Well this is terrifying. Pretty soon you'll have to crack open your appliances to snip the antennas to prevent them from calling home, rather than just not giving them the wifi password...!
You're already carrying around a device that monitors your location, what you are saying (and audio in the surrounding area), to some extent how you are moving (gyroscope), your data ingress and egress patterns and where you share virtually all your public thoughts (and most private thoughts).
Some people even connect their watches, which monitor (or will soon monitor) everything from their heart rate, sleep schedule, oxygen levels, BMI, etc.
I frankly don't think it can get much more intrusive.
This strikes me as defeatist. You can run GrapheneOS and pipe everything through VPNs for your phone. It's really easy, the phone does all the normal stuff except the constant listening ("assistant") thing, and it's way harder for anyone interested to spy on me. I don't run Google or Apple software.
If someone could get their hands on my data, it'd be a bunch of extra work to determine who it's coming from.
>>Some people even connect their watches, which monitor (or will soon monitor) everything from their heart rate, sleep schedule, oxygen levels, BMI, etc.
You can easily have a watch that does all these things but doesn't share any data, and you can be sure of that based on more than just promises. Open hardware, open software, local data storage and zero-knowledge for anything touching the internet. It's well within our grasp technically, we the people just need to demand it.
LoRa's much lower energy, maybe? I can see cell networks if it's plugged in. Or maybe cell radios are cheap enough that you could put one in and fire it up once a day to squirt out data on how to better sell your kids sugary cereals...
This is already possible with cell connectivity. Many cars have this now, for instance. Nothing is stopping the telcos from offering something to compete with this other than in remote tower-free locations.
And heavy equipment had this available years ago. One-time fee up front and good for the life of the machine. Can be installed in any type of machine. Worldwide GSM and can send commands to the machine. Was around USD$1500, IIRC.
https://www.komatsu.eu/en/komtrax
I literally watched a large excavator from a dealer break sanctions and show up digging in Iran.
Some people even connect their watches, which monitor (or will soon monitor) everything from their heart rate, sleep schedule, oxygen levels, BMI, etc.
I frankly don't think it can get much more intrusive.