8 ms·

> But people put an always on spy device connected to Amazon (or Google, or Facebook [honest, we won't spy on you, maybe]) into their homes. Do you not walk ar

• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Your iPhone is not listening to you right now, but your Echo is. That's a big difference.
  • menacingly 8y ago
    A software control prevents your iphone from spying on you, and a software control prevents your echo from spying on you. In both cases you aren't really sure it's the case, you wouldn't know if it were suddenly disregarded or circumvented, and you're just trusting in the good behavior of your chosen provider.
    • _jal 8y ago
      You also don't know that you're not being tailed by a PI, that your neighbors are not focusing a mic on your home, or that your dentist isn't on the lizard-peoples' payroll. However, we all make certain risk tradeoffs based on numerous things, including proxy signals. For instance, I would be intensely surprised to find out my downstairs neighbor was recoding me, based on multiple years of interactions. Likewise, I find the signal Apple sends ("We need a US-based GDPR") about privacy rather more compelling than the signal Amazon sends ("scour the mic for hints about product we can shift"). I mean, sure, while both $huge_bank and your hypothetical deadbeat relative might both steal your money, I bet I know which one you choose to to leave your money with.
      • menacingly 8y ago
        I'm just saying it boils down to trust either way, not weighing in on which way that trust should lean.
      • 52-6F-62 8y ago
        > You also don't know that you're not being tailed by a PI, that your neighbours are not focusing a mic on your home, or that your dentist isn't on the lizard-peoples' payroll. Totally tangential, so feel free to disregard: This statement reminded me of my experience during my brother's TS clearance (Canada). CSIS readily had accurate data (in surprising detail) about my time spent during a short period they must have observed his family members to use during an interview with him. It was pretty fascinating, mildly disconcerting— but in this case didn't bother me (in the context, I understood why. I certainly wasn't interesting at the time). They only could have captured the data they had by a combination of tailing (however brief or otherwise more expensive much more technical means) and bank records. I was of course none the wiser. Advertisers are another matter. I have a Google Home Mini. It remains unplugged 100% of the time we're not using it. My phone can always go in another room. If we decide to turn it on to play with it (search something benign or play trivia) then we'll have it on. It's good for that kind of thing, and those are useful enough we don't mind letting Google have the little data that might produce.
    • chrischen 8y ago
      Well, Apple doesn’t have the patent mentioned for a software control to spy on you.
      • orbitingpluto 8y ago
        Apple did buy Shazam last December with its "always-on technology".
        • chrischen 8y ago
          Actualky Siri is already always on, and it’s opt-in. Shazam is only always on when the app is open. In any case having the capability to spy on you is fundamentally different from having the actual on-paper intent of doing so, such as a patent.
      • menacingly 8y ago
        I see your point, but it's conflating a couple of issues. The comment I'm responding to was saying that a smartphone isn't a spy device because it doesn't listen to you, and the Echo does. My point is they're both spy devices, just opaquely crippled to varying degrees. To the other point, I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with the patents, but it's at least an Echo simply gleaning more from a voluntary engagement with it. I think the general feeling is an Echo is "spying" when it engages itself to listen to your home. Of course, I have no way to know if my echo is doing that, or if it were to start, and it's out of my hands to prevent it. The same with a smartphone. If Amazon wanted to spy, probably a smart tactic would be to deliberately "flaw" the wake word recognition such that it could plausibly be a bug, but the result is activating very often randomly. They already kind of do that, it would just need to be more frequent.
    • ryandrake 8y ago
      There is a huge difference between “my phone is probably not listening to me” and “my home surveillance device, built for the sole purpose of recording as much as possible about me, in order to manipulate my buying habits—is definitely listening to me.”
      • jhall1468 8y ago
        Your phone is always listening for the command "ok, Google" or "Siri" in the exact same way the echo is listening for "Alexa". So there's not a huge difference. They are the same thing.
        • ryandrake 8y ago
          You know how my phone is configured? Mine doesn’t respond to any of those phrases, so I conclude there is a small, but nonzero chance that it is listening to everything I do. Conversely, the sole purpose of an Echo is to listen to its environment and take actions based on what it hears. There is a high probability that it is listening at all times. You don’t see the difference?
          • jhall1468 8y ago
            No, because much like your phone the Alexa can be muted and entirely controlled from the very device you have deemed "safe". You don't need voice commands, they just happen to make it better than a typical bluetooth powered speaker. Still doesn't change the fact that placement of the Alexa is stationary, so your phone (regardless of how low the probabilities are) is still a considerably more "high risk" device in terms of what it could pick up than an Alexa. To me this just sounds like another person in a whole line of them that screams about privacy unless they have to give up something that's extremely valuable to them. The Alexa isn't valuable to you. Your phone sure is.
      • menacingly 8y ago
        You've just persuasively reworded "both my phone and my echo are currently configured to not spy on me and the vendor assures me of this" At the base of the claim that Amazon is listening to what your echo can hear is the assumption that they're lying, and at the base of the claim that your iphone isn't listening to you is the assumption that Apple is not.
    • illvm 8y ago
      I'm fairly certain it's baked into the chip or part of the firmware which is not easily writeable, which is why the wake words are static. One can check if a device is compromised or not behaving as expected fairly easily by monitoring network traffic.
      • felix_nagaand 8y ago
        Obfuscating the data would be no more difficult than obfuscating tor traffic by delaying, stuffing, and merging packets. Has anyone done a long term packet analysis of an echo, home, iPhone, pixel, or galaxy?
      • comex 8y ago
        As far as I know, the hotwords are static because the detector uses a neural network pretrained specifically for those words. Training a new network for a custom hotword would require way too much training data. While it would be possible to instead use a generic network that decodes any type of speech – like it does when in full speech-to-text mode – and then use the outputted representation to compare to a custom hotword, that would be far more compute and power intensive, whereas the specialized network is relatively small. (The specialized network is also probably more accurate.) At least on battery-powered devices, more power usage for something that‘s always running is a dealbreaker. The same pressure doesn’t necessarily apply to home devices that are always plugged in, but all of the major in-home voice assistants also run on phones, and the providers probably prioritize a uniform user experience across devices. Disclaimer: I could be completely wrong, and/or the situation could change over time due to improved hardware and software. There was a rumor earlier this year that the Google Assistant might add custom hotword support in the future: https://9to5google.com/2018/01/29/google-app-7-20-assistant-apk-insight-teardown/ https://9to5google.com/2018/01/29/google-app-7-20-assistant-... Main source: Apple’s article about “Hey Siri”: https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html
  • CaptainZapp 8y ago
    I recognize the difference, but still think that he makes a very valid point. My phone probably doesn't listen to me right now, but what exactly do I know?
  • jbb67 8y ago
    It might not be listening to you but it's almost certainly reporting on everything you do on it, your location, your contacts etc all the time.
  • kranner 8y ago
    Of course your iPhone is listening. The difference is that it's supposed to listen only for commands after "Hey Siri..." instead of "Alexa...". Even if you turn Siri off, it is up to Apple whether or not to really stop listening.
  • dave84 8y ago
    It’s constantly listening for “Hey, Siri”, unless I missed your point.
  • mikestew 8y ago
    My iPhone most certainly is listening right now. "Hey Siri, turn on the living rooms lights", and look Ma, no hands. I've got these things littering the house between a couple iPads, iPhones, watches, and two HomePods, all of which are happy to do my bidding simply by speaking to them. Perhaps I have misunderstood you, but I fail to see the difference between my phone and an Echo. Now the difference to me is that Apple claims (claims that appear to be backed by evidence) that they won't sell me out. But as far as listening, I believe they function in similar manners.
    • kenferry 8y ago
      Apple's is recognizing specifically "hey siri" at all times - it isn't otherwise listening. Perhaps you find the distinction uncompelling, but there you go! https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html
      • jki275 8y ago
        It can't hear "hey siri" if it's not listening at all times.
        • wnkrshm 8y ago
          You can also do data analysis locally, reducing the information down to something you can believably argue does not contain the information of what is said (like spectral analysis etc.) and then periodically upload that. You can claim that your product is not 'listening' in the classic sense.
          • jki275 8y ago
            Agree with the first part (I'm not certain how they actually do it), but the latter does not follow. It's still listening, even if it's not actually sending the data elsewhere for processing.
        • dwighttk 8y ago
• CaptainZapp 8y ago
  What can I say? Does a smartphone make me a hypocrite? You make an extremely valid point, though. What I would actually like (and what seems really hard to find) is a dumb phone with a 4G hotspot and which does not run Android in any way, shape or form. Any suggestions
  • ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    To each his own, I guess, but is the exchange of a little bit convenience to a potential privacy nuclear device really worth it? Does a smartphone make me a hypocrite? To me, it does. Not to pick on you personally, but 99% of the people freaking out about the Echo own smartphones and carry them around all the time. For the convenience. It makes no sense, unless you realize that the person has just drawn their arbitrary convenience-privacy tradeoff line differently than the Echo owners have.
    • 908087 8y ago
      Smartphones generally don't contain multiple directional microphones that give them the ability to pick individual voices out in a noisy room. They also don't have the advantage of being plugged directly into a wall 24/7, and so any audio surveillance being done would have to take battery life into account, as well as put consideration into the possibility of the device heating up and tipping the surveillance target off that something strange was going on. Further, despite being generally pretty locked down to the average consumer, smartphones are far less of a black box than the echo/home/etc. Both are a concern, but technically skilled users are at least able to take steps to reduce the potential for their phones to spy on them. The only way to reduce any spying potential with the echo/home/etc, is not to have one at all.
      • shard 8y ago
        iPhones have had 4 mics since the 6s, and that is enough to do some beam forming and target individual voices. Phones with 3 mics such as Pixel phones, iPhones starting with 5, and various phones from other manufacturers, can have some basic beam forming capabilities for picking out voices.
• ams6110 8y ago
  Yeah it's tough. I have an Android phone. I keep location services off on my phone unless I'm actively using maps or navigating. I have turned off location history, have no data plan (WiFi and voice only) and I have disabled the "Hey Google" listener. I use Firefox instead of Chrome browser on the phone, with uBlock Origin. But I'm still undoubtedly leaking some breadcrumbs.
  • StavrosK 8y ago
    Also try disabling all retention on your Google account.
  • NeutronStar 8y ago
    > keep location services off Google doesn't even respect thoses settings so you're screwed anyway.
  • burger_moon 8y ago
    Isn't there also a thing about being trackable because you block everything out? Like it makes you unique and identifiable compared to the normal heard who don't block anything?
• InfamousRece 8y ago
  I have one device that potentially spies on me. Therefore it is logical that I should also get tons of other devices that spy on me -- or else I will be a hypocrite, no? Also I should refrain from any criticism directed against the spying features that companies put into their products these days. That would also be hypocritical because I have this one device that can spy on me....
  • SamBam 8y ago
    I thought the question was valid: you looked down on people who would buy a device that spies on them, yet you bought a device that spies on you. The point was that the vast majority of people, even us techies, are willing to sacrifice some privacy for the benefits these devices bring us. (And yes, sometimes these benefits are the direct result of spying. When I shop on Amazon, I often look at the section "Customers who looked at X ultimately bought Y." Thank you, Amazon, for spying on those customers, and recommending a better product.)
    • nyxtom 8y ago
      This doesn't necessarily mean that product Y is better suited for you in particular it may just mean people might have been artificially funneled into purchasing it either through wide advertising reach or through models such as this. It's certainly useful in some regards but it's not a catch-all and a lot of that is simply because of wide reach advertising, better marketing, and in the case of Amazon many products may just have artificial reviews. You still have to consider the alternative that what you are being recommended, even the "Customers who looked at" doesn't automatically mean there isn't bias or artificial incentives that push people in one direction over another. There's a reason Thaler won the nobel prize in economics for his work on "nudge" theory.
  • mikeash 8y ago
    It’s fine if you want to minimize it or don’t like it. But don’t act incredulous that people do this, when you also do it.
  • bhauer 8y ago