"Alexa, are you spying on me?"

Homesteading & Country Living Forum

Help Support Homesteading & Country Living Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
No Alexa, no Google assistant or any other electronic help mates. We are watched, just that simple. There is no need to help them. It is more fun to make them work for a living, vs. doing the work for them. I enjoy using multiple VPN's, multiple browsers and separating the sites I visit on different browsers. Does that stop them, heck no but at least they have to work at filling in all the holes.
 
robinjopo said:
The answer is yes. You can be talking about a product you have never mentioned before and viola ads magically appear on your social media. I would never have one. My daughter does be young adults are so used to tech, the pay zero attention.
Click to expand...
When you're near Alexa, and your daughter is out of hearing range, start talking about adult diapers, constipation, and any other subject she isn't interested and doesn't want to hear about. It's her Alexa, she'll get the adds.
 
Caribou said:
When you're near Alexa, and your daughter is out of hearing range, start talking about adult diapers, constipation, and any other subject she isn't interested and doesn't want to hear about. It's her Alexa, she'll get the adds.
Click to expand...
I've bought a transportable Bose bluetooth loudspeaker. This dammned thing is like Alexa. connect itself with laptops and mobile phones and use them to connect to Internet. Therefore I put it always after use into a Faraday cage bocklet and it went dark for the spies. After a week doing so, it gave up to get connected by itself.
Seems if they do not get a permanent stream of information, the algorithm behind estabished, sort You out as a useful information source.
 
There are lots of spyware you can buy for $100 to install in someone's phone in just a couple minutes. Then you can listen and watch video through their phone without activating the green light.. also will copy you on text/emails they send/receive in real time... if you can do all that for $100 imagine what the powers to be can do! Why a Faraday box is important to use at times also.
 
If you know these devices spy, why own them? Fingernail paint your selfie cameras, tape the forward cameras till you need them, and electrical tape the mic while not in use (very effective). I am less than a year (the way things are going) from setting up a land line with autopatch to the old repeater buried in my closet. Once I get a better VNA to tune the duplexer, the days of google and alexa trojan horsing their way into my home with these kardashian cellular devices are over! Leave a dang message if you need to tell me something ~ remember those days?
 
....and I realize these devices spy more for marketing rather than government spying, after all, the govt likely has better things to do. The problem here is that these data whores are selling YOU to other companies. You should be getting PAID to use google and Alexa! I am not for sale, not if the market pimps get all the money for it.
 
I just wanted to update everyone on the shenanigans my new phone has been pulling. As mentioned above, I keep my camera taped over until its needed. Well, I wanted to take a picture of Tiff's apple cobbler, and before I could even snap the picture, google had already passed the live stream from my camera to their server-based algorithm and tagged it "Food" (that popped up on the bottom of the screen). I then went into permissions and was seriously disturbed. Google had, by default (i dont even have this thing signed in on google anything), every single permission on my phone to allow. This included physical activity like steps and excersize right down to my phone's contact list, camera and microphone.

PLEASE, everyone check their default permissions and put google on time out! I just got this Motorola One 5G a few weeks ago and figured, if I don't sign into google, it won't do that crap. WRONG! You don't need to sign in when lets their app access everything on your phone by default (like IMEI, microphone, files, your phone number, prepping associates, how fat you are, etc).

I never clicked agree to ANY google terms of use when I bought this ~ for what I thought was this very reason. My fault for not checking I guess...
 
Last edited:
Just talked to my buddy about this issue and he made a heck of a good point. The snapdragon chipset alone costs more than I paid for the phone. When you start to price out all the things that go into it, like 6 cameras, a 2k screen, stupid fast processor, 128gb internal memory, 4GB ram, it becomes obvious that someone else is footing part of the bill ~ government subsidy. It is the worlds most effective spy tool, they want you to afford it.

And the sad reality of it is this... You volunteered the information to their servers, which makes it their property. Guess who no longer needs a warrant. I thought the stingray (now Hailstorm for the 4G world) cell site simulator was bad.... BTW, if you are not up to speed, Google bought Android.
 
Last edited:
The first actual beta version of Android on a phone wasn't until 2007. Google mainly bought an idea in 2005 and they were the ones that actually developed it into a marketable product.

Android 1.0 (2008): (after three years of development by Google)

Android-1.0.jpg
 
I have one the oldest cell phone contracts in my town. I got my first cell phone back in October of 1996 and only had a single band Nokia 1610, with the first display with about 48 pixels. Each dot on the display was a 1/16 of an inch or so square. No spyware, weighed in at a 1/4 of a pound and was tourquise colored and an inch and a half thick. People here are going retro and buying the older models again. I still have 2 with spare batteries also...
 
MNwr786 said:
i havent watched the tv news since 2016. forgive my being a bit behind lol
Click to expand...
MNwr786 said:
Just talked to my buddy about this issue and he made a heck of a good point. The snapdragon chipset alone costs more than I paid for the phone. When you start to price out all the things that go into it, like 6 cameras, a 2k screen, stupid fast processor, 128gb internal memory, 4GB ram, it becomes obvious that someone else is footing part of the bill ~ government subsidy. It is the worlds most effective spy tool, they want you to afford it.

And the sad reality of it is this... You volunteered the information to their servers, which makes it their property. Guess who no longer needs a warrant. I thought the stingray (now Hailstorm for the 4G world) cell site simulator was bad.... BTW, if you are not up to speed, Google bought Android.
Click to expand...
just an old saying from the data-miners; "If You get it for free, You are the product."
 
The hubs and I are still using flip phones. Yes, we're still in the Dark Ages. Hopefully only GPS tracking is possible with those. Watched a video on Y-tube on how two open up the back and cut off the GPS tab on the board inside, but the back of the phone doesn't easily want to come off and I'm afraid to force the back to get inside. Our call phone service is lousy down at our BOL as it sits in a sort of depression between two rolling hills, but at least we have communication with the outside if the phones are working. We walk out to the back fence line that is higher and the signal usually comes in good there. Inside the cabin...........signal is often weak.
 
Buttoni said:
The hubs and I are still using flip phones. Yes, we're still in the Dark Ages. Hopefully only GPS tracking is possible with those. Watched a video on Y-tube on how two open up the back and cut off the GPS tab on the board inside, but the back of the phone doesn't easily want to come off and I'm afraid to force the back to get inside. Our call phone service is lousy down at our BOL as it sits in a sort of depression between two rolling hills, but at least we have communication with the outside if the phones are working. We walk out to the back fence line that is higher and the signal usually comes in good there. Inside the cabin...........signal is often weak.
Click to expand...
If you know what band the phone is using, you can make a passive repeater (not really a repeater at all) with an external antenna (typically a yagi) connected to another antenna indoors at the other end of the coax. Ive used this setup here on band 12 (about 722MHz) and my signal in the cabin goes up so high that it thinks Im closer to the tower and switches me to band 5 lol. I go from -122dBm to -96dBm in the cabin. The only trouble is to home brew such a device, you will need a network analyzer capable of tuning antennas at that frequency because if they are not matched to the coax, it just wont work.
 
MNwr786 said:
If you know what band the phone is using, you can make a passive repeater (not really a repeater at all) with an external antenna (typically a yagi) connected to another antenna indoors at the other end of the coax. Ive used this setup here on band 12 (about 722MHz) and my signal in the cabin goes up so high that it thinks Im closer to the tower and switches me to band 5 lol. I go from -122dBm to -96dBm in the cabin. The only trouble is to home brew such a device, you will need a network analyzer capable of tuning antennas at that frequency because if they are not matched to the coax, it just wont work.
Click to expand...
Would that either of us had the electrical/network skills to pull that off. Are you for hire out of state? LOL Thanks for the tip though. The son of a friend suggested a "booster" but again, have absolutely no idea what that is or how to set up things. We're both fully ensconched in the of the "plug-n-play" generation.
 
Last edited:
Read this and you won't click 'I agree' ever again: We're being spied on by phones, computers, TVs, cars – even the doorbells. Worse, argues Oxford professor CARISSA VELIZ, we're doing it to ourselves by giving away our data

Read this and you won't click 'I agree' ever again | Daily Mail Online


What irritates me most is that you HAVE to agree to use it. My Samsung tvs say you cannot use the tv unless you agree. Same with the internet on my phone. THIS should be illegal, but those A holes in congree don;t really care about We the Sheople.

So, let's talk about ways around.

I use OTA antenna so they cannot see what I watch.
I use prepaid credit cards with cash, so they cannot see what I buy, and I pay for streaming services with them
I sign up for everything using TOR, and a VPN.
I like prepaid cells too, but my wife HAS to have an iphone for some reason, so the rule is the phones HAVE to stay in the kitchen when not in use.

I do what little I can, and feel sorry for the next generation who blindly hits "accept" on everything; and even worse, doesn't care if they are spied on.

Someone gave my wife Alexa for Christmas and we just taped up the paper as soon as we saw what it was and re-gifted it to a young person.
 
if you are on the WEB,,,,,,,,,,, you are being tracked and there is nothing you can do about it

you have a smart TV a smart phone you get on the WEB,,google microsoft every website you visit,,,, they are all tracking you,,, your phone is even tracking your location.......... it's the way of the world we live in
 
I agree... The trick is to limit what people allow others to see while inevitably being tracked.

For instance, I use a GPS spoofing app that alters my GPS coordinates. Sure, this does not stop the government from gaining access to the cell data (as in what tower are you registered on) as a means to passively track you, but it does interfere with the apps doing it to sell your habits to marketers. Price out the components in your phone and see what it would cost to build it. It's far more than anyone here paid in cash. The real payment is knowledge of your habits.

Another example would be to limit how much of your personal activity you share and hiding your friend lists from public view. China has been assigning its population a "social" credit score for years, and it is starting to happen here in the US. Who you keep as company and how you spend your free time is now a major factor bankers look at when determining if you are eligible for a loan. Be conscious about this social credit scoring and adjust your online footprint to suit what you want "not friends" seeing. Sharing the intricacies of your personal life used to simply pose a petty crime risk, now, it determines your social "worth".

20 years ago, everyone drove to town without a phone, comfortable in the idea of walking to the nearest house to make a call if anything happened. Nowadays, people get separation anxiety if it is not with them 24/7. Start reconditioning yourselves out of that mindset and walk away from it for a while. If you go outside to do lawn work, leave it in the house. If you go in the store, leave it in the car. It's a start anyhow. If you miss a call, you can call them back. If you need it, go get it. You will be surprised how much more work you can get done without that distraction! The cool part with that is, at first, family and friends will constantly worry because you didn't immediately answer or respond, but eventually, they will realize you are just busy. In doing so, you will be indirectly helping others remember what life was like without constant communication and that its still OK.

TV is another rabbit hole people have fallen into, I won't go there :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top