7 ms·

As a European, I cannot believe that millions of people just across the ocean are putting always-on closed-sourced internet-connected listening devices in the h

by krn 8y ago

As a European, I cannot believe that millions of people just across the ocean are putting always-on closed-sourced internet-connected listening devices in the hearts of their homes. Maybe it's the lack of shared history? I highly recommend seeing The Lives of Others (2006)[1] to those, who want to understand why Europeans take their privacy so seriously. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others

oulipo 8y ago
This is why we are building Snips at https://snips.ai https://snips.ai: create a 100% on-device and private-by-design Voice AI which will be open-sourced We did this to solve privacy issues, and empower makers!
madhato 8y ago
Cell phones have microphones, are closed source, connected to the Internet and carried with you into all the rooms of your home. Europeans use cell phones so why do they fear home assistants?
- krn 8y ago
  Cell phones, unlike home assistants, are not designed to be recording anything by themselves. Their apps are. And the user controls both, what apps he installs on his device, and what permissions he gives to them.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikeash 8y ago
    You think they’re not. You really have no idea. You just have to trust that they aren’t constantly recording and sending everything back to the mothership. If you can trust that, why can’t you extend the same trust to a smart speaker?
    - dingaling 8y ago
      Distrust of a smartphone's mic can be mitigated by epoxying the microphone, or just ripping it off the board, and it's still a functional portable computer. But to consider further: if you're in a situation where you have to worry about your smartphone grassing on you then you probably won't keep it powered on. Or will keep it in a Faraday case or whatever. In other words you'll be considering all attack vectors and behaving appropriately. Whereas Amazon or Google could flip the notional 'record all' switch on their assistant devices on a whim and you'd be none the wiser.
      - mikeash 8y ago
        If the commenter has disabled their smartphone mic as you say then I’ll give them a pass. I suspect they haven’t. Why can’t Google flip the “record all” switch in Android on a whim?
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        If someone were in a situation where it made sense to put their phone in a Faraday cage, wouldn't you expect them to do the same with their Amazon Echo?
  - wvenable 8y ago
    The baseband of your phone is basically an entire closed OS that runs in parallel with the OS that interact with and has complete control over all the hardware. This OS has it's own file system, programs, network access, everything. The Amazon echo isn't even that mysterious; it has low-power hardware to listen for the wake word and doesn't even power up the main CPU until that point. And you can always monitor the network traffic. The fears are massively overblown for home assistants. Mobile phones, by comparison, track your position in real time everywhere you are and send that information to paying 3rd parties all the time.
    - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
      > And you can always monitor the network traffic. This is meaningless if the connection is encrypted. The device can wait to send data that it's collected without telling you along with data you expect it to send to Amazon, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
      - wvenable 8y ago
        You'd be able to tell if some traffic is being sent. If my Echo is spying on me day and in out then I'd expect a pretty constant stream of traffic from it. If the Echo was ever caught intentionally spying (either through analysis or someone leaking that information) that would be the end of that product line forever.
        fucking_tragedy 8y ago
        In my OP, I laid out an example in which an Echo could spy on you and waits to send data along with legitimate and expected network communications. > If the Echo was ever caught intentionally spying (either through analysis or someone leaking that information) that would be the end of that product line forever. Truthfully, I don't think many people would care.
        wvenable 8y ago
        So people who do care would care and people who don't care already don't care. But trying to appeal to people who would care without any evidence is really pointless.
  - dymk 8y ago
    They’re a closed source, always on device with a microphone. How do you know it’s not always listening? The point is, they subject you to the same threat as an Alexa. You can’t say “Europeans don’t use Alexa because it could XYZ”, and yet they use phones which could also do XYZ.
    - krn 8y ago
      > They’re a closed source, always on device with a microphone. How do you know it’s not always listening? Your iPhone might be closed-source, but Android devices can be compiled from source and fully inspected.
      - grey-area 8y ago
        How about the sim card? https://www.scmagazine.com/home/news/black-hat-mobile-carriers-react-quickly-to-major-sim-card-vulnerability/ https://www.scmagazine.com/home/news/black-hat-mobile-carrie...
      - madhato 8y ago
        Android is open source but the Play Store and Play Services are closed source. If Google needed to secretly install a rootkit to listen to the microphone they could.
      - mikeash 8y ago
        I’m pretty sure the cellular baseband in your phone is closed source. Coincidentally, it also has direct access to the microphone and to an internet connection you can’t monitor.
        jschwartzi 8y ago
        Yeah, the baseband processor runs its own independent RTOS with full software control. Without studying, in detail, the electrical connections between the baseband and the rest of the hardware it's not possible to say that it can't record from the microphone independently of the hardware. It's easier to make that argument for the SIM card, which is actually not a SIM card but also a small ARM core that runs Java code. You can embed small programs into the SIM card which is something a lot of carriers do. The SIM card and baseband work in tight concert though and you should just assume that the connections of the baseband are available to the SIM card.
  - netsharc 8y ago
    "Controls both"? We have an illusion of control, but do you know exactly what's going on inside the slab of black mirror? There are surely exploits for both points, most probably used by your friendly government surveillance agency against whomever they consider to be their adversaries.
  - zamadatix 8y ago
    For a single app device is this distinction relevant? Or are you saying most Europeans don't install any Google, Amazon, or Facebook apps?
  - CharlesW 8y ago
    > Cell phones, unlike home assistants, are not designed to be recording anything by themselves. The assistants in phones work in exactly the same way as the assistants in home appliances, no? They start recording when they hear their voice trigger. Both classes of devices require trust that their maker won't invoke this functionality when it's not asked for, has hardened this functionality against bad actors, etc.
umanwizard 8y ago
What’s so hard to believe? Europeans care about these sorts of privacy issues far, far more than anyone else in the world, for exactly the reason you point out. It’s very abstract to everyone else. Maybe you’ll be proven right in the end, but for now, I love my Alexa device as it’s extremely convenient.
- kzrdude 8y ago
  I think specifically Germans care about these issues far more than anyone else.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
Ntrails 8y ago
It's not that I care about privacy particularly - it's that I can't imagine the use case for me personally. They could give them out for free and I'd not be interested in owning one.
- wvenable 8y ago
  I got one for free; I use it daily for setting all cooking timers and for maintaining my household shopping list. I also use it for playing music in the kitchen. It's pretty fantastic for all those things and I'd probably buy one now if I needed to replace it.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  The “killer app” for me is being able to say “Alexa, turn the light off” when reading a book late at night, instead of having to drag myself out of bed to flip the switch.
  - bloomer 8y ago
    You mean the clapper?
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      A particularly nice clapper that has secondary features like telling you the weather, serving as an alarm, and so on, yeah.
  - nerbert 8y ago
    Which Siri does anyways.
- blakesterz 8y ago
  I feel the same way. There's been a few HN threads where everyone chimed in with "here's how I use mine" and each time I read with great interest thinking "These are the people that are going to teach me something new! Something I've been missing because this thing doesn't seem all that useful to me" and I never learned everything new. I don't get the appeal at all, it's the time savings seem to be measured in seconds, and the convenience seems to be so marginal as to be not worth it for me.
melling 8y ago
Groundhog day: someone on HN rants about the Echo’s privacy. https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/groundhog-day-amazon-updates-echosomeone-rants-about-privacy/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/groundhog-day-amazon...
- bhauer 8y ago
  I can appreciate your fatigue with hearing small variations on the same discussion or debate in every thread about these devices, but to discount the utility of the debate is a bit narrow-minded, in my opinion. The value of debate, even debate that seems redundant, on a popular forum such as HN should not be trivialized. Witness the recent correction Google made with respect to Chrome and its automatic login functionality. Google did not specifically identify where they heard or read the feedback they were responding to, but any reasonable observer suspects they read a lot of it here. When technologists grieve over the privacy risks of in-home voice "assistant" devices, even when they (as I often do) snarkily refer to them as surveillance devices, the visibility of that debate can serve many possible ends: * It communicates to the vendors of these devices that technologists are suspicious of their devices. It suggests vendors need to either do better at communicating the privacy safeguards they have already created or do better at creating privacy safeguards in the first place if they want to reduce the degree of negative reaction they receive from technologists. * It communicates to others who do not provide these devices that there is a market for more secure devices of the same flavor, such as self-hosted in-home voice assistants that do processing locally and exclusively for the benefit of the customer. Technologists may not be saying that specifically, but it's communicated as an undercurrent. * It communicates to casual readers in the thread that there are risks that they should consider before purchasing and installing one of these devices. Providing clear criticism is one of the ways high-engagement people influence low-engagement people. * It indicates that a segment of the population will not happily stand by if R&D resources are reallocated away from traditional user interfaces to voice UIs on these cloud-connected devices. It's hard to measure, but there is no doubt that as R&D resources are allocated to voice UIs, some amount of investment is moved away from building UIs that use traditional touch, type, and click UIs. People criticizing these devices are in a small way saying "this is not the future I want." It's a way of participating in the economy and communicating demand to suppliers. Bottom line: Even though you and I have both "been here, done that" the value is not zero.
overcast 8y ago
As an American, why does every topic turn into a jab from the other side of the ocean? Particularly when some of those places there are overrun by surveillance and the heavy use of cell phones. We're all in this together.
verytrivial 8y ago
As a European (dweller), I am also concerned by the little devices habitually carried by our political representatives. "Ho, ho, ho, Syria sounds like Siri!"[1] but seriously, just like contestants on the TV show Big Brother say, you stop noticing the surveillance after a while and start sharing things you did even realise you were sharing. "Surveilled By Default" is corrosive agenda to push. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/watch-siri-heckles-british-defense-minister-during-speech-parliament-1008508 https://www.newsweek.com/watch-siri-heckles-british-defense-...
_cs2017_ 8y ago
Please consider not describing your opinion as if it represents Europe. I'm sure there are a lot of people in Europe who disagree with you (and a lot of people in America who agree). Grouping people together by some vague concept of nationality or ethnicity, and then claiming that your opinion is intrinsic to that group, invites some rather unpleasant associations.
- krn 8y ago
  > Grouping people together by some vague concept of nationality or ethnicity It's neither nationality, nor ethnicity. I explicitly raised the question of history, and how it forms different values in the society. Why doesn't the US have the equivalent of GDPR?
  - adrianmonk 8y ago
    The US doesn't have GDPR because of the gigantic chasm because the European and American philosophies of what the government's role in society should be. Europeans are more inclined to think that if there's a problem, it is very logical for the government to step in and solve it because that's government's function after all. Americans are more likely to think private citizens should solve it if possible because government should be small whenever possible. When it comes to privacy, an American might value privacy but think the best solution is a buyer beware approach. Such as, if you don't want to risk Amazon / Alex spying on you, don't buy an Echo. To many Americans, having to take on the entire burden of being responsible for their own privacy is the lesser of two evils because government intervention is to be avoided. As an analogy, consider attitudes towards medication. Some people dislike taking any medications at all if they can avoid it. If they have a headache, they will usually just deal with the pain instead of taking a pill. If their doctor wants them to go on prescription medication for high blood pressure, they will hope to find a way to manage it without drugs. Then there are other people who have a more balanced approach and have zero problem taking medications as long as they have been studied well and found safe. Americans are more like the people who avoid medications whenever possible. Sometimes they avoid things which could actually have been pretty beneficial. But they don't avoid them because they think the problem isn't a problem. It's because they don't like that type of solution.

by krn 8y ago

oulipo 8y ago

This is why we are building Snips at https://snips.ai https://snips.ai: create a 100% on-device and private-by-design Voice AI which will be open-sourced We did this to solve privacy issues, and empower makers!

madhato 8y ago

Cell phones have microphones, are closed source, connected to the Internet and carried with you into all the rooms of your home. Europeans use cell phones so why do they fear home assistants?

krn 8y ago
Cell phones, unlike home assistants, are not designed to be recording anything by themselves. Their apps are. And the user controls both, what apps he installs on his device, and what permissions he gives to them.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mikeash 8y ago
  You think they’re not. You really have no idea. You just have to trust that they aren’t constantly recording and sending everything back to the mothership. If you can trust that, why can’t you extend the same trust to a smart speaker?
  - dingaling 8y ago
    Distrust of a smartphone's mic can be mitigated by epoxying the microphone, or just ripping it off the board, and it's still a functional portable computer. But to consider further: if you're in a situation where you have to worry about your smartphone grassing on you then you probably won't keep it powered on. Or will keep it in a Faraday case or whatever. In other words you'll be considering all attack vectors and behaving appropriately. Whereas Amazon or Google could flip the notional 'record all' switch on their assistant devices on a whim and you'd be none the wiser.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      If the commenter has disabled their smartphone mic as you say then I’ll give them a pass. I suspect they haven’t. Why can’t Google flip the “record all” switch in Android on a whim?
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      If someone were in a situation where it made sense to put their phone in a Faraday cage, wouldn't you expect them to do the same with their Amazon Echo?
- wvenable 8y ago
  The baseband of your phone is basically an entire closed OS that runs in parallel with the OS that interact with and has complete control over all the hardware. This OS has it's own file system, programs, network access, everything. The Amazon echo isn't even that mysterious; it has low-power hardware to listen for the wake word and doesn't even power up the main CPU until that point. And you can always monitor the network traffic. The fears are massively overblown for home assistants. Mobile phones, by comparison, track your position in real time everywhere you are and send that information to paying 3rd parties all the time.
  - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
    > And you can always monitor the network traffic. This is meaningless if the connection is encrypted. The device can wait to send data that it's collected without telling you along with data you expect it to send to Amazon, and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
    - wvenable 8y ago
      You'd be able to tell if some traffic is being sent. If my Echo is spying on me day and in out then I'd expect a pretty constant stream of traffic from it. If the Echo was ever caught intentionally spying (either through analysis or someone leaking that information) that would be the end of that product line forever.
      - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
        In my OP, I laid out an example in which an Echo could spy on you and waits to send data along with legitimate and expected network communications. > If the Echo was ever caught intentionally spying (either through analysis or someone leaking that information) that would be the end of that product line forever. Truthfully, I don't think many people would care.
        wvenable 8y ago
        So people who do care would care and people who don't care already don't care. But trying to appeal to people who would care without any evidence is really pointless.
- dymk 8y ago
  They’re a closed source, always on device with a microphone. How do you know it’s not always listening? The point is, they subject you to the same threat as an Alexa. You can’t say “Europeans don’t use Alexa because it could XYZ”, and yet they use phones which could also do XYZ.
  - krn 8y ago
    > They’re a closed source, always on device with a microphone. How do you know it’s not always listening? Your iPhone might be closed-source, but Android devices can be compiled from source and fully inspected.
    - grey-area 8y ago
      How about the sim card? https://www.scmagazine.com/home/news/black-hat-mobile-carriers-react-quickly-to-major-sim-card-vulnerability/ https://www.scmagazine.com/home/news/black-hat-mobile-carrie...
    - madhato 8y ago
      Android is open source but the Play Store and Play Services are closed source. If Google needed to secretly install a rootkit to listen to the microphone they could.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      I’m pretty sure the cellular baseband in your phone is closed source. Coincidentally, it also has direct access to the microphone and to an internet connection you can’t monitor.
      - jschwartzi 8y ago
        Yeah, the baseband processor runs its own independent RTOS with full software control. Without studying, in detail, the electrical connections between the baseband and the rest of the hardware it's not possible to say that it can't record from the microphone independently of the hardware. It's easier to make that argument for the SIM card, which is actually not a SIM card but also a small ARM core that runs Java code. You can embed small programs into the SIM card which is something a lot of carriers do. The SIM card and baseband work in tight concert though and you should just assume that the connections of the baseband are available to the SIM card.
- netsharc 8y ago
  "Controls both"? We have an illusion of control, but do you know exactly what's going on inside the slab of black mirror? There are surely exploits for both points, most probably used by your friendly government surveillance agency against whomever they consider to be their adversaries.
- zamadatix 8y ago
  For a single app device is this distinction relevant? Or are you saying most Europeans don't install any Google, Amazon, or Facebook apps?
- CharlesW 8y ago
  > Cell phones, unlike home assistants, are not designed to be recording anything by themselves. The assistants in phones work in exactly the same way as the assistants in home appliances, no? They start recording when they hear their voice trigger. Both classes of devices require trust that their maker won't invoke this functionality when it's not asked for, has hardened this functionality against bad actors, etc.

umanwizard 8y ago

What’s so hard to believe? Europeans care about these sorts of privacy issues far, far more than anyone else in the world, for exactly the reason you point out. It’s very abstract to everyone else. Maybe you’ll be proven right in the end, but for now, I love my Alexa device as it’s extremely convenient.

kzrdude 8y ago
I think specifically Germans care about these issues far more than anyone else.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

Ntrails 8y ago

It's not that I care about privacy particularly - it's that I can't imagine the use case for me personally. They could give them out for free and I'd not be interested in owning one.

wvenable 8y ago
I got one for free; I use it daily for setting all cooking timers and for maintaining my household shopping list. I also use it for playing music in the kitchen. It's pretty fantastic for all those things and I'd probably buy one now if I needed to replace it.
umanwizard 8y ago
The “killer app” for me is being able to say “Alexa, turn the light off” when reading a book late at night, instead of having to drag myself out of bed to flip the switch.
- bloomer 8y ago
  You mean the clapper?
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    A particularly nice clapper that has secondary features like telling you the weather, serving as an alarm, and so on, yeah.
- nerbert 8y ago
  Which Siri does anyways.
blakesterz 8y ago
I feel the same way. There's been a few HN threads where everyone chimed in with "here's how I use mine" and each time I read with great interest thinking "These are the people that are going to teach me something new! Something I've been missing because this thing doesn't seem all that useful to me" and I never learned everything new. I don't get the appeal at all, it's the time savings seem to be measured in seconds, and the convenience seems to be so marginal as to be not worth it for me.

melling 8y ago

Groundhog day: someone on HN rants about the Echo’s privacy. https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/groundhog-day-amazon-updates-echosomeone-rants-about-privacy/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/groundhog-day-amazon...

bhauer 8y ago
I can appreciate your fatigue with hearing small variations on the same discussion or debate in every thread about these devices, but to discount the utility of the debate is a bit narrow-minded, in my opinion. The value of debate, even debate that seems redundant, on a popular forum such as HN should not be trivialized. Witness the recent correction Google made with respect to Chrome and its automatic login functionality. Google did not specifically identify where they heard or read the feedback they were responding to, but any reasonable observer suspects they read a lot of it here. When technologists grieve over the privacy risks of in-home voice "assistant" devices, even when they (as I often do) snarkily refer to them as surveillance devices, the visibility of that debate can serve many possible ends: * It communicates to the vendors of these devices that technologists are suspicious of their devices. It suggests vendors need to either do better at communicating the privacy safeguards they have already created or do better at creating privacy safeguards in the first place if they want to reduce the degree of negative reaction they receive from technologists. * It communicates to others who do not provide these devices that there is a market for more secure devices of the same flavor, such as self-hosted in-home voice assistants that do processing locally and exclusively for the benefit of the customer. Technologists may not be saying that specifically, but it's communicated as an undercurrent. * It communicates to casual readers in the thread that there are risks that they should consider before purchasing and installing one of these devices. Providing clear criticism is one of the ways high-engagement people influence low-engagement people. * It indicates that a segment of the population will not happily stand by if R&D resources are reallocated away from traditional user interfaces to voice UIs on these cloud-connected devices. It's hard to measure, but there is no doubt that as R&D resources are allocated to voice UIs, some amount of investment is moved away from building UIs that use traditional touch, type, and click UIs. People criticizing these devices are in a small way saying "this is not the future I want." It's a way of participating in the economy and communicating demand to suppliers. Bottom line: Even though you and I have both "been here, done that" the value is not zero.

overcast 8y ago

As an American, why does every topic turn into a jab from the other side of the ocean? Particularly when some of those places there are overrun by surveillance and the heavy use of cell phones. We're all in this together.

verytrivial 8y ago

As a European (dweller), I am also concerned by the little devices habitually carried by our political representatives. "Ho, ho, ho, Syria sounds like Siri!"[1] but seriously, just like contestants on the TV show Big Brother say, you stop noticing the surveillance after a while and start sharing things you did even realise you were sharing. "Surveilled By Default" is corrosive agenda to push. [1] https://www.newsweek.com/watch-siri-heckles-british-defense-minister-during-speech-parliament-1008508 https://www.newsweek.com/watch-siri-heckles-british-defense-...

_cs2017_ 8y ago

Please consider not describing your opinion as if it represents Europe. I'm sure there are a lot of people in Europe who disagree with you (and a lot of people in America who agree). Grouping people together by some vague concept of nationality or ethnicity, and then claiming that your opinion is intrinsic to that group, invites some rather unpleasant associations.

krn 8y ago
> Grouping people together by some vague concept of nationality or ethnicity It's neither nationality, nor ethnicity. I explicitly raised the question of history, and how it forms different values in the society. Why doesn't the US have the equivalent of GDPR?
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  The US doesn't have GDPR because of the gigantic chasm because the European and American philosophies of what the government's role in society should be. Europeans are more inclined to think that if there's a problem, it is very logical for the government to step in and solve it because that's government's function after all. Americans are more likely to think private citizens should solve it if possible because government should be small whenever possible. When it comes to privacy, an American might value privacy but think the best solution is a buyer beware approach. Such as, if you don't want to risk Amazon / Alex spying on you, don't buy an Echo. To many Americans, having to take on the entire burden of being responsible for their own privacy is the lesser of two evils because government intervention is to be avoided. As an analogy, consider attitudes towards medication. Some people dislike taking any medications at all if they can avoid it. If they have a headache, they will usually just deal with the pain instead of taking a pill. If their doctor wants them to go on prescription medication for high blood pressure, they will hope to find a way to manage it without drugs. Then there are other people who have a more balanced approach and have zero problem taking medications as long as they have been studied well and found safe. Americans are more like the people who avoid medications whenever possible. Sometimes they avoid things which could actually have been pretty beneficial. But they don't avoid them because they think the problem isn't a problem. It's because they don't like that type of solution.