7 ms·

I'm in two minds about Google home, alexa etc. On one hand, the novelty / utility of these devices makes me half inclined to get one but the fundamental idea o

I'm in two minds about Google home, alexa etc. On one hand, the novelty / utility of these devices makes me half inclined to get one but the fundamental idea of having a device in my house, connected to the internet that is sat there listening to me 24/7 leaves me feeling slightly uneasy at best. The idea makes me feel like I'd be treating all the things I've read in the past few years about tech companies, privacy etc with complete contempt.

subsubsub 9y ago
Honest question. Why do you feel this way about a hub, and not about your smartphone? (assuming you have one) Is it because, although your smartphone has the ability to listen to you in the same way, it is not the stated aim of the device?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Not OP, but on the emotional level, I feel similarly. I suppose this capability creeped in slowly - phones became more and more powerful while the industry moved to SaaS model, and then before we noticed your phone is always connected and always talking with someone over the Internet. (I know technically it was feasible to use phones as listening devices decades ago, but storage and processing infrastructure was not there to do it on mass scale, and your phone could talk to one company only at any given time.) With assistants, OTOH, you have a device whose sole purpose is to record and transmit your voice over the Internet. With our cloud-based computing world, this kind of makes the posssibilities obvious. (Also, I have a particular distaste for solutions that use Internet connection for things that should be done entirely locally. For instance, me asking Google Now for current time, should not require sending data halfway around the planet.)
- a_imho 9y ago
  Isn't it a valid distinction between a device which could be abused to spy on you vs a device with the sole purpose to record ~everything you say unless you opt out (like in this case)? I can see how smartphones make that possibility less obvious and more palatable even to users who are aware of it.
  - Pyxl101 9y ago
    If you are worried that a home hub will spy on you, then you should be way more worried your phone will do the same thing. A lot of phones already listen to audio nonstop. Take the Android phones that listen to "OK Google" or the Apple phones that respond to "Hey Siri". Those features require the phone to listen to and process audio nonstop. Sure, if you don't like that then you can turn it off, but I don't understand why people have concerns about stationary always-listening devices moreso than phones with the same functionality. These base stations or hubs are the same concept, except they're present in a room instead of part of your phone. All other things equal, I think mobile phones are a much greater threat vector than home hubs. Mobile phones are juicy targets with large, complex attack surface areas. See the various remote code execution exploits in Android that could be triggered by sending someone a message. See the various high levels of privilege that applications have that can be used to spy on you. Did you see the article about how Uber had secret privileges that allowed the app to record iPhone screens? [1] There are multiple reasons why an attacker would want to compromise your phone (e.g. to steal your data, not just record your voice). Many people have phones, so sophisticated adversaries are more likely to invest the energy into developing attacks. There's a lot more to compromise (apps). Home hubs are less likely to see that same level of scrutiny, and they're less likely to be vulnerable to the same types of attacks and issues because they're much simpler devices (they don't run "apps", they don't communicate on the network except with their vendor). If you're worried about being spied on, then you should also be worried about other people's phones, which you may not even realize are in the room with you! By comparison it tends to be pretty obvious / known to everyone when there's a home hub present in a room. Your phone probably doesn't have a hardware-level light that tells you when it's recording you, like your home hub does. The list goes on. [1] http://bgr.com/2017/10/05/uber-app-privacy-issues-iphone-screen-record/ http://bgr.com/2017/10/05/uber-app-privacy-issues-iphone-scr...
    - jasonrhaas 9y ago
      Exactly correct. But having Alexa's and Google Home's around isn't helping anything. It's just yet another vector that can be used to inadvertently collect your data.
    - 9y ago
- darklajid 9y ago
  Not the OP, but .. my smartphone explicitly has NO hotwords that it listens to as far as I can tell. I opt out of this Google stuff as best as I can. So for me the answer would be that - while my smartphone can certainly listen to things (as every thing with a microphone can. Who covered all the microphones in their laptops?) - a smartphone offers these things as optional features. For Google Home and Alexa etc.: The 'listen all the time' (for hotwords at least..) is the single use of these devices. And as soon as you buy into this stuff you might as well allow the cloud storage of your recordings for 'better recognition'. A smartphone could do the same. But it has a lot of value without doing any of that.
  - kybernetikos 9y ago
    If you use voice with your smartphone you'll probably find some items on this page https://history.google.com/history/audio https://history.google.com/history/audio
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      I did. Curiously, the only "false positives" activations are relatively recent ones (from the last 6 months), while stuff ranging from 6 months to 2+ years ago is all correct activations. I.e. it seems either my current phone vendor or Google messed something up.
    - philbarr 9y ago
      I did... "Said: set alarm for 6:30 in the morning" "Said: set alarm for 7" "Said: set alarm for 7:30" "Said: set alarm for 7:45"
    - darklajid 9y ago
      As expected, this is empty for me. Glad for the link though.
  - sigi45 9y ago
    A hardware chip with a ring buffer and hardware keyword detection is something i feel much better than any microphone in any other device which is purely controlled by software.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  There's a significant difference in that your phone has a limited battery, in which actual audio recording and data transmission would deplete quickly. Even if you were to use the hotword detection, you can be reasonably confident it works as claimed (only listening for the hotword passively), because it's nearly impractical for it to do anything else all the time. As phones get better and more capable, I do get more worried about this though.
Topolomancer 9y ago
At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, what exactly is the utility of these devices? I find voice input still to be very cumbersome. Except for obvious applications such as driving in a car, I see no viable usage scenario where I have to utter my interactions out loud. Which scenarios am I missing/forgetting here?
- luma 9y ago
  In our home the Echo devices are used throughout the day for home control tasks. "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights", "Alexa, close the east garage door", "Alexa, is the front door locked?" etc. The kitchen Echo sees a lot of action around dinner time for things like timers ("Alexa, set a timer for 15 minutes"), conversions ("Alexa, how many cups in a quart"), and grocery lists. The hands-free nature of these interactions are particularly helpful when you may have your hands full while preparing a meal. I have a fair amount of home automation kit deployed which I find fun to monkey around with but the rest of the family never really cared to interact with until the Echo came into play.
  - Topolomancer 9y ago
    These are good scenarios, thank you. I still have some reluctance because I am not sure how dependent Alexa (or the home automation system, for that manner) is on services that are outside my control. I recall that a lot of these products went belly up, leaving their customers stranded.
    - luma 9y ago
      I strongly recommend checking out Home Assistant, which is fully self-hosted and open-source. The Alexa integration requires the cloud (because that's where Alexa lives), but nearly everything else my system does is under my roof and under my control.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- vidarh 9y ago
trey-jones 9y ago
Amazon Tap has been a good compromise for me. I mostly just use it for playing music, and it serves that purpose very well. The portability over the Echo varieties is also better for me. I suppose it's possible that it's still listening, at the same risk you run by having any device with a microphone connected to the internet. I agree with other commenters who aren't sold on voice commands as efficient, but even my four year old (who can't read) can play music on the Tap.
marcosdumay 9y ago
I will start to integrate an always listening device into my home when I can get one I control. I do use a phone I don't control, and it is mostly sandboxed into social activities. Yes, it does potentially listen to me, and I am aware of it, but it won't take control of anything that is not a social activity.
rsync 9y ago
"I'm in two minds about Google home, alexa etc. On one hand, the novelty / utility of these devices makes me half inclined to get one but the fundamental idea of having a device in my house, connected to the internet that is sat there listening to me 24/7 leaves me feeling slightly uneasy at best." I am totally opposed to these devices in my home and am, frankly, aghast at the notion that they would see wide deployment or that "voice is the future ... blah blah". However, I do have the ability to consider other viewpoints and when I do, I am completely underwhelmed by the proposed use-cases of these devices. According to Amazon themselves, the things I could do with Alexa include: "What's on sale today ?" "Find me a Chinese restaurant" "What's the weather" These are use-cases that suggest a user who either has no particular preferences or is satisfied with extremely simple, non-nuanced information (or both). These use-cases are the literal manifestation of dumbing yourself down far enough for the computer to pass your (very easy) turing test. Other use-cases like "play my party playlist" are a wash in terms of simplicity or speed vs. just (pressing whatever play button you have in the system you use). Are there any examples that I would find interesting or nuanced or definitive improvements over existing tools ?
- MikeTV 9y ago
  The only killer use case I've encountered so far is being able to yell "hey Cortana! Next track!" across the room while playing with a toddler, since either walking over to push a button or pulling my smartphone out to advance it remotely would totally disrupt the current interaction with my child. Or I could just curate my playlists more carefully. Everything else is either too low information density (this is why I get the weather from an app, not The Weather Channel) or more efficiently handled manually (music control, search queries) in most situations
- chris_va 9y ago
  I had an an interesting moment recently where I watched my 88 year old grandfather seemlessly set up music from his Alexa, and order something on Amazon. We might just not be the target market.
- bhauer 9y ago
  I too have observed no use-cases that make these devices appealing even if data exfiltration was not their principal feature. But what irks me most is the flimsy excuse that sending their recordings (or even a post-processed textual rendering) to the cloud is necessary to perform these trivial operations. We've had desktop voice recognition of the quality necessary to perform these operations for a long time now. > "What's on sale today ?" This could access an Amazon (store) API directly. > "Find me a Chinese restaurant" This could use a Yelp API directly, as if it were a web browser. > "What's the weather" This could use a Weather Underground (or whatever) API. Ideally the device could be configured to source data for these inquiries from various options. > "play my party playlist" This shouldn't generate any off-network traffic at all.
ryandrake 9y ago
I agree with this. I'll happily experiment with these "home assistant" devices only once they can be used completely untethered from the Internet. I don't even mind if it's listening to audio 24/7 as long as it does not have the ability to send it all home to the mothership.

subsubsub 9y ago

Honest question. Why do you feel this way about a hub, and not about your smartphone? (assuming you have one) Is it because, although your smartphone has the ability to listen to you in the same way, it is not the stated aim of the device?

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Not OP, but on the emotional level, I feel similarly. I suppose this capability creeped in slowly - phones became more and more powerful while the industry moved to SaaS model, and then before we noticed your phone is always connected and always talking with someone over the Internet. (I know technically it was feasible to use phones as listening devices decades ago, but storage and processing infrastructure was not there to do it on mass scale, and your phone could talk to one company only at any given time.) With assistants, OTOH, you have a device whose sole purpose is to record and transmit your voice over the Internet. With our cloud-based computing world, this kind of makes the posssibilities obvious. (Also, I have a particular distaste for solutions that use Internet connection for things that should be done entirely locally. For instance, me asking Google Now for current time, should not require sending data halfway around the planet.)
a_imho 9y ago
Isn't it a valid distinction between a device which could be abused to spy on you vs a device with the sole purpose to record ~everything you say unless you opt out (like in this case)? I can see how smartphones make that possibility less obvious and more palatable even to users who are aware of it.
- Pyxl101 9y ago
  If you are worried that a home hub will spy on you, then you should be way more worried your phone will do the same thing. A lot of phones already listen to audio nonstop. Take the Android phones that listen to "OK Google" or the Apple phones that respond to "Hey Siri". Those features require the phone to listen to and process audio nonstop. Sure, if you don't like that then you can turn it off, but I don't understand why people have concerns about stationary always-listening devices moreso than phones with the same functionality. These base stations or hubs are the same concept, except they're present in a room instead of part of your phone. All other things equal, I think mobile phones are a much greater threat vector than home hubs. Mobile phones are juicy targets with large, complex attack surface areas. See the various remote code execution exploits in Android that could be triggered by sending someone a message. See the various high levels of privilege that applications have that can be used to spy on you. Did you see the article about how Uber had secret privileges that allowed the app to record iPhone screens? [1] There are multiple reasons why an attacker would want to compromise your phone (e.g. to steal your data, not just record your voice). Many people have phones, so sophisticated adversaries are more likely to invest the energy into developing attacks. There's a lot more to compromise (apps). Home hubs are less likely to see that same level of scrutiny, and they're less likely to be vulnerable to the same types of attacks and issues because they're much simpler devices (they don't run "apps", they don't communicate on the network except with their vendor). If you're worried about being spied on, then you should also be worried about other people's phones, which you may not even realize are in the room with you! By comparison it tends to be pretty obvious / known to everyone when there's a home hub present in a room. Your phone probably doesn't have a hardware-level light that tells you when it's recording you, like your home hub does. The list goes on. [1] http://bgr.com/2017/10/05/uber-app-privacy-issues-iphone-screen-record/ http://bgr.com/2017/10/05/uber-app-privacy-issues-iphone-scr...
  - jasonrhaas 9y ago
    Exactly correct. But having Alexa's and Google Home's around isn't helping anything. It's just yet another vector that can be used to inadvertently collect your data.
  - 9y ago
darklajid 9y ago
Not the OP, but .. my smartphone explicitly has NO hotwords that it listens to as far as I can tell. I opt out of this Google stuff as best as I can. So for me the answer would be that - while my smartphone can certainly listen to things (as every thing with a microphone can. Who covered all the microphones in their laptops?) - a smartphone offers these things as optional features. For Google Home and Alexa etc.: The 'listen all the time' (for hotwords at least..) is the single use of these devices. And as soon as you buy into this stuff you might as well allow the cloud storage of your recordings for 'better recognition'. A smartphone could do the same. But it has a lot of value without doing any of that.
- kybernetikos 9y ago
  If you use voice with your smartphone you'll probably find some items on this page https://history.google.com/history/audio https://history.google.com/history/audio
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I did. Curiously, the only "false positives" activations are relatively recent ones (from the last 6 months), while stuff ranging from 6 months to 2+ years ago is all correct activations. I.e. it seems either my current phone vendor or Google messed something up.
  - philbarr 9y ago
    I did... "Said: set alarm for 6:30 in the morning" "Said: set alarm for 7" "Said: set alarm for 7:30" "Said: set alarm for 7:45"
  - darklajid 9y ago
    As expected, this is empty for me. Glad for the link though.
- sigi45 9y ago
  A hardware chip with a ring buffer and hardware keyword detection is something i feel much better than any microphone in any other device which is purely controlled by software.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
There's a significant difference in that your phone has a limited battery, in which actual audio recording and data transmission would deplete quickly. Even if you were to use the hotword detection, you can be reasonably confident it works as claimed (only listening for the hotword passively), because it's nearly impractical for it to do anything else all the time. As phones get better and more capable, I do get more worried about this though.

Topolomancer 9y ago

At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, what exactly is the utility of these devices? I find voice input still to be very cumbersome. Except for obvious applications such as driving in a car, I see no viable usage scenario where I have to utter my interactions out loud. Which scenarios am I missing/forgetting here?

luma 9y ago
In our home the Echo devices are used throughout the day for home control tasks. "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights", "Alexa, close the east garage door", "Alexa, is the front door locked?" etc. The kitchen Echo sees a lot of action around dinner time for things like timers ("Alexa, set a timer for 15 minutes"), conversions ("Alexa, how many cups in a quart"), and grocery lists. The hands-free nature of these interactions are particularly helpful when you may have your hands full while preparing a meal. I have a fair amount of home automation kit deployed which I find fun to monkey around with but the rest of the family never really cared to interact with until the Echo came into play.
- Topolomancer 9y ago
  These are good scenarios, thank you. I still have some reluctance because I am not sure how dependent Alexa (or the home automation system, for that manner) is on services that are outside my control. I recall that a lot of these products went belly up, leaving their customers stranded.
  - luma 9y ago
    I strongly recommend checking out Home Assistant, which is fully self-hosted and open-source. The Alexa integration requires the cloud (because that's where Alexa lives), but nearly everything else my system does is under my roof and under my control.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
vidarh 9y ago

trey-jones 9y ago

Amazon Tap has been a good compromise for me. I mostly just use it for playing music, and it serves that purpose very well. The portability over the Echo varieties is also better for me. I suppose it's possible that it's still listening, at the same risk you run by having any device with a microphone connected to the internet. I agree with other commenters who aren't sold on voice commands as efficient, but even my four year old (who can't read) can play music on the Tap.

marcosdumay 9y ago

I will start to integrate an always listening device into my home when I can get one I control. I do use a phone I don't control, and it is mostly sandboxed into social activities. Yes, it does potentially listen to me, and I am aware of it, but it won't take control of anything that is not a social activity.

rsync 9y ago

"I'm in two minds about Google home, alexa etc. On one hand, the novelty / utility of these devices makes me half inclined to get one but the fundamental idea of having a device in my house, connected to the internet that is sat there listening to me 24/7 leaves me feeling slightly uneasy at best." I am totally opposed to these devices in my home and am, frankly, aghast at the notion that they would see wide deployment or that "voice is the future ... blah blah". However, I do have the ability to consider other viewpoints and when I do, I am completely underwhelmed by the proposed use-cases of these devices. According to Amazon themselves, the things I could do with Alexa include: "What's on sale today ?" "Find me a Chinese restaurant" "What's the weather" These are use-cases that suggest a user who either has no particular preferences or is satisfied with extremely simple, non-nuanced information (or both). These use-cases are the literal manifestation of dumbing yourself down far enough for the computer to pass your (very easy) turing test. Other use-cases like "play my party playlist" are a wash in terms of simplicity or speed vs. just (pressing whatever play button you have in the system you use). Are there any examples that I would find interesting or nuanced or definitive improvements over existing tools ?

MikeTV 9y ago
The only killer use case I've encountered so far is being able to yell "hey Cortana! Next track!" across the room while playing with a toddler, since either walking over to push a button or pulling my smartphone out to advance it remotely would totally disrupt the current interaction with my child. Or I could just curate my playlists more carefully. Everything else is either too low information density (this is why I get the weather from an app, not The Weather Channel) or more efficiently handled manually (music control, search queries) in most situations
chris_va 9y ago
I had an an interesting moment recently where I watched my 88 year old grandfather seemlessly set up music from his Alexa, and order something on Amazon. We might just not be the target market.
bhauer 9y ago
I too have observed no use-cases that make these devices appealing even if data exfiltration was not their principal feature. But what irks me most is the flimsy excuse that sending their recordings (or even a post-processed textual rendering) to the cloud is necessary to perform these trivial operations. We've had desktop voice recognition of the quality necessary to perform these operations for a long time now. > "What's on sale today ?" This could access an Amazon (store) API directly. > "Find me a Chinese restaurant" This could use a Yelp API directly, as if it were a web browser. > "What's the weather" This could use a Weather Underground (or whatever) API. Ideally the device could be configured to source data for these inquiries from various options. > "play my party playlist" This shouldn't generate any off-network traffic at all.

ryandrake 9y ago

I agree with this. I'll happily experiment with these "home assistant" devices only once they can be used completely untethered from the Internet. I don't even mind if it's listening to audio 24/7 as long as it does not have the ability to send it all home to the mothership.