We eventually guilted Dunkin Donuts into sending us a whole case - Evil Corporations! - but always the same damn coffee, big blue 5 pounder of Maxwell House Classic, not even options like Bold or Colombian. War is Hell man.



You hold a business accountable through not buying their stuff, and by buying from their competitor who doesn't do the thing that bugs you, you also use law and regulation, like outlawing anyone's ability to peer through people's house walls with a Superman-style X-ray vision.




Why? You simply state that as fact but it isn't, the electric company monitors your power usage and regularly stomps around people's lawns to check they're meters. And that's a monopoly, I can't tell them to bug off and buy from their competition, yet it's hardly a legitimat einvasion of privacy.




Buying a damn TV with a big camera on it and a sticker bragging about it's surveillance capability would be 'opt in', but you're initiating an argument - as you usually do - with the wind, we're discussing a technology able to monitor sight and sound to determine preferences and behavior, this is not an evil thing in of itself, we've been working on such things for decades for things like Handicap access. You're asusming the tech will be used for something, and in the most parnaoid and intrusive fashion, simply because someone is developing it. Let's take an alternative:

I develop a little touch screen pad with a camera and microphone that hangs on the kitchen fridge. It magically monitors everything going ito and out of that fridge and my general kitchen behavior and compiles - for me and my household, not a company - a list of what products we used, how often, how many calories, etc. and produced shopping lists I could easily edit to add or remove and transmit to my phone for shopping at the store. I really ramp it up and it can wirelessly connect to a recipe database and let me know what I'm missing for recipes or suggest recipes I alreayd have the components for and that it thinks match my known tastes or requested diet.

Sound like a good product? Same tech conceptually. This is the epitome of proper tech, that which makes life more convenient and easy for mankind.

Now could that be abused? Potentially, a company might offer a discount model that preferences their products on suggested recipes, the government might subsidize it's production or hand them out to low income families and try to politically correct their diet, anything can be abused and we need to be vigilant for those abuses, especially the subtle sort, not paranoid about the core technology itself, because the same monitor might be able to just as easily say 'Fuck! You're having a Heart Attack, dialing 9-1-1!'



And idiot point, to conduct surveillance on people without their permission, or in a specific fashion they do not like, without warrant, has no place. An in house system I own that watches me and lets me know where I put my keys definitely has a use, and if some company wants to discount it for me in exchange for certain aspects of the data, then that's my decision, I may decide it's worth saving ten bucks a year - or being paid hundreds or thousands - to let them study my behavior as a template for others and find out that 32 year old males who drink coffee at 6 am while watching news are 5% more likely to be fond of redheads or whatever so they can target their 6am advertising with that in mind and now more commercials on Fox or CNN at 6 AM feature hot redheads as spokespersons for Folgers. This is my right as a person, it's their right to offer me such a discount or bonus and mine to accept or decline, but that's nothing to do with the basic tech, which would have vast numbers of positive applications.




You mean in the last couple centuries we hunted Mastodons? Hell that screws up my view of history, I guess all those people in third world countries, or 1st world ghettos, I encountered who lived several people to tiny 1-3 room places hunt extinct animals. Apparently all those American Colonials who did the same regularly a century or two ago did too. We presumably stopped hunting Mastodons in the late 1700's when the US ratified the Constitution.



Where is this invasion coming from? Thus far we have a patent from a company who believes behavior recognizing software is a thing of the future and wants to make sure they have a cut of the cake, probably base don them already having a good portions of the ingredients.



Yeah, the whole right wing is paranoid about gov't but not corporations narrative fails the test insofar as Drudge reported this and right-wingers are freaking out too. Sorry to burst your bubble, though points for the 'in Soviet Russia'