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52 comments and nobody mentions the NSA. Are you people aware that this is essentially a glorified bug?

slantaclaus 10y ago
I was at a multifamily technology conference in San Diego last year and during a panel with some 'experts', brought up the concern of devices like Amazon Echo recording people's conversations. The lady who responded misunderstood me and chimed in within something like: "you know, I haven't even thought of that. There are many opportunities for revenue with this technology". But that was an evil uber-landlord, not sure where Amazon stands on this. If they want to increase adoption for this technology, they better come up with a solid privacy policy and stand behind it.
- blubb-fish 10y ago
  A policy won't help against the NSA. And technologically the language processing "necessarily" takes place in the cloud. For that everything you say needs to be sent through the web. Amazon will store everything they can for the purpose of later using this as a training data set.
  - mercer 10y ago
    > And technologically the language processing "necessarily" takes place in the cloud. Is that actually true? And if so, how far are we from being able to do this on the device itself?
Pyxl101 10y ago
Have you considered that maybe other people have thought about this and reached a different conclusion? I think calling it an NSA bug is pretty silly if you have a smartphone or laptop. How are those not bugs? All of these devices have microphones. The Echo is less likely to be used as a bug than any other device because it's simple and single-purpose. When you are not using it, it is idle and will not use network throughput. That's trivially easy to monitor with my router. I can see how many gigabytes of data my TV downloads. If an Echo started consuming network throughput to upload audio when I was not using it, then that would be extremely suspicious and easy to notice. This ease of detection makes it a terrible covert surveillance device. By comparison, I have little visibility into what my phone is streaming over its cellular connection, and devices like laptops, PCs, and Xboxes are so complicated that I cannot expect their network usage to be idle. It is unsurprising for these devices to download/upload potentially gigabytes of data while not in use, because some software has decided to patch in the background. These devices have local storage and could buffer audio and upload it during times of legitimate network activity. There is a lot of network activity in which covert surveillance could hide. This is not so with the Echo. Additionally, your phone and laptop are far more juicy targets for the NSA or any attacker. These devices have your data! An attacker can break in and steal your documents or passwords or other data. And then they can also activate the microphone and listen to you! The Echo doesn't have any data on it, so it's not a juicy target. It's also stationary in one room and has far less ability to conduct effective surveillance on someone than the cell phone or laptop that they carry with them everywhere. Someone isn't going to take their Echo with them to the mosque or an important business meeting or whatever. The Echo is far less complicated than smartphones and laptops (less stuff running on it), and so is less likely to have software defects that can be exploited remotely by attackers.
ryanlol 10y ago
How is it more of a bug than any phone or laptop you own? Sometimes it's even relatively easy to turn speakers into microphones! Maybe nobody has brought this up because it's complete nonsense.
- takeda 10y ago
  With phone, the way it currently works (Apple, Google essentially have full control over it, the modem cpu also is closed source and has full control over application cpu) it's not hard and people are concerned about it. With laptop (at least non mac) is a bit harder, different hardware, different OSes. Some laptops have privacy switches. Regarding turning speakers into a microphone this is possible, but turning D/A to A/D converter is much harder.
takeda 10y ago
I noticed that Alexa was talking a lot to Amazon servers even when no one was at home (i.e. no one was even using it), which made me suspicious and I just unplugged it. Anyway I wasn't using it lately for anything else than an alarm clock, the novelty worn out after a week or so.

I was at a multifamily technology conference in San Diego last year and during a panel with some 'experts', brought up the concern of devices like Amazon Echo recording people's conversations. The lady who responded misunderstood me and chimed in within something like: "you know, I haven't even thought of that. There are many opportunities for revenue with this technology". But that was an evil uber-landlord, not sure where Amazon stands on this. If they want to increase adoption for this technology, they better come up with a solid privacy policy and stand behind it.

blubb-fish 10y ago
A policy won't help against the NSA. And technologically the language processing "necessarily" takes place in the cloud. For that everything you say needs to be sent through the web. Amazon will store everything they can for the purpose of later using this as a training data set.
- mercer 10y ago
  > And technologically the language processing "necessarily" takes place in the cloud. Is that actually true? And if so, how far are we from being able to do this on the device itself?

Pyxl101 10y ago

Have you considered that maybe other people have thought about this and reached a different conclusion? I think calling it an NSA bug is pretty silly if you have a smartphone or laptop. How are those not bugs? All of these devices have microphones. The Echo is less likely to be used as a bug than any other device because it's simple and single-purpose. When you are not using it, it is idle and will not use network throughput. That's trivially easy to monitor with my router. I can see how many gigabytes of data my TV downloads. If an Echo started consuming network throughput to upload audio when I was not using it, then that would be extremely suspicious and easy to notice. This ease of detection makes it a terrible covert surveillance device. By comparison, I have little visibility into what my phone is streaming over its cellular connection, and devices like laptops, PCs, and Xboxes are so complicated that I cannot expect their network usage to be idle. It is unsurprising for these devices to download/upload potentially gigabytes of data while not in use, because some software has decided to patch in the background. These devices have local storage and could buffer audio and upload it during times of legitimate network activity. There is a lot of network activity in which covert surveillance could hide. This is not so with the Echo. Additionally, your phone and laptop are far more juicy targets for the NSA or any attacker. These devices have your data! An attacker can break in and steal your documents or passwords or other data. And then they can also activate the microphone and listen to you! The Echo doesn't have any data on it, so it's not a juicy target. It's also stationary in one room and has far less ability to conduct effective surveillance on someone than the cell phone or laptop that they carry with them everywhere. Someone isn't going to take their Echo with them to the mosque or an important business meeting or whatever. The Echo is far less complicated than smartphones and laptops (less stuff running on it), and so is less likely to have software defects that can be exploited remotely by attackers.

ryanlol 10y ago

How is it more of a bug than any phone or laptop you own? Sometimes it's even relatively easy to turn speakers into microphones! Maybe nobody has brought this up because it's complete nonsense.

takeda 10y ago
With phone, the way it currently works (Apple, Google essentially have full control over it, the modem cpu also is closed source and has full control over application cpu) it's not hard and people are concerned about it. With laptop (at least non mac) is a bit harder, different hardware, different OSes. Some laptops have privacy switches. Regarding turning speakers into a microphone this is possible, but turning D/A to A/D converter is much harder.

takeda 10y ago

I noticed that Alexa was talking a lot to Amazon servers even when no one was at home (i.e. no one was even using it), which made me suspicious and I just unplugged it. Anyway I wasn't using it lately for anything else than an alarm clock, the novelty worn out after a week or so.