins at 1. (In Applesoft BASIC, you would dimension an array (tell the interpreter how much space to reserve in memory), but it always started counting at zero. So a 10-element array would have index values from 0 to 9. If you didn't know that, you'd try to address the 10th element of the array with an index variable set to the number 10 and you'd get an error. "Out of range," I think. Can't recall.) (And there was an unmatched paren there just now. Fixed it. But, attention to detail is another aspect of programming that challenges me.)
So, big lesson is still to really pay attention to data types, and don't be fooled by the "conversational" bullshit.
In this way, I think these languages kind of make programming less accessible. But I'm just a grumpy old man.
Anyway, my little script works now. Mostly. Have one thing left to sort out and I'll put it into production.
Yay me.
✍️ Reply by emailThe Shape of Things
10:01 Sunday, 18 June 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 80.74°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 309
A note about shapes.
But first, a caution. You should never look to the marmot for tips about Tinderbox. I know just enough to be dangerous. Maybe not even that much. There are other places for that kind of help.
A correspondent has suggested that a particular construction in the previous post may be somewhat misleading.
"Oval notes are meant to denote "action" or "practice," something you do (or don't do)."
Notes in Map View may have a number of different shapes, a baker's dozen in the pick list. You can use a shape however you wish, it means whatever you wish it to mean; though you may want to record what it means in a note, because you may return to the project and wonder what it was you were trying to convey. I speak from experience.
The default shape is a rectangle. There are any number of ways to have the shape of a note in Map View be determined automatically or programmatically. I'm just assigning them manually as I'm trying to figure this out.
I did a little work this morning, and it definitely is the most productive time to approach it. Not a lot of work, but one thing I did do was to change the name of the file. The original effort, started in 2016, was Memento Mori. After seeing Jerry's Brain in action, I started this project as Dave's Brain.
My correspondent makes a good point about the subjective meaning of words, and the unintended consequences of careless language.
The file is by no means my "brain," nor are the contents exclusively "Dave's." It's a map. A map to perhaps help find a way to "be."
I don't know what the right name is yet, but for now it's called Being a Map.
Recalling, of course, that "the map is not the territory."
✍️ Reply by emailSiri Smart
12:42 Thursday, 18 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 71.29°F Pressure: 997hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 17.4mph
Words: 957
I spent some time this morning with the Siri app in MacOS 27, asking about low-voltage, DC LED lighting. The experience was very much on par with the discussions I've had on ChatGPT and Claude.
The conversation veered into our HVAC design as well, and it seemed as informative as Claude and ChatGPT were in that topic as well.
Like both of those other AI products, Siri tends a bit toward the verbose, but it doesn't have the gratuitous obsequiousness of the other two. It does ask questions to continue the conversation, which the others do as well.
I haven't asked it anything about things like AppleScript, or how to write a formula in Numbers, but that's another area I'll be exploring.
Had a very pleasant Zoom call with the representative from CleanLife & ATX LED about low-voltage DC lighting solutions. We'll have another meeting with Mitzi on the call to talk about design solutions before we get a quote. He's confident that we'll probably save money on our lighting install, simply from the wiring.
I'm planning to use a Zigbee system, with their Kinetic products, rather than the ATX-specific design. That means we'll be using constant voltage versus constant current, which also means that dimming will be achieved with pulse width modulation (PWM), which is supposedly the source of flicker, I mentioned the other day.
For funsies,here's part of my chat with Siri, responding to the question:
Can you tell me what the practical difference is between a "constant current" and "constant voltage" DC LED lighting system would be? Apparently the "constant current" system can dim LED bulbs more, but as a practical matter it's not significant. Is that correct?
Answer:
You are entirely correct that for most residential applications, the practical difference in dimming between the two systems is negligible. While Constant Current (CC) systems are technically superior at ultra-low dimming levels, modern Constant Voltage (CV) systems—especially at 48V DC—use high-frequency dimming that is completely imperceptible to the human eye. The real practical difference for your home build comes down to wiring flexibility and fixture types, rather than how dim the lights can get.
THE PRACTICAL DIFFERENCES
| FEATURE | CONSTANT VOLTAGE (CV) | CONSTANT CURRENT (CC) |
|---|---|---|
| How it Works | Delivers a fixed voltage (e.g., 48V); the current varies based on how many lights are on. | Delivers a fixed current (e.g., 700mA); the voltage adjusts automatically. |
| Best Used For | LED tape, linear lighting, and flexible systems where you might cut strips to length. | High-power individual fixtures, like architectural downlights or exterior floodlights. |
| Wiring Flexibility | High. You can wire lights in parallel (like a standard home). Easy to add or remove lights later. | Low. Lights must be wired in a specific series loop. If one light fails, the whole loop can go dark. |
| Dimming Method | Uses PWM (Pulse Width Modulation)—turning the light on and off thousands of times per second. | Uses CCR (Constant Current Reduction)—actually lowering the electrical flow to the diode. |
THE DIMMING MYTH: DOES CC REALLY DIM BETTER?
Technically, yes. A Constant Current driver can dim an LED down to 0.1% smoothly because it is physically choking the electricity flowing into the diode.
However, modern Constant Voltage systems use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation). Instead of lowering the power, they flicker the light on and off so fast (thousands of times a second) that your brain perceives it as "dim." Unless you are shooting high-speed, slow-motion video in your house, you will never notice the difference. Both will dim down to 1% perfectly for your eyes.
WHICH ONE SHOULD YOU CHOOSE FOR YOUR BUILD?
For a 48V DC residential system, Constant Voltage (CV) is almost always the better choice for the following reasons:
1. The "Christmas Light" Effect: Constant Current requires wiring fixtures in a series. If one CC downlight fails, the circuit breaks, and every light on that line goes out. CV is wired in parallel, so if one light dies, the rest stay on.
2. Flexibility: With CV, if you decide later to add one more puck light over a kitchen counter, you just tap into the existing 48V line. With CC, you would have to completely recalculate the electrical load for the whole chain.
3. The 48V Advantage: Because you are already using 48V (instead of 12V or 24V), you won't suffer from "voltage drop" (where lights get dimmer at the end of a long wire), which used to be the only real downside of Constant Voltage.
Are you looking at a specific brand of 48V fixtures (like WAC, PureEdge, or a proprietary smart home brand), or are you still in the exploratory phase?
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That also shows the question at the end.
My Tinderbox Export Template for the marmot doesn't handle tables. When I copied and pasted the response into Tinderbox, a very nice RTF table appeared in the text of the note that is this post.
Rather than try to figure out how to revise the template, I made a screenshot of the table and asked Siri for the html to re-create it.
Let's see how that works.
Update: That worked pretty well. It also gave me some css to make it look better (add the lines and so on), but I omitted that because I have no idea what I'm doing! I'll have to check out the RSS and see how that turned out.
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