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Considering this is recording (or at lest intercepting and processing in some form) audio in a place where most people have an expectation of privacy, I assume
by mox1 10y ago
Considering this is recording (or at lest intercepting and processing in some form) audio in a place where most people have an expectation of privacy, I assume you have to inform the renter that this is on and monitoring....
- cheeze 10y agoAlmost certainly illegal in my state if the tenant is not aware.
- JonFish85 10y agoI'd fine it humorous if this gets shut down as illegal if Airbnb units continue unchecked.
- empath75 10y agoI wonder how many people actually have cameras in their rentals and don't tell anyone?
- vesinisa 10y agoThat's pretty high risk on the host's part. If your guest happens to discover the camera and informs the police, at least where I live you would be looking at a pretty hefty fine and possibly even a short prison term + felony criminal record. It doesn't help much if you are mostly spying on foreign tourist guests, since the act of visual spying of a private household is itself a serious crime - not only as a tort against a victim, but a criminal offence likely of interest to the public prosecutor.
- TylerE 10y agoThere's no need to record audio for this to work.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoIt's crazy to me that we've moved so far away from privacy-considerate technology that people have begun to assume we can't measure volume without "recording" and "processing" audio.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoUnless I get a government certificate saying so, I won't trust that your butt-connected volume-measuring device isn't sending recorded audio, or that it won't start at some point after a trivial software update. Actually assuming it won't is something I'd consider naivety / lack of tech-savviness.
- SteveNuts 10y agoOr at the very least, listen for certain keywords and send that data back to HQ. No need to record for that either.
- robryk 10y agoThe problem is not only not recording audio, but also not accidentally recording enough data to reconstruct words spoken. Silence detection on a sufficiently short timescale might allow you to guess sentences.
- svens_ 10y agoDon't worry, they thought about that: Guests' privacy is always protected. Our patent pending technology ensures that no content is recorded It's patented, so it must be good. Sarcasm aside, I really wonder what's in that patent... I mean it must (should) exist, otherwise it should be "pending".
- robryk 10y agoGiven that variable bit-rate VoIP can reveal words spoken from bitrate alone[1], I would be very cautious about their claims. [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/06/eavesdropping_o_2.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/06/eavesdropping...
- svens_ 10y agoI doubt their "signal processing" involves anything more than a microphone and a peak detector. A more practical side channel attack would probably be through radiated emissions over the mains power. However if you're willing to go that far, a laser microphone is much more effective and simpler.
- robryk 10y agoDepending on how wide is the peak detection window, they might send enough data to detect how long consecutive words are. I have a vague impression that I've read once that this, together with a language model, can be used to guess what's being spoken ~10% of the time or so.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- blackguardx 10y agoI hope it isn't recording audio. That would cost more than just a simple peak detector circuit sampled at 1 kHz or so.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoGiven the markup they have on these devices (like someone else pointed out, it's $10 in parts DIY, probably much less if mass-produced), I don't think they care...
- blackguardx 10y agoI'm a hardware engineer and grasp fully how simple this is. But cost to make in a garage != cost to make at scale. Bringing hardware to market is expensive. You are forgetting mold tooling costs, factory fees, prototype costs, profit, etc. The fixed NRE costs can go to zero at mass scale, but if they intend to only sell 1000 or so (probably a good estimate), they need to account for it somehow.
- joezydeco 10y agoExcept you would need a lot more server power on the back end to handle the audio. It would cost more. Sending an SPL every few seconds is a lot less bandwidth. It's engineering overkill to do anything else.
- burntwater 10y agoFor simple SPL (Sound Pressure Level. Literally, loudness), there's no processing of audio. It's doing little more than monitoring the voltage of the microphone. Voltage spikes above X millivolts too many times in X timeframe, send out an alert.
- dsr_ 10y agoWhat do you think a digital audio file is? It's a normalized history of the voltage output of a microphone. And while this device says it doesn't record, it doesn't say "it can't record" and it doesn't say "it cannot stream the data elsewhere".
- blacksmythe 10y agoIt should only trigger when loud enough for the neighbors to hear, which seems like a situation where you don't have an expectation of privacy.
- stevekemp 10y agoProbably not recording - just reading volume from a microphone and transmitting a "level". That's more plausible because it is simpler to code, requires less upstream bandwidth, and tallies with their "We can't record" statement. Of course it would be easy to build something like this yourself, if you fancied a challenge. A mic-input, an ESP8266 chip, and you've got yourself an instructibles-project!