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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

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.
  - pnutjam 9y ago
    I monitor traffic on my phone due to data limits. I turn of features that aren't needed, like bluetooth or wifi. My phone is a well understood ecosystem. Meanwhile, these other devices are a speaker and a button. Why wouldn't I trust that?
  - jerf 9y ago
    "A lot of phones already listen to audio nonstop." I think you have to be careful about what it is you care about. Listening isn't it. To the extent that modern phones "listen non-stop" you're just one step away from saying that all microphones are non-stop-listeners. What matters is what data is available, where it goes, and who can get access to it. If my phone truly only has a small ring buffer with specialized hardware purpose-built to listen for "OK Google", which it is reasonably accurate at, then it's not a privacy issue. The problem is that by visual inspection I can't distinguish that from a system that is listening for "OK Google" and also other politically interesting keywords, or a phone that is just sending all my audio up, etc. Now, I am a very technically aware person compared to the general population, and I have good reason at the moment to still believe that phones aren't actually spying on the audio level as much as people believe on the grounds that it is technically impossible due to both battery and mobile data consumption. However, it is not entirely comforting that those are the only reasons I believe it is not happening, and improvements in battery technology, CPU efficiency, and/or mobile bandwidth are going to eliminate those assurances for me. (By contrast, location spying, activity spying, and abundant marketing-based tracking clearly does happen.)
- mikeash 9y ago
  What's the distinction? When comparing to a modern smartphone which supports "Hey Siri" or "OK Google," then both devices have dedicated hardware that's always listening for the activation phrase, then send your audio off to the cloud for processing. The only real difference is that your phone does this even when it's unplugged, can still send your audio to the cloud when far beyond the range of your home WiFi, and can listen to you everywhere you go instead of just at home.
  - a_imho 9y ago
    Disable the voice recognition and you have a perfectly functioning phone. With a hub you have a paperweight, pretty big difference. I agree smartphones are bad, but can see how they perceived not as bad as hubs.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Why would you trust it to actually be disabled when it says it's disabled, but not trust the hub to actually keep your data private when it says it's private?
      - a_imho 9y ago
        I for one, do not trust or use them. All I'm saying is they could appear more trustworthy, perhaps because users are less aware. In this particular case as far as I understand, disabled means no recording at all, while keeping private means your data is already transferred and access is granted to parties based on how private is defined in the tos.
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.

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.
- pnutjam 9y ago
  I monitor traffic on my phone due to data limits. I turn of features that aren't needed, like bluetooth or wifi. My phone is a well understood ecosystem. Meanwhile, these other devices are a speaker and a button. Why wouldn't I trust that?
- jerf 9y ago
  "A lot of phones already listen to audio nonstop." I think you have to be careful about what it is you care about. Listening isn't it. To the extent that modern phones "listen non-stop" you're just one step away from saying that all microphones are non-stop-listeners. What matters is what data is available, where it goes, and who can get access to it. If my phone truly only has a small ring buffer with specialized hardware purpose-built to listen for "OK Google", which it is reasonably accurate at, then it's not a privacy issue. The problem is that by visual inspection I can't distinguish that from a system that is listening for "OK Google" and also other politically interesting keywords, or a phone that is just sending all my audio up, etc. Now, I am a very technically aware person compared to the general population, and I have good reason at the moment to still believe that phones aren't actually spying on the audio level as much as people believe on the grounds that it is technically impossible due to both battery and mobile data consumption. However, it is not entirely comforting that those are the only reasons I believe it is not happening, and improvements in battery technology, CPU efficiency, and/or mobile bandwidth are going to eliminate those assurances for me. (By contrast, location spying, activity spying, and abundant marketing-based tracking clearly does happen.)
mikeash 9y ago
What's the distinction? When comparing to a modern smartphone which supports "Hey Siri" or "OK Google," then both devices have dedicated hardware that's always listening for the activation phrase, then send your audio off to the cloud for processing. The only real difference is that your phone does this even when it's unplugged, can still send your audio to the cloud when far beyond the range of your home WiFi, and can listen to you everywhere you go instead of just at home.
- a_imho 9y ago
  Disable the voice recognition and you have a perfectly functioning phone. With a hub you have a paperweight, pretty big difference. I agree smartphones are bad, but can see how they perceived not as bad as hubs.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Why would you trust it to actually be disabled when it says it's disabled, but not trust the hub to actually keep your data private when it says it's private?
    - a_imho 9y ago
      I for one, do not trust or use them. All I'm saying is they could appear more trustworthy, perhaps because users are less aware. In this particular case as far as I understand, disabled means no recording at all, while keeping private means your data is already transferred and access is granted to parties based on how private is defined in the tos.

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.