Skynet Went Live June 8! Attn: Alexa Echo and Ring Owners

i'm addressing this video to those of you with an alexa echo or a ring camera or to those with friends with these products some of you are my friends or members of my family i hate to say this but unfortunately we are all going to be zocked because of you all because on june 8th 2021 you made skynet go live yes i know i'm just a caveman or ludite whatever you want to call me you all know how fun tech is i'm just the regular tech naysayer or the paranoid guy it is clear to me at least that most of you have no idea what you've enabled on june 8th or understand the implications of that nor do any of you realize that i'm actually john connor of the resistance unfortunately we cannot turn the clock back on this one just like you've all embraced alexa echo and put a crazy surveillance infrastructure in this country your little machine is now a slave doing the bidding for amazon doing something new and you're not even part of it anymore you have no control except that it is your device that will enable it if you want to know exactly what you've enabled and why it's dangerous maybe you want to watch the rest of this video i'll be back [Music] i'm on the platform odyssey.com and i'm now one of the top creators on there just for insurance in case i get the platform please follow me there using the link in the description i have a vpn service bytes vpn my company also sells the google phones and brax routers these products are made to make your identity disappear on the internet and hopefully this video will explain why these products are important if you're interested in them they are on my app brax me the link is in the description the big problem with commercializing tech products is that the average person takes their understanding of technology from the advertising guys like me to try to explain what big tech is actually trying to sell you cannot fight the ad air time so you've likely heard of amazon sidewalk and heard of all the good things this is supposed to enable you never heard any bad things of course just like you didn't hear about any bad things with alexa echo or the ring cameras i'm sure most of you don't clearly understand what amazon sidewalk is for or what it can do and definitely you didn't know that it's actually skynet in any case amazon isn't going to try to explain to you how their product really work all customers want to see is the end result which presumably is some sort of convenience but with no idea of the cost to your privacy before i start with that let's first talk about alexa echoes alexa echoes are ubiquitous i got one as a christmas gift some people donated one to me and i have to take it apart one of these days of course i would never use one it seems simple enough it's a voice recognition device and it's great for selecting music and even doing quick internet searches supposedly fun when you're having a discussion at the dining table with friends and you have to ask some quick question to alexa to end a debate but truly the average person does not know that the alexa echo itself has no voice recognition capability nada alexa echo is nothing but a small low powered linux computer with a connection to the internet and a microphone its main task is to listen on the microphone capture the audio and then send that voice capture as a file to amazon hq it does it all day and then it gets a response back from amazon as a text file which it then synthesizes into a voice on the speaker this happens in a cycle when you speak it will look for the wake up word but the cpu itself isn't much on a little echo it is not powerful enough to do voice recognition especially with different accents and different languages so it keeps sending the sounds to amazon to do voice recognition on the big amazon servers in the cloud after it confirms the wake up word it assumes the next words are a command and those commands are then processed again by the amazon servers not by the little echo the amazon cloud servers that's where the power is this is why an alexa echo is so cheap it just functions as a microphone and speaker the problem here is that whether you like it or not all your voice captures are sent to the amazon cloud where they then choose to transcribe what they need for example to determine a wake up word or to understand the command in theory they don't transcribe your voice until they hear the wake up word but that is solely based on trust there are always two parts to the voice collection there's the actual raw voice recording and there's the transcription we already know that they don't delete the voice recordings it's in their terms of service they admit to that supposedly you can go to amazon and delete the transcriptions of whatever transcriptions they do but you and i don't know what happens to the voice recordings are they archived they can then make a lot of claims that they don't do anything to it until it's transcribed they do not make a clear distinction in the terms of service between the raw voice recordings and the transcription and even if they do respect your privacy right now it is in their power to change that policy in an instant and even change it for an individual and as you will discover they do make changes the point is in plain black and white we have an entity that can listen into most of america every house with an alexa echo and your safety in this is based simply on trust trust that amazon won't screw you trust that amazon won't change the software to do something else trust that those voice recordings will be private that's a hell of a lot of trust to give a couple of decades ago the idea that we would put listening devices in every home and cameras a lot 1984 would be unthinkable yet this generation of big tech executives have succeeded in making this issue go away no one cares anymore and it is shocking how a 180 degree change in attitudes was achieved privacy was snuffed and no one complained next amazon bought the company ring and then they marketed these ring cameras but the specific focus has been on collecting the videos and centralizing it in the amazon cloud then amazon made agreements with law enforcement that those entities can watch your videos and you thought they were private again you trusted amazon but here we are at 2021 and they will now make another change and by default you are opting in if you do nothing the change is the addition of features to alexa echos and ring cameras which enable something called amazon sidewalk so before i explain the effect of this change the point i want to make is that you trust a product will be as you buy it it's supposed to be your device since you paid for it but now your device will be used for something else because they didn't tell you that they put certain features in the alexa echo in the ring camera that they would be utilizing later on like now and that feature my friends is a 900 megahertz transmitter and receiver that is built into the echoes and the cameras and i don't even know for sure if it's limited to 900 megahertz there could be support for 433 megahertz and 2.4 gigahertz let me be very specific these devices have been equipped with special radios since a couple of years ago and that functionality was never mentioned before here are the specific models containing this special radio ring floodlight cam ring spotlight cam wired ring spotlight cam mount echo echo dot echo dot for kids echo dot with clock echo plus echo show echo spot echo studio echo input echo flex all these products will now work to create the amazon sidewalk network so just to put it into perspective the echo captures voice conversations the ring camera captured videos and now both will be sending and receiving radio transmission messages and this rf traffic is not your traffic or necessarily tied to your activities they will be controlled by an amazon private network there's a particular significance to the 900 megahertz span and the 433 megahertz span these are ham radio bands but a slice of it is reserved for industrial scientific and medical use so these are called ism bands meaning they are used by unlicensed devices what makes this special many devices use these frequencies to do device to device signaling for example it is the frequency used by phones bluetooth ble trackers like tile and air tag rfid security and home automation devices in other words amazon echo has the capability to talk to or listen to devices in the area up to a range of one half mile so if there's another echo around all these echoes and ring cameras will be connected in a mesh network to sense the environment of electronic devices this went online on june 8th to make this even clearer let me emphasize how this data is collected and stored everything i'm talking about here including your voice the camera videos and now the data sense by the amazon sidewalk mesh are all centralized these devices capture this data encrypts it and sends it to amazon so only amazon can see it now your devices are doing things you can't even understand or see these devices will now collect rf data which will be used to capture information from devices and be able to derive locations they will also be able to control devices since it is also a transmitter reminds me of the drones in the terminator movie it just gets a central command and they all start chasing schwarzenegger no internet required or wi-fi just a private radio network a radio network that is not even controlled by the owners of the devices but most will basically turn a blind eye to this and say oh well i have nothing to hide anyway oh well it doesn't cost me anything there's this new approach being taken by apple google and amazon that puts your devices to use for their purposes the benefits will not accrue to you but to big tech hq i remember the first approach by google and facebook and other platforms was to offer their stuff for free so everyone gobbles up the free social media and free email and free storage and people justify the selling of personal data as a necessary evil since you're getting stuff for free but now the new approach is completely different this time they steal your network utilize your own devices and bots and then sell the services back to you the approach is to crowdsource the network and computing power of existing devices which expands the capability of bigtech but not requiring them to spend much in an actual infrastructure all they have to do is use your existing devices to function as bots for them and the functionalities will be controlled by the hqs of the big tech companies you will not even know what the devices are doing they will just steal your internet bandwidth this strategy of making your own devices work for the big tech giants has been going on for a while but this new iteration is specific to amazon this mesh network is even more devious sounding amazon sidewalk is now a secret encrypted network operating over the internet but using radio frequency the idea of amazon sidewalk is that you will share your amazon echo to the world and then pass the traffic through your home internet connection the advantage given to amazon sidewalk is that presumably all devices that are within range will then have indirect access to the internet and then can thus operate without wi-fi and while moving around on the streets or sidewalks precisely what devices will utilize this is not completely clear one specific device that will use it is the tile tracker which is the competitor to apple air tag this will allow tile trackers to be located but this is the same frequency used by many devices including bluetooth low energy or ble ble was supposed to provide a personal network now even your personal devices will connect to the internet your house devices will connect to the internet your home automation devices will not be local they will all be controlled from the outside including by amazon contact tracing will now be doable even on this network but here's the main difference the network is private private to amazon so let mistake the technology in simple terms once again amazon has created a voice capture network that can listen in to most people including your guests a camera that can capture who goes in and out of your house with facial recognition all this information is kept in a central database and share with law enforcement and their contractors now there's an rf network available to pretty much any device that wants to pass data over the airwaves using a built-in network available on every sidewalk without needing anything more than the ability to talk on 900 megahertz tracking a tile device is one thing but remember that this is bi-directional communications meaning it could enable remote control of devices without internet or cell data from amazon there are so many amazon echos that every square inch of a big city could be completely covered by this mesh network it will be an amazon private network running over the internet a large part of the population will still not understand the implications of this and say so what so they can spy on me big deal well let's frame this for the future this technology cannot be undone since there's a large group of people with these devices there's no way to stop it unless you go door to door in your neighborhood and hit an area half a mile square and begin massive destruction of alexa echoes remember that location of each echo is known so whatever the echo finds is also a location beacon if you want out of this spy network you can't just opt out of alexa echo because you have to opt out the entire neighborhood as long as there's someone within half a mile that has an echo you're docked this will mean that new devices will be able to be controlled directly by amazon even though they're not even directly connected to your wi-fi you are deeply embedded in this elaborate surveillance network and that includes people like me who has no amazon echo or ring cameras if i went to someone's house with a ring camera and an echo i suddenly participate in the spy network by having my voice captured and having facial recognition done and now the amazon sidewalk can then in theory capture my phone bluetooth identity and rfids on my person and my vehicle and then sidewalk can determine the location of each device most of you watching my videos are living in free countries but some of you live under the control of some repressive government or in my case when i was young i had the experience of living under a dictatorship so i'm always bothered by large amounts of surveillance data captured by third parties and perhaps being shared to governments by government contracts in a repressive government the job of the government and keeping the current people in power is of course a shutdown dissidence if you disagree with the government in some way you will be silenced in a supposedly democratic government like the usa don't be so certain you are that free either you can be targeted and classified as belonging to a certain group and historically this has led to being denied opportunities or being subjected to fake messaging or even threats in case you didn't know amazon is one of the largest contractors to the us government in fact most of the computer systems in the government likely operate inside the amazon cloud called amazon aws if you read the terms of service of all these different products you will find that they frequently state that they don't sell their data however there's always a statement that exempts what is required by law my point is that this is a lot of power to give to a single entity by allowing them this power there's a lot of temptation to use it in terminator skynet was supposed to be just a defensive system but once the cat is out of the bag and you've handed the power to someone in this case the complete power of surveillance how do you control it how do you make sure it is not abused how do you take it back a company called palantir is poised to utilize this kind of data for mercenary purposes palantir is another government contractor they are a company that uses data for offensive purposes to manipulate people as a contractor they will get access to this kind of data justified of course by anti-terrorist objectives now you have given multiple big tech companies incredible power to control each and every one of us and our own devices from the voice capture they know our thoughts from the cameras they know our connections from device tracking they know who is nearby and who we associate with every one of our destinations is known and now even without a cell connection a device can be connected to a secret network and remote control this is just one company google of course collects another big glob of information like our search hybrids our device activities and our thoughts through our email and again through voice via google assistant in the case of google i can leave my phone home i can choose to have a google phone and not use gmail or google search there are still ways for me to evade their tracking in the case of amazon sidewalk the tracking is environmental in fact some hotels are installing amazon echo in every room so it's a case where i'm not deliberately participating in this loss of privacy but i'm being locked into it by others and this is why i hate this even more my choices are being controlled by those that choose not to listen to any privacy concerns and this is going too far those that bought an echo did not buy it to participate in an amazon sidewalk network and if you have one in your home you did not ask permission of your guests to have their voice captured in their photos sent to a central database or their device is tracked should those who have amazon echo and ring opt out of amazon sidewalk to be honest small moves aren't going to make a difference and this makes me very very mad what needs to happen is that large numbers of people need to stop using these devices completely throw them away turn them into target shooting parts sadly i know it won't happen so we are all sucked thank you for watching see you next time

Channel: Rob Braxman Tech

Views: 1,166,408

Keywords: privacy, internet privacy, internet privacy guy, tech privacy, alexa echo, ring camera, amazon sidewalk, amazon sidewalk radio, amazon sidewalk network, amazon sidewalk dangers, skynet, amazon skynet, palantir, amazon government contracts, amazon aws

Id: ccrUAp4GQvY

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021