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> Nobody can prove that. It's always listening and you have to assume always recording and transmitting Uh... packet analyzers, IP logs, bandwidth monitoring t
by ryanmercer 8y ago
> Nobody can prove that. It's always listening and you have to assume always recording and transmitting
Uh... packet analyzers, IP logs, bandwidth monitoring tools etc...
If instead of transmitting occasional bursts of data when you say the wake word it's been sending back tens of megabytes an hour, or tens to hundreds of megabytes a day, you can go "hey, it's probably transmitting everything it hears".
There are people that religiously watch what these devices are sending back just to try and catch one of the companies doing something fishy. There are people that religiously watch their network traffic period looking for something nefarious.
These devices aren't like your phone, where simply having it on can have all sorts of services/apps using data in the background or you open a webpage and tens or even hundreds of different servers are contacted and data pulled/pushed to/from them. It's a device that should be periodically checking for an update and sending very small audio files back in nearly-real time. If they were recording regularly, or especially all the time, and transmitting it back to a server it would stand out like a sore thumb.
Never mind the fact that keeping it secret, and not having a whistle blower, would be damn impossible. Someone's going to mention it to a loved one or friend, or flat out go online "I discovered my Amazon/Google device is actively listening and recording and sending to these IPs in these intervals" when they just know it as fact and didn't have to 'discover' it.
- LinuxBender 8y agoWhich nobody can do. It is encrypted and unless the device accept invalid certs, they can queue up, compress, batch upload any data they want. They control the security, not the end-luser.
- y04nn 8y agoEncrypted or not, an audio stream should not be difficult to identify.
- LinuxBender 8y agoIf they batch compress and upload, it wont be a stream. It could be aes-256 lzma2 compressed chunks. Using the right codec, they could likely upload a hour of audio in a few hundred kbytes. I have seen some demos of highly bw optimized codecs. Here are some staring points. [1] I would go with Opus. My voice chat server uses that. [1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/167533/best-voice-compression-algorithms-formats https://stackoverflow.com/questions/167533/best-voice-compre...
- vinkelhake 8y ago> Using the right codec, they could likely upload a hour of audio in a few hundred kbytes. But at the same time, you're convinced that you would notice if your phone was slipping out these kilobytes as part of its usual communication? It seems to me that you've just arbitrarily picked a level of paranoia where you've decided that this can definitely happen with the Alexa, but won't happen with your phone. Your proud paranoia isn't applied consistently.
- LinuxBender 8y agoI am not convinced of anything. The risk of the throw away device uploading my audio is significantly lower than a device powered in my home, with dedicated fast internet.
- cc439 8y agoWhat if they convert speech to text like the American intel agencies do as proved by the Snowden and Vault 7 leaks?
- ryanmercer 8y agoThat's possible but that's quite a bit of processing for actionable speech to text which means you have a chance of the device acting sluggish when you query it or you have to give the device way more processing power than it needs which increases cost and from my understanding with devices like Amazon's, they're already being sold relatively near cost because they are intended to get you to spend more money inside the Amazon ecosystem.
- Aloha 8y agoWe know how much storage is on the device - we could tell thru network monitoring if they were actually doing this - there is just enough smarts in the device to only turn on the recordings when the wake word is spoken - thats not being said a malicious player wouldnt hack it, and insert their own code to listen all the time - but based on the evidence, I don't think amazon is that player.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jakeogh 8y agoCan you MITM SSL the conversations to Amazon? It has memory. There is no requirement that it transmits in real time.