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I am baffled by how many people have no problems adding always listening and recording Google and Facebook devices to their living rooms. Some are considered t
by rdtsc 8y ago
I am baffled by how many people have no problems adding always listening and recording Google and Facebook devices to their living rooms.
Some are considered tech people who should know stuff like this could happen, but they just don't care or don't think it will happen to them.
Somewhere there is an ex-Stasi officer who is thinking "I wish we were that good and had people fooled to voluntarily install listening devices and didn't have to tap phone lines and crawl around basements and rooftops".
- lykr0n 8y agoThis. You're trusting everything you say & do to a company who says they're not going to share your data with others and that have the proper control in place to prevent other people from getting it.
- carapace 8y agoYeah, it's like volunteering to become a serf.
- isostatic 8y ago"He thought of Alexa with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them." The irony is the ability for mass survelence (by unelected corporations) is far more than they had in 1984
- sevensor 8y agoWe've settled the 1984 versus Brave New World debate with the answer "yes, please."
- eclipxe 8y agoBecause it doesn't matter. Human error. Will be fixed.
- jakeogh 8y agoHa. Sure. It's going to keep happening, and on a larger scale. Then people will (again) aruge it's no big deal. Stil relatively early in the conditioning stage.
- melling 8y agoWhy are you baffled? They’re great little devices. I have two Amazon echoes. Now that I can use my Apple Music, they are used constantly. Voice-first devices are long overdue.
- thfuran 8y ago>Voice-first devices are long overdue. Sure, that's not really anything that anyone disagrees with. It's the acceptance of data collection and exfiltration that is odd.
- eyjafjallajokul 8y agoMaybe a naive question, but how are they any worse than having phones with non-transparent hardware/radio drivers in your living room? We seem to have accepted that risk, and even carry phones around everywhere.
- alpaca128 8y agoWe use smartphones for the same reason we don't avoid any non-free software like Stallman: a huge amount of additional possibilities. But what Alexa, Siri etc. offer is just a different way to use a limited set of existing features, in exchange for a much higher risk of a privacy breach. Everyone needs to draw a line somewhere, I just don't see a reason to use voice assistants, definitely not with internet connectivity and where the company keeps all recordings for some reason.
- agildehaus 8y agoThey keep all recordings because they train their voice recognition off them. GOOG-411 kept all recordings too, for the same reason, as do hundreds of other services, but I don't recall anyone caring about them. Google gives you a UI to view and delete your recordings and suddenly they're monsters.
- samstave 8y agoHas anyone on HN put their phones into Airplane mode with WiFi on and then had wireshark tracking all outgoing packets from the wifi devices in their home? To see exactly what outbound connections were made by which device and which app when either device was being actively used, or laying dormant? This is how it was discovered in the UK that SmartTVs were sending viewing data....
- stevecalifornia 8y ago1) It's always listening for a keyword, and then it starts recording. It's a voice interface for a computer. 2) Your phone is doing the same thing except for it follows you around everywhere you go and records your map location, what apps you use, who you are talking to and what your web searches are. Your phone isn't recording just what you say...its recording what you do and where you do it and when you do it. It's overwhelmingly more pervasive and invasive if you value privacy. 3) The utility of being able to interact with a computer via my voice wildly surpasses the risk. Even if it had been my voice sent to this random other person all they would get is 3000 recordings of me saying "Alexa, what is the weight of an elephant?" "Alexa, play Magic Sword." "Alexa, whats the weather?" My father-in-law thought these things were the devil until he realized he could ask it to play ANY SONG HE WANTED and it would do it. Now he is always unplugging ours and plugging it back in on the porch so he can use it out there. Literally every article about home assistants brings out a number of people who continue to say how they can't understand how people could have this in their homes. Great, you can't understand it. Meanwhile, an enormous number of people find immense utility in home assistants otherwise they wouldn't be proliferating so wildly for this long.
- baxtr 8y agoI get 1) and 3), but I don’t buy 2). Your phone works with Siri/any other assistant off. The connected speakers don’t. So the comparison doesn’t hold in my opinion.
- stevecalifornia 8y agoAs an example for #2, when I got an Android somehow I was either automatically opted in or accidentally opted into location sharing. Two years later I found that Google Maps could show me every location I had been to for the last 2 years. I could review, day by day, everywhere I had gone, what time I went, how I drove there and where I went to next.
- jedberg 8y agoYou can just mute the connected speakers and it's the same as having Siri off. Or get one of the ones that requires you to push a button (the Amazon Tap).
- baxtr 8y agoAstonishingly, people are able to do tricky trade-offs. They trade privacy for utility in this case. What’s wrong with that?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- meritt 8y agoA number of years ago, The Onion did a great parody piece [1] on how Facebook is ran by the CIA [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiPaTy2iJTM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiPaTy2iJTM
- TAForObvReasons 8y agohttps://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/fb https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/fb the title for the stock is: "Facebook Inc. Cl A". With the particular font they use, the lowercase "l" and uppercase "I" look the same.
- jakeogh 8y agoThey get a kick out of the whole revelation of the method thing.
- ryanmercer 8y ago>I am baffled by how many people have no problems adding always listening and recording Google and Facebook devices to their living rooms. I am baffled by people that think anyone cares about their conversation about Jeff at work or what Monica and Ross just did on the 75th viewing of an episode of friends, or that they talk to their stuffed rabbit named Bun that they've had since about a week after they were born about how miserable their life is and how they should just pack up and run away together... I mean... "oh no, big bad google knows I shouted 'oi shut the fuck up' four times instead of three at the neighbors today" and "oh no, Amazon knows I asked what we want for dinner" I guess I must be weird and other people are having extremely sensitive, if not classified, conversations in their residence but I just don't see what the big deal is. Most of the people I personally know that find it bizarre people would have such a device have rewards cards, smart phones, take every damn quiz that myspace and facebook have ever had, checked in religiously with foursquare, tag their friends in every photo they upload seven times a day from every place they've been that day, check in everywhere they go on facebook and have 2+ streaming services monitoring every single thing they watch. Like, hellloooooo you're worried about a microphone that can't even get "hey alexa" "hey google" right half the time and actually trigger?
- danso 8y agoUsing a reward card and taking FB quizzes are active decisions. Being surreptitiously recorded is not.
- mynameisvlad 8y agoWell, they made an active decision to buy a device specifically meant to record them and provide responses to said recording. It would be another thing to find out a phone records every conversation passively, but these devices are literally made for the purposes of recording you. That kind of sounds like a self inflicted wound if they actually cared about privacy. This is all said with the presumption that the devices actually are surreptitiously recording. Which is far from proven but already addressed by other comments here.
- 8y ago
- matte_black 8y agoI sniffed the packets and didn’t find anything particularly worrying.
- oulipo 8y agoThis is exactly why we are building the first 100% on-device and private-by-design open-source Voice AI at https://snips.ai https://snips.ai (and we have cloud-matching performances: https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-brings-cloud-level-spoken-language-understanding-to-the-edge-dc98acf73169 https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-brings-cloud-level-spoken-...) Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder We believe that people want more natural interaction and AI at home, but that it should never be at the cost of their privacy. You never know what a company, or hackers, could do with recordings from your home. This is why we are creating AI which can work on a Raspberry Pi 3, and works in english, french, german, japanese, spanish, italian (more coming very soon) Take a look at our blog if you want to build your own smart assistant: https://blog.snips.ai https://blog.snips.ai
- iforgotpassword 8y agoCompletely OT, but is the woman supposed to look that goofy/deformed? https://imgur.com/a/DFgvNMt https://imgur.com/a/DFgvNMt
- stevenleeg 8y agoHey, your product looks super cool but I’m a bit stumped as to why you’re trying to force a token into it. It looks like it’s a simple payments token, which doesn’t usually turn out to be a great idea if you look at the remnants of blockchain projects that did the same in 2018. Is this just a way to fundraise or do you have other ideas to make your product ‘decentralized’ aside from using a cryptocurrency? For the record, everything else about the product looks amazing and I’m really excited to see an open and privacy conscience alternative in this space :)
- diminoten 8y agoPerhaps the source of your confusion lies in your misunderstanding of the actual risks involved. A good indicator of that is your reference of the Stasi.
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoHey I’m right there with you. I keep voice assistant disabled on my phone FWIW and my girlfriend and I both refuse to have voice assistant devices in our studio. Our upstairs roommates have the whole top floor of the house bugged. They mostly use it to turn on and off the lights. Downstairs we also have Hue lights but we use the app. I’d love a locally hosted assistant but I’m busy with so many projects and it’s low on my list.
- harryh 8y ago1) The devices are useful. 2) The chances of a mishap like this happening to a single user are very very small. 3) Even if a mishap like this occurs, the chances of it causing meaningful harm for most people are small. The fact that you are baffled by this phenomenon says a lot more about you than it does about users of these products.
- fipple 8y agoI've made a fairly well-considered decision to use most of these new services. I keep virtually all of my content on services run by five major corporations because I'd rather have my entire phone's photos published on the front page of the Washington Post than lose all the photos of my kids. I'd rather have Jeff Bezos listening to everything happening in my house than have the more frequent trips to the grocery store that were needed before I had voice-controlled shopping lists. I'm not an ignoramus, I've just decided that certain things that are very important to some are not important to me. I agree that the decisions that me and others are making are hugely damaging collectively but that is a different issue.
- vonseel 8y agoAnd you're not the only one. Outside of HN, in the real world, the average person doesn't set up a FreeNAS server or homelab for data storage, doesn't know how to do backups, and doesn't have nearly as much concern over privacy as the fear mongers here at HN, Reddit, and tech publications. Fear mongering is nothing new, folks. The media is incentivized to cater to people in that way; this is why they use scare tactics and write BS articles like this one which boil down to "someone fucked up, sent the data for one customer to another customer". Furthermore, the article implies this mixup would NEVER have happened if the user's had not requested their data be released per GPDR. The only valid question worth asking is this: are you willing to risk ANY chance of your data being compromised? Google/Apple/et.al. are not the enemy. For most users, convenience trumps security, and they will accept the minimal risk that comes with using services like Alexa and Google Photos. FWIW, I've lost years of photos and data before on my first run-a-round with FreeNAS. It's not something that's just easy for the average user or even average developer to use and deploy reliably. I'm trying FreeNAS again now 4 years later, but it's taken way more work than I expected to understand my options and ZFS, and I'm still not sure I'll ever store anything critical on it.
- Supernaut 8y ago> the article implies this mixup would NEVER have happened if the user's [sic] had not requested their data be released per GPDR. OK, cool. So as long as I don't assert my rights under data protection regulations, Amazon probably won't orchestrate a grotesque breach of my privacy?
- burtonator 8y agoThere's some weird cognitive bias people have about visible vs invisible technology. If they can't see it they're fine with it. For example, if someone is walking in the mall they're being filmed by a dozen cameras. But if you walk behind them with your own handheld camera photographing them they will get VERY angry and freak out and start yelling at you. Yet nothing has changed... Same thing with Facebook. People don't mind giving their data to Facebook but if Zuck was staring over their shoulders reading their email they would be upset.
- iforgotpassword 8y ago> Some are considered tech people who should know stuff like this could happen, but they just don't care or don't think it will happen to them. It's this thing where you somehow believe that just by being an expert in some field, bad things in this very field can't happen to you, even if it's out of your control. Like a brain surgeon suddenly getting a tumor in his own brain.
- setquk 8y agoThe stasi kept the data protected better than a lot of tech companies as well.
- asdkhadsj 8y ago> I am baffled by how many people have no problems adding always listening and recording Google and Facebook devices to their living rooms. To be less baffled, think about how many of us have those devices under a different name: Our phone. Functionally I do not see the decides any differently. Yet, I think everyone I know has an Ok Google, Hey Siri, or Ok Bigsbi (however you spell it lol). I'm not going to lie, for some reason Alexa makes me more concerned than my phone. Yet, the logical part of me fails to see a meaningful difference between my phone and an Alexa. Disclaimer: I own an iPhone, I do not own an Alex/HomePod/etc.
- citilife 8y agoI wrote this a little bit ago: https://austingwalters.com/the-last-free-generation/ https://austingwalters.com/the-last-free-generation/ It's amazing to me that people are actively seeking to erode society as greatly as they are. The fact is, it's not better to have these systems long term. So what if it saves you even 10 minutes a day (which I highly doubt), if eventually someone comes to power that will decide to kill you and your families based on your prior beliefs. Today we are seeing a more subtle manipulation of politics using all the data these large companies collect. I can't imagine what would happen if there was a concerted effort to "weed out" bad eggs.
- emilsedgh 8y agoSaf thing is, some current officers are thinking “oh nice. Lets find ways if exploiting this opportunity, by finding security issues on these devices, paying these corporations to allow us to sneak in their devices it any other means necessary to use these amazing machines.”
- imhelpingu 8y agoAnd somewhere there's an active intelligence officer ready to respond "thanks!"
- jacquesm 8y agoIf someone has one of these in their house I will leave. Recording without permission of all participants is forbidden in many places anyway.
- justtopost 8y agoI do as well. I used to politely ask they unplug it, bit invariably there were more in other rooms. I just explain my concerns, and avoid those people if they cannot grasp or honor them. So far it seems a good strategy, as I have doged a few 'bullets' both security-wise and socially.
- grkvlt 8y agoYeah, I'm extra happy I have my Amazon Echo now, if it also works as a way of preventing paranoid conspiracy-theorist lunatics from interacting with me!
- jacquesm 8y agoIf there is one thing you could have learned from the post Snowden era it is that your paranoid hacker colleagues may (1) know more than you do and (2) tend to be right in the longer term about what you today consider to be ridiculous lunacy and (3) usually are still too mild in their delusions compared to reality.