In article , Roger Blake
wrote:

your loss. they're very capable devices that can do all sorts of things
that were once considered impossible.

I don't see it as a loss. Nothing they provide is worth the tracking and
surveillance aspects. There is nothing a smartphone can do that I need
or want.

the 'tracking and surveillance' can be disabled, and it doesn't do what
you think it does.

the entire concept is ludicrous. it's tinfoil hat material.

As in Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty Four" it may not be listening all the
time, but you don't know when or where it might be.

now you're backpedaling about the listening all the time.

you conveniently snipped it, so here it is again, because it's *so*
detached from reality that it needs to be repeated:

In article , Roger Blake
wrote:
I'm not interested in having a device that listens to everything around
it and uploads it.

seriously, wtf.

At a minimum it has
to be listening for keywords to activate the AI functions and you don't
really know when or where it may be doing more.

keyword detection is done locally, but if that bothers you, it can be
disabled, as can the assistant entirely.

Devices such as Alexa
and Google Home don't even have the battery concern.

but they do have the bandwidth concern, and people have sniffed it and
found nothing.

they are also not smartphones. you're moving the goalposts.

smartphones do a wide range of things. they're a computer that fits in
a pocket.

an amazon echo is basically a voice assistant, which is far more
limited than a phone, although better at being an assistant.

different devices optimized for different tasks.

Then of course there
is the GPS function that tracks everywhere you go.

it doesn't, but again, if that bothers you, location services can be
disabled, either on a per-app basis or globally, and change that at any
time for any reason.

the downside is that some apps might not work well (or at all), but
that's the tradeoff each person makes for themselves and the apps they
choose to use.

and keep in mind that the cell carrier knows everywhere you go based on
cell tower pings, even if you have a 'dumb phone' that does not have a
gps. surveillance cameras are also common, both for businesses and
residential. in china, they're using facial recognition to identify
jaywalkers, no phone required.

(How else is Siri
going to recommend restaurants that are near you?)

'near you' doesn't require any tracking. it only needs to know where
you are *right* *now*, and the siri request is anonymous anyway.

if you don't want siri (or any other app) to know where you are right
now or at any other time, then disable location services for specific
apps or systemwide.

as i said, some apps might not work properly with location off, but
that's up to each user to decide.

and with location services disabled, you can still get restaurant
recommendations, weather, etc. for a particular location simply by
specifying the location, e.g., "what's the weather in los angeles?" or
"what time is it in london?"

You might want to look up a guy named Ed Snowden if you believe that
being concerned about mass surveillance is merely "tinfoil hat material."

i'm quite familiar with ed snowden.

i'm also quite familiar with how mobile devices actually work, not how
the fear mongers think they work.

the cloud is much more than 'just a collection of servers'.

It is not. I've been working in technology for over 40 years and the
internet for over 35 years. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a
duck... guess what, it's a duck.

not all ducks are the same, nor are duck recipes.

in other words, what matters is what the server actually *does* for the
user, which is a very wide range of things.

there is no single 'cloud service'.

another thing you're missing is it being always-on, which is a game
changer. gone are the days of dial-up and modems, and back in the '70s,
those were often acoustic.

it's more reliable than anything you could possibly do with your own
system, unless you have a similar budget as they do, which is extremely
unlikely.

Nonsense. It is not difficult to implement one's own effective backup
regimen.

not at the level of a cloud backup service, whose entire business model
is data reliability. such services can't afford to lose data, otherwise
they go out of business.

for example:
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_durable_is_Amazon_S3
Amazon S3 Standard, S3 Standard*IA, S3 One Zone-IA, and S3 Glacier
are all designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over
a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual
expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store
10,000,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur
a loss of a single object once every 10,000 years. In addition,
Amazon S3 Standard, S3 Standard-IA, and S3 Glacier are all designed
to sustain data in the event of an entire S3 Availability Zone loss.

nothing a home user could possibly do can come anywhere close to that.

and if a home user *did* want offsite backups, either they shuttle
drives back and forth (a pain, so it won't be done often enough), or
they'd that thing called 'the cloud'...

If you think no one has ever lost anything in "thuh cloud"
you're delusionary. Start with the people who lost their stuff with
due to a bug in the Windows 10 1809 update.

the win10 1809 data loss bug was not a cloud issue and most people were
not affected anyway.

of those who were, only those without backups lost data.

in fact, those who *did* have cloud backups were likely the ones with
the most up to date backups.

you weren't streaming music or video in the 1970s, locally or the cloud.

That is irrelevent. From an architectural standpoint it is the same
type of client-server concept. You have a local device whose limitaions
require computing power and storage at a remote location. The actual
application does not change the fundamental concept, nor does it change
simply because you are using a smartphone with "thuh cloud" instead of
a terminal connecting to a remote mainframe.

it's not irrelevant at all.

there's a *huge* difference between an always-on device with a several
hundred wireless megabit link and fits in a pocket, versus a dumb 24x80
text-only terminal with dial-up using 300 baud acoustic modem.

what can be done today is nothing short of amazing.

also, the remote system might be *less* capable than the local one.
consider a high end workstation with multiple gpus connecting to a
lowly file server to back up the final version of the project.

missing the point entirely.

I would say you do not even have a point.

then you'd be wrong on that too.

nothing about the cloud prevents that.

When processing and storage is taking place on someone else's servers
(which once again is all that "thuh cloud" really is), then you effectively
do not have control. You really have no idea where your data is being
stored, who will have access to it under what conditions, or even if
you will have access to it in the future.

not true.

again, the cloud can be a lot of things, including being hosted on
one's own equipment, not someone else's servers.

local or remote, always encrypt anything for which you want to limit
access.

not using the cloud will not stop someone from examining a local hard
drive.