5 ms·

People should reconsider keeping an always-on microphone operated by strangers in their home.

by idlewords 8y ago

negamax 8y ago
That defeats the purpose. Echo with smart home integrations is really useful
criddell 8y ago
I do that every time I see a story like this. So far the cost has never exceeded the utility.
- spaceheretostay 8y ago
  The problem with your reasoning is that you won't be able to reconsider once it is too late- the damage will be done and your regret won't matter. The problem is societal, not just your comfort with your data and your microphone. The past-the-point-of-no-return could occur with decades of people becoming less and less protective of privacy, to the point where they give all apps all permissions, have microphones in the house in every room, and live in a world with constant corporate data breaches, and where our elections were hacked to take advantage of our lack of care for privacy, and government was installed without care for the foreign attacks against our sovereignty, and we lose our freedom and rule of law in the US as our government ignores public responsibility, and it turns out it all happened because we signed up for Facebook and told it our political opinions and didn't care about privacy at all, and our locations and political preferences and personal weaknesses were all sold to foreign adversaries, who created fake internet personas to convince us of false things, again because we didn't care about privacy, and then we'd live under a surveillance state run by a totalitarian regime who snubs their noses at peaceful transfer of power and states unequivocally that they will not leave office in the future, and who looks to China for a good model of total surveillance and one party for life as a good thing to "try here"....., a government who treats transgender people like they're not people, who puts children in cages if they are from Mexico, who holds the paychecks of 1million people hostage for racist political grandstanding, who actively causes harm to people for fun, who knows nothing about the dangers of fascism and who acts openly fascist... Oh wait. Fuck.
  - criddell 8y ago
    No slope is that slippery.
    - spaceheretostay 8y ago
      Reality has already slipped further than I described.
    - tzs 8y ago
      It's still slippery enough to trip us up. Consider the 4th Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. When is a search or seizure unreasonable? That's largely determined by what people reasonably expect to be private. Widespread public sharing of what used to be considered private could move the boundary, allowing searches or seizures without a warrant for things that formerly required warrants. The was an interesting article in the Stanford Law Review a few years ago that looked at this kind of thing [1]. [1] https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox-the-dead-past/ https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox-the...
  - wil421 8y ago
    You are so off base and jumping right into some political rant. The article has nothing to do with politics and is talking about Amazon. If you want to discuss those topics I suggest you submit articles about those topics. Or even write a blog or do a YouTube video about it. This is what separates us from Reddit. From the HN guidelines: >Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
    - bitwize 8y ago
      "Keeping politics out of it" may have worked in the 90s or 2000s. But we know that the Russians are conducting extensive cyber ops in the USA, have compromised systems with access to sensitive data in the USA and globally, and are trying to influence, and likely have influenced, US elections. So yes, THERE IS A VERY RELEVANT CONNECTION between data harvesting by big tech and the current occupant of the White House. It's kind of like Godwin's law. It was relevant in an era when Nazism was a discredited relic of the past. But actual Nazis have turned into a powerful political force in the United States, thanks in part to toxic internet culture, and we do ourselves a profound disservice to forbid talking about them for what they are. Accordingly, Godwin's Law is no longer relevant.
- idlewords 8y ago
  A lot of that cost, unfortunately, is a collective harm. Your decision means I have to live in a surveillance economy.
  - api 8y ago
    So far emitting fossil CO2 has never cost me more than the utility... I agree. These mass surveillance dragnets are a society-wide risk even more than they're a risk to the individual. The socialized risk is that malicious actors (whether the company itself or anyone else who can get access) will use them to attack the entire society in a variety of ways. I personally consider these systems to be a risk to national security. The risk is also in the panopticon effect itself. If people think they're always under surveillance, they will unconsciously self-censor and cultural innovation could halt. People will just silently stop doing things they think other people might judge.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    It's like littering. No direct cost to the person doing it but if everyone did it it would have a large cost to society.
    - criddell 8y ago
      It's not really like littering. I don't think there are very many people that think littering isn't a problem if everybody does it. Smart phones, on the other hand, are used by billions of people everyday to do all kinds of legitimately useful things.
  - stronglikedan 8y ago
    Surveillance economies do have a societal cost, but calling that cost harmful is completely subjective, so the people that choose utility over that cost don't necessarily believe they are harming anything.
    - spaceheretostay 8y ago
      The harm done by surveillance societies is not completely subjective. People are suffering. Their suffering due to surveillance-pervasive society is objectively bad. And if you want to argue that people should suffer and that is a good thing, we have gone off the rails into a discussion of morality, a discussion I would be shocked to have here. I think it is safe to say that intentional and targeted suffering of minority groups directly due to our surveillance society is objectively bad. The only wiggle room here is, as you said, the existence of people who believe that targeting minorities for suffering is a good thing but I surely and dearly hope that we can still call those abhorrent ideas "objectively bad".
ummonk 8y ago
Yup. Only always-recording microphone I choose to have is Siri on my phone.
JohnFen 8y ago
Personally speaking, I don't have to reconsider it since there's no way I'd ever allow it in the first place. The very notion strikes me as insane.

People should reconsider keeping an always-on microphone operated by strangers in their home.

negamax 8y ago

That defeats the purpose. Echo with smart home integrations is really useful

criddell 8y ago

I do that every time I see a story like this. So far the cost has never exceeded the utility.

spaceheretostay 8y ago
The problem with your reasoning is that you won't be able to reconsider once it is too late- the damage will be done and your regret won't matter. The problem is societal, not just your comfort with your data and your microphone. The past-the-point-of-no-return could occur with decades of people becoming less and less protective of privacy, to the point where they give all apps all permissions, have microphones in the house in every room, and live in a world with constant corporate data breaches, and where our elections were hacked to take advantage of our lack of care for privacy, and government was installed without care for the foreign attacks against our sovereignty, and we lose our freedom and rule of law in the US as our government ignores public responsibility, and it turns out it all happened because we signed up for Facebook and told it our political opinions and didn't care about privacy at all, and our locations and political preferences and personal weaknesses were all sold to foreign adversaries, who created fake internet personas to convince us of false things, again because we didn't care about privacy, and then we'd live under a surveillance state run by a totalitarian regime who snubs their noses at peaceful transfer of power and states unequivocally that they will not leave office in the future, and who looks to China for a good model of total surveillance and one party for life as a good thing to "try here"....., a government who treats transgender people like they're not people, who puts children in cages if they are from Mexico, who holds the paychecks of 1million people hostage for racist political grandstanding, who actively causes harm to people for fun, who knows nothing about the dangers of fascism and who acts openly fascist... Oh wait. Fuck.
- criddell 8y ago
  No slope is that slippery.
  - spaceheretostay 8y ago
    Reality has already slipped further than I described.
  - tzs 8y ago
    It's still slippery enough to trip us up. Consider the 4th Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. When is a search or seizure unreasonable? That's largely determined by what people reasonably expect to be private. Widespread public sharing of what used to be considered private could move the boundary, allowing searches or seizures without a warrant for things that formerly required warrants. The was an interesting article in the Stanford Law Review a few years ago that looked at this kind of thing [1]. [1] https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox-the-dead-past/ https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox-the...
- wil421 8y ago
  You are so off base and jumping right into some political rant. The article has nothing to do with politics and is talking about Amazon. If you want to discuss those topics I suggest you submit articles about those topics. Or even write a blog or do a YouTube video about it. This is what separates us from Reddit. From the HN guidelines: >Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    "Keeping politics out of it" may have worked in the 90s or 2000s. But we know that the Russians are conducting extensive cyber ops in the USA, have compromised systems with access to sensitive data in the USA and globally, and are trying to influence, and likely have influenced, US elections. So yes, THERE IS A VERY RELEVANT CONNECTION between data harvesting by big tech and the current occupant of the White House. It's kind of like Godwin's law. It was relevant in an era when Nazism was a discredited relic of the past. But actual Nazis have turned into a powerful political force in the United States, thanks in part to toxic internet culture, and we do ourselves a profound disservice to forbid talking about them for what they are. Accordingly, Godwin's Law is no longer relevant.
idlewords 8y ago
A lot of that cost, unfortunately, is a collective harm. Your decision means I have to live in a surveillance economy.
- api 8y ago
  So far emitting fossil CO2 has never cost me more than the utility... I agree. These mass surveillance dragnets are a society-wide risk even more than they're a risk to the individual. The socialized risk is that malicious actors (whether the company itself or anyone else who can get access) will use them to attack the entire society in a variety of ways. I personally consider these systems to be a risk to national security. The risk is also in the panopticon effect itself. If people think they're always under surveillance, they will unconsciously self-censor and cultural innovation could halt. People will just silently stop doing things they think other people might judge.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  It's like littering. No direct cost to the person doing it but if everyone did it it would have a large cost to society.
  - criddell 8y ago
    It's not really like littering. I don't think there are very many people that think littering isn't a problem if everybody does it. Smart phones, on the other hand, are used by billions of people everyday to do all kinds of legitimately useful things.
- stronglikedan 8y ago
  Surveillance economies do have a societal cost, but calling that cost harmful is completely subjective, so the people that choose utility over that cost don't necessarily believe they are harming anything.
  - spaceheretostay 8y ago
    The harm done by surveillance societies is not completely subjective. People are suffering. Their suffering due to surveillance-pervasive society is objectively bad. And if you want to argue that people should suffer and that is a good thing, we have gone off the rails into a discussion of morality, a discussion I would be shocked to have here. I think it is safe to say that intentional and targeted suffering of minority groups directly due to our surveillance society is objectively bad. The only wiggle room here is, as you said, the existence of people who believe that targeting minorities for suffering is a good thing but I surely and dearly hope that we can still call those abhorrent ideas "objectively bad".

ummonk 8y ago

Yup. Only always-recording microphone I choose to have is Siri on my phone.

JohnFen 8y ago

Personally speaking, I don't have to reconsider it since there's no way I'd ever allow it in the first place. The very notion strikes me as insane.