Does Having Live Mics in Your Home Bother You?

[Edwin Santos]

Cell phone cameras have brought a lot of "light" to acts that would have gone unpunished or unreported in the past. Look at the Rodney King beating that was videotaped. The cops would likely have said that he fell down while trying to escape.

Mike

Question for you guys that are ok with this for the sake of security, what if the cameras catch you breaking a law you didn't even know existed? There are so many, I'll bet we all break one periodically. Add an ideological enemy in control of the camera, and you just became a criminal. Don't commit a crime? With all the data, it'd be simple to make anyone appear to be a criminal with a little selective editing. Pretty easy to go full Orwell from there...

I can see both sides of the argument. Yes, there's a general attitude that more security is always better. However the Rodney King example makes a separate point that Mike may not have intended - that is, that police power can be abused.
If surveillance and other types of technology eventually become a near inescapable blanket of power in the name of security and crime fighting, history teaches us that it can be abused by those in control of it, if they are not held in check in some way.
I guess it's each person's decision as to where they might balance the desire for security against their personal freedoms and rights.

[Kev Williams]

Re: turning off your GPS app... all that does is stop YOU from knowing where your phone is/has been. Doesn't stop others- The ONLY way to keep ANY cell phone, smart or not, from being tracked is to remove its battery. Just turning off older phones may be sufficient, but not the newer ones. That microphone thing, among others...

Re: social media ie FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc... Pretty much the root of all evil IMO. We have a DIL that hasn't spoken to us for 2 years over pics my stepson put on FB from a 'family' lunch gathering at Golden Corral. She posted up how it was "a slap in the face' that SHE wasn't invited. She didn't even bother to notice the family members were all my wife's family, not mine/hers. My one and only FB post was explaining exactly what I thought about that slap in the face. How dare I?

[Jim Koepke]

So they knew I was at a building where orthopedic surgeons have their offices because I had my phone with me. But how did they know about the knee brace?

Was there a credit card involved?

My wife does a lot of internet shopping using her iPad. The ads popping up on my screen seem to reflect what she has been purchasing.

jtk