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Maybe because he finds it a useful and convenient tool to have around the house and that he's weighed up the pluses and minuses of having one in his home? He's

Maybe because he finds it a useful and convenient tool to have around the house and that he's weighed up the pluses and minuses of having one in his home? He's a technical guy - he's not stupid. I have an Echo and I mainly use it to set timers and check the weather. If that, plus a few questions about "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?" constitute a huge cache of data on me, I'm honestly fairly relaxed about it. Compared to the vast number of tracking pixels, cookie sync firings and God knows what else that happens if I happen to load up a web browser without a VPN & ad blocker, it's really small beer. Not to mention the location tracking that happens by default and is mandated by law in every smartphone. Also, the 1984 comparisons just don't bear fruit. We're not living in a violent, single-party totalitarian regime. We're just not. If anyone is really relevant to this, it's Weber and his concerns over the rise of unaccountable and powerful bureaucracies and social alienation. Our tendency to pattern match will only ever pick out what someone predicted correctly, it often overlooks what a thinker got wrong and Orwell was wrong about a lot of things in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Much of what he gets right relies on things like conflating the power of the state with the power of corporations, and equating businesses tendency to employ euphemism with the complete evisceration of language. That's not to say that we shouldn't be mindful of privacy concerns and what we are allowing into our lives, but 1984 is a pretty blunt and emotionally charged instrument for critiquing something like Google Home. I just don't see the big deal.

pdkl95 9y ago
Currently the legal definitions around the uses of power such as search and seizure rely upon determining if a situation had an expectation of privacy. Police need a warrant to search your home because most people expect the home to be "private". One particularly interesting example of this Kyllo v United States[1], where the use of infrared cameras to find grow lights inside a home was ruled a search (and thus needed a warrant) because infrared cameras were not common so the general public did not in practice see infrared emissions as "available to the public". The opinion of the court, however, did point out that their decision would be defunct when infrared cameras became generally available and used by the public. At that point the public would no longer expect infrared emissions to be private. (Presumably this expectation might create a market for e.g. ir-blocking paint? If that's even possible?) Installing microphones that regularly send data to unknown 3rd parties normalizes the expectation that spoken word in the home is no longer private. When perceptions change, so will warrant requirements. > We're not living in a violent, single-party totalitarian regime. If that's you're criteria for when to act, you are always going to be too late to do anything. Some of us prefer the idea of detecting problems early - hopefully before the become violent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
- jk563 9y ago
  Would that not still be different? The public doesn't have access to El Goog's recordings, so surely a warrant would still be needed as that precedent would not apply?
  - pdkl95 9y ago
    Google is part of the public. Yes, this would depend on the interpretation of the court, but the point is that the expectation of privacy no longer exists when you are explicitly sending that audio to a 3rd party.
    - jk563 9y ago
      I'd be very interested in how that would play out in a court. My gut instinct would be that there is a distinction between consenting to send voice data to a named company and conversations being deemed public. Of course, my profession is not in the legal domain.
    - polishTar 9y ago
      No. You're just making things up. Law enforcement must have a valid and legal warrant to access Google voice logs.
      - pdkl95 9y ago
        I'm not talking about voice logs or anything else recorded by Google Home itself. Once people expect that their conversation can be recoded by a 3rd party, they no longer have the protections against other recordings being made. > Law enforcement must have a valid and legal warrant Kyllo v United States established a bright line test that the need for a warrant specifically depends on if the technology used is commonly available to and used by the general public.
        Karunamon 9y ago
        Except that's not how any of these devices work. Nobody has any expectation that their words are being recorded until such time as they say "Okay google" or "Alexa".
InitialLastName 9y ago
> Also, the 1984 comparisons just don't bear fruit. We're not living in a violent, single-party totalitarian regime. ... But we could be one day, and some people are. The transition to cloud listening devices in every house and the transition to totalitarianism each only need to happen once. The thing Orwell missed was that these devices could be made useful enough to consumers for that transition to be first.
- Mtinie 9y ago
  It has been said many times before by commenters here on HN, and is worth repeating. Cloud-enabled listening devices already have saturated society and are nearly omnipresent. They have a form factor that fits in your pocket and also includes discrete surveillance-enabling conveniences such as: GPS tracking, always-on microphones, high resolution cameras, target-specific network graph data, and access to very large (and inconvenient to monitor) data storage. If a person is concerned with the practical security implications of Amazon's Echo or Google's Home, I expect they should be terrified of the potential vectors for misuses that their mobile phone allows. The future state of government regulation and the ability for those in power to use the digital tracks I've left do concern me, but I've found it very difficult to decide how to combat it without fully disconnecting and moving off-grid. There are ways to mask and obfuscate certain parts of that record, to be sure (Tor, proxies, not using Echo or Home, no connected devices, etc.) but I like the benefits that technology brings to me life and I don't really want to move into a remote, signal-free location to live a spartan life.
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    For sure. My argument is that, in general, consumers have found all of those listening devices more useful than terrifying. I don't think Orwell imagined that universal surveillance would happen due to consumer demand rather than imposition by the totalitarian state.

pdkl95 9y ago

Currently the legal definitions around the uses of power such as search and seizure rely upon determining if a situation had an expectation of privacy. Police need a warrant to search your home because most people expect the home to be "private". One particularly interesting example of this Kyllo v United States[1], where the use of infrared cameras to find grow lights inside a home was ruled a search (and thus needed a warrant) because infrared cameras were not common so the general public did not in practice see infrared emissions as "available to the public". The opinion of the court, however, did point out that their decision would be defunct when infrared cameras became generally available and used by the public. At that point the public would no longer expect infrared emissions to be private. (Presumably this expectation might create a market for e.g. ir-blocking paint? If that's even possible?) Installing microphones that regularly send data to unknown 3rd parties normalizes the expectation that spoken word in the home is no longer private. When perceptions change, so will warrant requirements. > We're not living in a violent, single-party totalitarian regime. If that's you're criteria for when to act, you are always going to be too late to do anything. Some of us prefer the idea of detecting problems early - hopefully before the become violent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

jk563 9y ago
Would that not still be different? The public doesn't have access to El Goog's recordings, so surely a warrant would still be needed as that precedent would not apply?
- pdkl95 9y ago
  Google is part of the public. Yes, this would depend on the interpretation of the court, but the point is that the expectation of privacy no longer exists when you are explicitly sending that audio to a 3rd party.
  - jk563 9y ago
    I'd be very interested in how that would play out in a court. My gut instinct would be that there is a distinction between consenting to send voice data to a named company and conversations being deemed public. Of course, my profession is not in the legal domain.
  - polishTar 9y ago
    No. You're just making things up. Law enforcement must have a valid and legal warrant to access Google voice logs.
    - pdkl95 9y ago
      I'm not talking about voice logs or anything else recorded by Google Home itself. Once people expect that their conversation can be recoded by a 3rd party, they no longer have the protections against other recordings being made. > Law enforcement must have a valid and legal warrant Kyllo v United States established a bright line test that the need for a warrant specifically depends on if the technology used is commonly available to and used by the general public.
      - Karunamon 9y ago
        Except that's not how any of these devices work. Nobody has any expectation that their words are being recorded until such time as they say "Okay google" or "Alexa".

InitialLastName 9y ago

> Also, the 1984 comparisons just don't bear fruit. We're not living in a violent, single-party totalitarian regime. ... But we could be one day, and some people are. The transition to cloud listening devices in every house and the transition to totalitarianism each only need to happen once. The thing Orwell missed was that these devices could be made useful enough to consumers for that transition to be first.

Mtinie 9y ago
It has been said many times before by commenters here on HN, and is worth repeating. Cloud-enabled listening devices already have saturated society and are nearly omnipresent. They have a form factor that fits in your pocket and also includes discrete surveillance-enabling conveniences such as: GPS tracking, always-on microphones, high resolution cameras, target-specific network graph data, and access to very large (and inconvenient to monitor) data storage. If a person is concerned with the practical security implications of Amazon's Echo or Google's Home, I expect they should be terrified of the potential vectors for misuses that their mobile phone allows. The future state of government regulation and the ability for those in power to use the digital tracks I've left do concern me, but I've found it very difficult to decide how to combat it without fully disconnecting and moving off-grid. There are ways to mask and obfuscate certain parts of that record, to be sure (Tor, proxies, not using Echo or Home, no connected devices, etc.) but I like the benefits that technology brings to me life and I don't really want to move into a remote, signal-free location to live a spartan life.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  For sure. My argument is that, in general, consumers have found all of those listening devices more useful than terrifying. I don't think Orwell imagined that universal surveillance would happen due to consumer demand rather than imposition by the totalitarian state.