arien

Who would back up their phone to the cloud if they were involved in illegal activities?

This is going to bite more innocent people through false positives than criminals who already know how to get away with these things.

Might have, judging from this story.

It didn't have to be binding, just advisory or symbolic with no action to be taken. It might have prevented most of the current situation if the result had been to remain (which would have been most likely, back then, now I'm not so sure). If it had been independence I suppose we would be in a very similar situation.

What about the Instagram and WhatsApp apps? Do they behave the same way?

The explicit consent request is what they can do. It should have been there from the start, but better late than never.

Anything that falls in that 'personal data' segment above that belongs to me has to be obtained with my prior, explicit consent. And these bits of data with my name or other details in them must be included if I send Google a "right to be forgotten" or "show me all the data you've got about me" request. That's GDPR in a nutshell.

This might be a grey area for now, as both GDPR and listening devices are both quite new. But Google, Amazon & co aren't super popular with EU regulators and governments, so they might side with users' rights on this one.

But in this particular case, it's the company doing the recordings, not the owner of the device, so it's a slightly different situation, in my opinion.

That said... The owner could be liable if for example it were necessary to explicitly inform of the existence of such devices the possibility of being recorded.

In terms of GDPR:

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/

‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;

There are some rules concerning security cameras as well. I recently found out that private CCTV (at least in the UK) can't record public areas (e.g only your porch). Someone got sued over this recently.

There have been some stories in HN about opting out of face recognition as well. Maybe the laws for video are different as the other reply says, but there are privacy concerns in there as well.

edit: here's a list of GDPR fines (not comprehensive as I only see 2 in the UK). If you filter by CCTV you'll find a couple of examples from Austria: http://enforcementtracker.com/

Not in the case of the device being someone else's. I don't have any Google or Amazon smart listeners, so I never accepted them. Yet if my voice is in any of these recordings, well...

Doesn't mean you can use live data for tests. Should be opt-out by default, with the chance to opt-in if you wish to collaborate with your data.

And not to be anywhere near anyone else's listening devices.

Isn't there a law in some US states that there needs to be consent before recording someone? How does this fit in and who would be held responsible, the owner of the listening device or the company behind it?

I'm guessing it's some kind of A/B testing done by Amazon. Do people trust in the Amazon brand, or do they rather buy from unknown brands that offer cheap but decent quality (compared to the cheap and poor quality counterparts that flood the site)? Each brand is probably there to answer a specific question (or set of).

Yeah, I've seen those, but they are slightly different and have been available for a few years already (I believe before 2014, the date of this project, but I could be wrong).

I'm glad to see on the other reply that the plan hasn't been scrapped. Some of the lines could really use new trains (with proper air ventilation/filtering, especially).

I only started reading this one yesterday. I honestly know nothing of this book other than everybody always mentions it (along with 1984, Animal Farm and Farenheit 451). The first few pages made me raise a few eyebrows already, looking forward to finishing it.

This reminds me of 'The Gods Themselves', by Asimov. Doesn't talk about a mirror universe per se, but a parallel one. It's one of my favourite Asimov stories outside the Foundation/Robots series.

Slightly off-topic, but couldn't help but notice on the Projects list a really cool version of the London tube. Unfortunately it seems it's from 2014 (there's even some quote from Boris as Mayor), so probably scrapped by now?

Makes me wonder if these Austrian train designs are already set in stone or just a proposal that might or might not happen.

I've been on a fair amount of sleeper trains and the Caledonian has been the most comfortable so far.

For the opposite, the most uncomfortable one to sleep in was the Hong Kong to Shanghai one. I paid extra for the Deluxe option, can't even imagine how hard the bed would have been on the lower classes. Still, was a pretty cool journey.

I did recently Chicago to Las Vegas with the Southwest Chief and, while it's not as shiny, it was still a lovely train (the cabins, the restaurant and the fantastic viewing lounge), with great service and quite comfy. It was a very enjoyable trip, would recommend it to anyone who loves train travel. Looking forward to taking the California Zephyr some day.

You can choose to share your email with each developer or not, so if you feel particularly attached to a service you can disable the email obfuscation. Or sign up withouth Apple ID if you know beforehand.

Hm... The Amazon Prime app doesn't allow purchases in the app, you've got to purchase through Amazon and then you can watch them just fine.

Sometimes you have to trade up some part of the experience to be able to enjoy it. I travel by cruise (and trains) a lot, but I do mostly on small ships and off season. It's cheaper and I get to avoid the masses. It's very enjoyable and has its own perks.

I spent a month in Japan a few years ago, at the beginning of the year instead of the Golden Week when everybody goes and visited all over the place. No queues, no massive amounts of people (well, Tokyo is Tokyo), no stress. Sure, I missed the famous cherry blossoms, but to be able to visit e.g. Himeji castle and be in a room almost by myself contemplating was worth it. Had many experiences like this everywhere. I really enjoyed that trip and left feeling that Japan was even better than I imagined.

Thanks for the explanation :)

What about smallpox? Wasn't it eradicated completely in the 80s?

But you use the service, just not 24/7 or to the maximum capacity. And you might subscribe because it gives you other benefits.

E.g. I have an Office 365 subscription. I haven't used Office in forever, but it comes with 5Tb of OneDrive space (family account), so I keep the subscription to store my photos. However, I've filled less than 100Gb so far and I'm sure my family has even less than that. Same thing with Prime, some months I buy a few things things, others nothing at all. But I know that every package arrives the next day, so I keep the subscription.

TV content is a bit special in this regard, true. However... If you keep binge watching, how long until you have nothing else to watch? Would you not cancel your service, then? The service is then _forced_ to keep delivering new quality content at the same speed that you watch it. Maybe Apple doesn't want to play that game.

You pay a monthly fee, so it doesn't really matter to them how much do you use the services during this month.

In fact, the less you use them, the more profitable it is for them.

From the article:

“When we found out about these guideline violations, we communicated these violations to the app developers, giving them 30 days to submit an updated app to avoid availability interruption in the App Store,” a spokesperson explained. “Several developers released updates to bring their apps in line with these policies. Those that didn’t were removed from the App Store.”

Sounds are the easiest to reproduce for me, perhaps even more so than images.

But I have experienced other things as well. Since I was a kid I play this game when I'm bored... let's call it "visualising". But not for images, for other sensory input. For example, I try to imagine really hard the taste and texture of a cake, the smell of coffee or a perfume, touching something fluffy with my hand, feeling hot or cold... It works, although I don't feel it physically in my body per se, it's just like... a very vivid memory of it. As if an invisible limb was experiencing this feeling again.

Perhaps this whole visualisation process is related to hallucinations. Do people with aphantasia ever experience these?

Maintenance of old infrastructure in large projects is difficult and budget for this purpose is hard to justify, while building new things gets harder due to (self imposed) new regulations and higher costs (outsourcing might be cheaper, but always has some risks...).

I don't know, sounds very familiar :)