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Big tech lobbying gutted a bill that would ban recording without consent
- tomohawk 8y agoI live in a state that requires 2 party consent to record audio. Does this mean I can report a crime every time I say something near a Alexa?
- microcolonel 8y agoIn some sense, the whole purpose of Alexa is to record what you're saying; I think it would be hard to argue that it's recording without consent if you set it up in your own home, or interacted with it in somebody else's home, or in public (where you wouldn't have an expectation of privacy anyhow). It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some reasonable non-disclosure terms.
- wallace_f 8y agoOk but there's a distinction to be made. Right now on the front page of HN is a thread about LEO using Google data. Most people probably think the data they're handing over to big tech is just used for an immediate, apparent purpose. Not stored and shared.
- microcolonel 8y agoMaybe these companies have some responsibility to push awareness in the faces of the customers, that the only way to offer these services reliably is to study actual user stimulus. I don't understand why people have so little restraint though. If you don't like these devices (I don't like them, and don't want one in my own home), then you can't complain when the things you don't like about them come to bite you in the ass. I can understand being upset at being subtly betrayed by some ubiquitous and inescapable tool, some might argue that social media sites are becoming an effective privately-owned public square, deserving of some of the protections that offers (as established by the norms of the courts); but in this case you have absolutely every right and convenience not to buy personal assistant terminals and fit them in your homes. I don't trust smartphones, so I don't use them as phones; there are certain banks here in Canada I won't do business with because of bad reputations. It's all well and good to be concerned about a product, but if you're not willing to walk away from a luxury good which is not essential in your life, even though it violates your basic principles of good living, you have nobody to blame but yourself. If you won't take the most basic, simple, and convenient steps to uphold your principles, do you really have any?
- ericd 8y agoI refuse to have one of these in my house, but that doesn't mean I can reasonably escape being recorded without my consent - a large percentage of the people I know have these things. The reasonable thing to do is to make it so that these don't transmit recordings, or at the very least, that there are hard promises made to not store the recordings. If the companies need training data, they can go spend the money to hire people to provide samples.
- MereInterest 8y ago>It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some reasonable non-disclosure terms. Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more. By that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit consent to have all keystrokes recorded, and for that keylog to be accessible to the manufacturer of the keyboard, their employees, and their contractors.
- microcolonel 8y ago> Utter hogwash. The voice activation is a form of user input, nothing more. By that same logic, you could argue that use of a keyboard is explicit consent to have all keystrokes recorded It's like typing in to a search engine, which these days means live streaming results. Seems you are empowering them to analyze those search inputs just the same.
- MereInterest 8y agoThe type and amount of data transmitted, and the type and amount of data preserved depend on what is being done. Exceeding the minimum amount of data transmitted/preserved is a violation of privacy. - Case 1: local action, such as playing music, making a calendar event, setting an alarm. These have no need to be sent to - Case 2: remote action, such as performing a search. The audio can be parsed locally, with the search terms then sent externally to get the results. In neither case is it necessary to send the raw audio anywhere. In neither case is it necessary to record the audio for future use.
- zorpner 8y agoA friend of mine is named Alexa. Is this consent?
- marcinzm 8y ago>It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, and for that recording to be accessible to Amazon employees and contractors under some reasonable non-disclosure terms. That assumes everyone knows all the words which trigger a recording device and that those devices actually remotely record sound. Including a 90 year who hasn't use anything beyond a rotary telephone.
- microcolonel 8y ago> That assumes everyone knows all the words which trigger a recording device and that those devices actually remotely record sound. Including a 90 year who hasn't use anything beyond a rotary telephone. Don't put a Google Home in babushka's apartment, she wasn't going to buy one anyway, and she doesn't need it!
- tbyehl 8y agoHow about when it mistakenly decides the trigger word was uttered? Or when someone on the television or a YouTube video says the trigger word?
- SargeZT 8y agoFor someone to be criminally liable you have to show that they knowingly recorded somebody without their consent. An accidental trigger would definitely not qualify. For them to be liable civilly you'd have to show that you suffered some harm from the accidental recording and that they were negligent in allowing it to happen, and I have a very hard time believing that there are many situations where that's possible.
- Retric 8y agoAre you specifically referring to these laws in each state? Becase negligence can lead to criminal liability without intent depending on the statute.
- SargeZT 8y agoI am referring to the laws specifically. California's law specifically states that a beep is sufficient to establish recording notification, so that one is out; Florida's law requires intention; as do Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. Washington is the only state where it isn't totally 100% clear, and the law seems to read that a tone would be sufficient to establish consent.
- nfoz 8y ago> It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, Alexa is the name of my friend's one-year-old daughter. It's short for Alexandra, but that's what we call her. So yes I've said that name a lot in a variety of different places, and never expected to be recorded.
- lazyjones 8y ago> It's hard for me to think of interjecting "Alexa!", or whatever it is you have to say, as anything but explicit consent to be recorded, There is a certain spectrum of possibilities for how Alexa can handle this audio, all plausible and not equally worthy of consent: from immediate offline processing after explicit activation (never even record a whole command, just as much as is needed and never start processing unless a trigger word was said) to uploading everything to Amazon (including things that may or may not have been trigger words) and having employees listen in on private conversations. Non-IT-people won't be able to know exactly what they're supposedly consenting to, nor whether what Amazon and Google are doing is actually necessary for their gadget to function.
- phkahler 8y ago>> In some sense, the whole purpose of Alexa is to record what you're saying No. Just no. When voice recognition is done locally there is no reason to record you and certainly no reason to send those recordings to the cloud. Most Alexa users didn't know it was recording them until stories broke about it. If recording is "the whole purpose" of the device I think the public has been terribly lied to.
- lsiebert 8y agoStrictly speaking (and I am not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice etc), if you set up alexa, you presumably consented to the TOS, but others who might use it might not have consented. That said, good luck getting a prosecutor to go after Amazon for it. You'd be better off speaking to an attorney about some sort of class action lawsuit, presuming that your ability to sue them isn't governed by some other agreement with the company. Alternatively, the rules for keeping information on those 13 and under might be implicated.
- amelius 8y agoIsn't the person who installed the device the one who is liable? Just like the law applies to regular cameras and microphones?
- lsiebert 8y agoI honestly don't know, not a lawyer though I enjoy reading about legal issues from time to time. I imagine that if the recording wasn't made legally, you could at least get a court to order them to delete it, even if they weren't liable for damages or something.
- 3xblah 8y agoI think what you mean to say is that you live in an "all party consent" jurisdiction. "Two party consent" would imply that if there are more than two parties then only the consent of two of them is needed.
- vageli 8y agoThis is not correct. For example, > Germany is a two-party consent state—telephone recording without the consent of the two or, when applicable, more, parties is a criminal offence according to Sec. 201 of the German Criminal Code—violation of the confidentiality of the spoken word. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_law... This is similar to how the word "assault", to the layperson, implies a physical element, but to the law it does not.
- 3xblah 8y agoIn the first case the term "two party" is describing a defence (consent). Defences may vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, so the term might be useful in highlighting those differences. In the second case the term ("assault") is the offence itself. It is not a term that is being used to highlight differences in elements or defences amongst jurisdictions. Being accurate in the first case makes sense, regardless of the audience.
- maxxxxx 8y agoThis would be a good bill. Devices like Alexa should never transmit conversations back to Amazon's servers but all processing should be done locally. They should learn to train their system without real user data.
- pdkl95 8y agoThey can use real user data if they ask[1] for it first. Let users browse their poor-quality/failed interpretations, recent commands, etc, and submit the data they want. If you're clever with the UI, you might even get them to attach the desired/correct interpretation if they really want a particular error fixed. Alternatively, use the Nielsen method of simply paying people for their data. [1] in the "informed consent" sense, not the usual open ended "you agreed to give us whatever we want in our contract of adhesion" dark pattern.
- m0zg 8y agoYeah, I'd actually prefer that. If system guesses mis-recognition, ask me if you got what I said right, and if not, ask if you can use this as a training example. Have me enter on the phone the text that corresponds to what I was saying, and explicitly approve it for training. Better yet, if this creates an adaptation of the general model specifically for me.
- amelius 8y agoBut what if the user asks Alexa about some topic on e.g. Wikipedia? Should Alexa store the entire web upfront? At some point it might need to send a request of some sort to a server.
- Proven 8y agoThat such a BS title. What the hell are the people who are PAID to work for their voters doing? Do they have a mind of their own?
- DontGiveTwoFlux 8y agoThe article makes this out to be about digital devices like Echo and Google home. I agree that these devices should allow for choice in what gets sent back to the companies. More broadly, I believe that being able to secretly record conversations you participate in is probably for the best. This varies state to state. For example, in New York 1 party consent is legal but in California it is illegal, from my understanding. Though I haven't had a need to secretly record anything, it feels like a backstop against fraud from bad actors. You hear about so many horror stories from telephone customer service, law enforcement etc, that may have had a recourse if only there was a recording.
- pfdietz 8y agoI'm against laws prohibiting recording without consent. Recording is a way for the weak to defend themselves against the powerful. If someone calls me, or comes up to talk to me, I should be able to document electronically whatever is said to me.
- craftyguy 8y agoI'm perfectly fine with a ban on companies and institutions recording individuals. They are very rarely, if ever, the 'weak'.
- outside1234 8y agoWhat if they are journalists? That's the slippery slope here.
- bluntfang 8y agoyou must understand that authority will selectively use evidence as well. Especially considering deepfakes, I don't see a path towards the use of non-approved devices with secure digital evidence possession chains as evidence in court.
- CPLX 8y agoI agree with you. But that’s called one party consent and this isn’t that. This is a ban on zero party consent, where the manufacturer of a device records remotely without proper notification. That’s another thing entirely.
- mikeash 8y agoIllinois already required two party consent. What would this law have blocked that isn’t already illegal?
- debt 8y agoIt would’ve allowed you to file complaints with the AG. But Google and Microsoft and Amazon thought that’ll jus lead to too many class action lawsuits lol I guess they’re listening in then