Don’t Worry It Is All Encrypted: TV’s Recording Your Conversations And Power Companies Know When you’re Home. Feel Saver Now?

This week an article appeared in a MSM News Paper. The piece titled:

Smart meters: power companies know when you’re home.

It started ominously:

They know when you’re out and when you go to bed.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner yesterday fired a warning shot at power companies over the huge amounts of private details that smart meters collect every day.

In a memo, the office said such meters, which are now installed in more than a million New Zealand homes and businesses, could take electricity readings detailed enough to determine whether customers were using high-energy appliances, such as ovens or heaters, and when they had left the house.

It ended as per usual with reassuring “nothing to see here move on” remarks such as:

Electricity and Gas Complaints Commissioner Judi Jones said smart meters did give power companies a lot of personal information that could be used to work out household routines, such as when customers went to bed or when they left the house.

“Over the course of the day, you can say what is being used or not. You can see when the kids come home and turn on the television.”

However, there was nothing wrong with collecting the information, providing customers were informed and power companies treated it sensitively and securely, she said. She had received three complaints raising concern about privacy, among other issues, and smart meters, none of which were upheld.

Power companies who responded to Fairfax Media yesterday said information from smart meters was kept securely and only sent to third parties and then only when required by law, as with phone records.

Contact Energy said that, despite claims to the contrary, it was not possible to monitor individual appliances, because power use was recorded only once every half an hour.

So here we have mostly privatized utilities who spy on your behaviour and record that information and will only give that to police and other entities as per required by law which in modern revamped regulations is whenever a policeman, industry inspector or other nincompoop calling himself and inspector wants to know. Since when was it necessary for a power company to collect all this data on you? You need energy, they have it for sale. End of!

A second revelation this week  was that the Samsung Smart TV happily records all your living room conversations. Encoded of course BUT if authorities want that information it will be made available!

The Daily mail in fact states that not just the Samsung smart TV collects data but a whole slew of other devices you have in your home:

It’s not just smart TVs. Your home is full of gadgets that spy on you: How internet giants are collecting your personal data through their high-tech devices.

This evening, while you settle down to watch Death In Paradise or Birds Of A Feather, the disturbing reality is that your television set may also be watching and listening to you.

If you own a ‘smart TV’ from South Korean tech giant Samsung, every word you say can be captured by the device and beamed over the internet to Samsung and to any other companies with whom it chooses to share your data.

This ability for the TV to earwig your conversations on the sofa is part of the set’s voice command feature, which enables viewers to tell the TV to change channels rather than use a remote.

Such a feature is typical of many smart TVs, which are to the humble old cathode ray TV set what a jet aircraft is to a propeller plane.

Crucially, smart television sets connect to the internet, from where they can download programmes and films from services such as Netflix or BBC iPlayer. And increasingly, experts are realising that if the internet can be used to bring information into your TV, it can also be used to take it out.

Read more:

What most people don’t understand is that Smart meters can actually communicate with a lot of utilities and more and more utilities come with Wifi technology and as they all will have unique identifiers it will be possible for power companies to gather even more detailed information. For example what videos you download, when you do your wash and if you have a gadget in your bedroom perhaps when you’re having sex or a matrimonial. All encoded of course!

In the last quarter of 2014 governments around the Western Empire announced that people with extremist views such as 9/11 was a false flag or people who might be watching the ISIS execution videos would be regarded as non violent extremists and terrorist enablers. So if you were to watch a video like Loose Change or tried to ascertain how the terrorist execution video’s were made, by whom and how much was spend on them to see if they were really made by the perpetrators of these hideous murders or by professional or companies and this would be recorded and someday they would like to arrest people who did these things all they would have to do is to go to power companies and demand the records of people suspected. In fact they could even do a blanket search on certain words, data, energy use to catch people in the dragnet. This could be the idjit growing some weed in one of his spare rooms, Your daughter with her boyfriend watching Loose Change for a laugh or a journalist trying to write an article about the professional level and money spend on say the video of a massacre committed by Isis.

Encryption of our data is only one password or encryption key away from being publicly available. Blanket gathering of data equals the assumption that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear but Glenn Greenwald talks in this TED talk about the stifling effect of data collection of our innermost private life.

I don’t  know if any of this makes you feel any safer but I for one won’t be adding any modern gadget to my household unless I know what it will and will not do. We refused the smart meter at our home and I have heard of people able to be shot of it again after it was installed. My advice? Get rid of it even if it costs you a small sum. In the mean time, if you “need” a new TV or I-box or whatever make sure you are able to turn of any data gathering options they may have.

Nobody should be gathering any data on anybody. Even in the event of a “criminal” investigation data should be gathered only in the most serious of allegations. Criminal after all, unless it’s stealing, murder, theft or rape, is very much in the eye of the beholder. And even for those kinds of crimes powerful people have been able to turn the moral duty to refrain upside down.
I, for example think that bankers are stealing us blind but bankers tell us that what they are doing is not illegal. I also for example think that oil companies rape but they tell us that they are only polluting entire sections of the globe for our fuel needs while suppressing cleaner  options.

Turn of your gadgets, go outside, turn on a sprinkler and have a talk amongst yourself in private. Believe it or not that is what people do. Enjoy!