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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 hy

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.
tjoff 8y ago
There are no real alternatives to a smartphone (this is paramount). Not living with a smartphone is a real social handicap on many levels. You also still have some control over it (compared to an Echo). An Echo is just the tiniest subset of a smartphone but with some serious privacy risks, all of a very minuscule benefit in convenience. A gimmick most would probably say, the killer app to this day seems to be a kitchen timer. To compare that with a smartphone where tons of every day things can be quite inconvenient without one. I get your point and on principle I agree. But the line most definitely isn't arbitrary set (even if you do find some practical use for an Echo). The difference is astronomical. That's not to say the current state of affair is depressing and we ought to really try to improve it.
- mikeash 8y ago
  I think it depends on the attitude. If you say that the relatively low utility of an Echo means it’s not worth the potential downsides, that’s perfectly reasonable. If you say that people who buy an Echo are insane for willingly putting a spy device in their house, that’s hypocritical and irrational if you have a smartphone. I think there’s a useful discussion to have in the former case, but alas most of the conversation involves the latter.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Not hypocritical at all - phones would burn out charge in an hour if they were listening all the time. And anyway the listening feature of a phone is incidental, and they can be useful with it turned off. Echo's only feature is listening and reporting. Its a different device in kind
    - mikeash 8y ago
      Phones last several hours when actively doing real-time voice communication. The power draw for passive surveillance would be way lower. Many phones support constant background listening with wake-word activation just like the Echo, with minuscule impact on battery life. If your phone has a spying feature, are you sure it can be turned off? How do you know?
      - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
        Because you asked it to. If it didn't that'd be actionable, right? Whereas an Echo is explicitly useless unless its always listening. So the 'feature' would have to be illegal/surreptitious and exposing it would be big news
        mikeash 8y ago
        Well, what exactly are you defending against? Echo, like phones, uses low-power, always-on algorithms to listen for a specific phrase. Only when it hears that phrase does it actually start recording and sending your audio back home. Are you worried about that low-power, always-on part listening to you? If so, then avoiding the Echo while carrying a phone with the feature switched off is sensible. But I don’t see why this would be worth worrying about, since the data stays local and isn’t saved. If you’re worried about the device secretly recording you and sending that data to someone else, then the two are equivalent in their threats.

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.

tjoff 8y ago

There are no real alternatives to a smartphone (this is paramount). Not living with a smartphone is a real social handicap on many levels. You also still have some control over it (compared to an Echo). An Echo is just the tiniest subset of a smartphone but with some serious privacy risks, all of a very minuscule benefit in convenience. A gimmick most would probably say, the killer app to this day seems to be a kitchen timer. To compare that with a smartphone where tons of every day things can be quite inconvenient without one. I get your point and on principle I agree. But the line most definitely isn't arbitrary set (even if you do find some practical use for an Echo). The difference is astronomical. That's not to say the current state of affair is depressing and we ought to really try to improve it.

mikeash 8y ago
I think it depends on the attitude. If you say that the relatively low utility of an Echo means it’s not worth the potential downsides, that’s perfectly reasonable. If you say that people who buy an Echo are insane for willingly putting a spy device in their house, that’s hypocritical and irrational if you have a smartphone. I think there’s a useful discussion to have in the former case, but alas most of the conversation involves the latter.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Not hypocritical at all - phones would burn out charge in an hour if they were listening all the time. And anyway the listening feature of a phone is incidental, and they can be useful with it turned off. Echo's only feature is listening and reporting. Its a different device in kind
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Phones last several hours when actively doing real-time voice communication. The power draw for passive surveillance would be way lower. Many phones support constant background listening with wake-word activation just like the Echo, with minuscule impact on battery life. If your phone has a spying feature, are you sure it can be turned off? How do you know?
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      Because you asked it to. If it didn't that'd be actionable, right? Whereas an Echo is explicitly useless unless its always listening. So the 'feature' would have to be illegal/surreptitious and exposing it would be big news
      - mikeash 8y ago
        Well, what exactly are you defending against? Echo, like phones, uses low-power, always-on algorithms to listen for a specific phrase. Only when it hears that phrase does it actually start recording and sending your audio back home. Are you worried about that low-power, always-on part listening to you? If so, then avoiding the Echo while carrying a phone with the feature switched off is sensible. But I don’t see why this would be worth worrying about, since the data stays local and isn’t saved. If you’re worried about the device secretly recording you and sending that data to someone else, then the two are equivalent in their threats.