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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 s
by 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 agoI 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 agoNot 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 agoPhones 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 agoBecause 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 agoWell, 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.
- fouric 8y agoNot only that, but a cybersecurity researcher claims to have created a proof-of-concept for this very kind of low-power listening that you claim doesn't exist (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549).
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoCool!