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How is a smart phone any different? It has a microphone that, for most people, is always listening. It’s not shocking at all. I find my Echo to be incredibly u

How is a smart phone any different? It has a microphone that, for most people, is always listening. It’s not shocking at all. I find my Echo to be incredibly useful and I’ve decided that it’s worth the trade-off. Just like I did with the microphone I have on my wrist and the one in my pocket.

windexh8er 7y ago
It's very different. My expectation that of my smart phone is that it's not listening unless I want it to (I don't). If I find out it is listening/recording and it's configured not to then I will find an alternative. The "smart speaker", on the other hand, is 100% useless if the microphone is disabled. It also has microphones designed to hear as far away as possible given its design. Finally, the phone in your pocket and watch on your wrist likely handle the audio data very different than that speaker manufacturer. You might find it useful now, but don't discount now you'll ever find it intrusive.
- BeetleB 7y ago
  >My expectation that of my smart phone is that it's not listening unless I want it to (I don't). If I find out it is listening/recording and it's configured not to then I will find an alternative. >My expectation This is the key phrase here. Just as you have your expectations, Alexa/Home owners have their expectations. And if Alexa owners find out that Amazon/Google is using their inputs in ways they don't want it to, they'll drop it or find an alternative. Different people have different expectations. I was late into the whole smartphone thing, and refused to buy one for years because of the privacy leak it represents (heck, I refused to buy a dumb phone for years for the same reason). Back in those days, I would have been as unsympathetic for your rationale of owning a smartphone as you are of those owning smart speakers. Do you not see that there are different levels of comfort, and not everyone has the same level as you do? Furthermore, do you not see that on that continuum, even you have made compromises?
  - zepto 7y ago
    Fair enough, and this is a great argument that the press are failing to sufficiently publicize that Amazon is collecting a repository of these private recording. Without being aware of what is going on, people can’t make these choices for themselves.
  - windexh8er 7y ago
    Guess you better find alternatives: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://nos.nl/artikel/2292889-google-medewerkers-luisteren-nederlandse-gesprekken-mee.html&xid=17259,1500004,15700022,15700043,15700186,15700191,15700256,15700259,15700262&usg=ALkJrhhComqKPdEmwe0DXtuhWXimIP_Wtg https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
- wvenable 7y ago
  A smart speaker has a tiny CPU designed to listen for the wake word and doesn't even fully power up until that is heard. Sure it's voice but it's the voice equivalent of pressing a record button.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    These are also available in some phones, as provided by my employer: https://statics.cirrus.com/pubs/proBulletin/CS47L35_201507.pdf https://statics.cirrus.com/pubs/proBulletin/CS47L35_201507.p...
- rando444 7y ago
  Your phone microphone can be enabled remotely and the means to do so can be controlled through the baseband processor. The Snowden leaks revealed that this had been an attack vector available and used for years. The method they were using has since been patched, but one would be foolish to think that it has been impossible for interested parties to have found another way to do the same.
  - windexh8er 7y ago
    I don't think my point was well understood based on your counterargument. What I'm saying is the expectation of a smart phone is that voice assistance is an option. That was my point to OP. Smart speakers are useless sans listening. They are not one and the same in their use case or normal operation. I'm also not disputing there are baseband controls a nefarious entity could abuse but I'm saying that people who choose to trust Amazon with always listening devices vs a smart phone are not comparing apples to apples.
_Codemonkeyism 7y ago
What Smartphone is listening all the time and sending the voice data to some people to listen in?
- Klathmon 7y ago
  I don't think Alexa nor the Google homes listen and send data to the respective "motherships" at all times. Both do local processing for the keywords until it hears one then sends the following data (and I believe a few seconds prior) to the servers for processing. My phone works the exact same way with the Google assistant. I don't know if other "assistants" (like Bixby) work the same way.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  The smartphone is their; I mean, your GPS tracker for machine learning movement behavior. Voice (various project names), Text (SMS gateways) and Data (CarrierIQ) are just a value added bonus. I enjoyed the conversation with Alex Stamos (former CSO at Yahoo/FB), where pointed out that had George Orwell been told that people would willingly pay for a tracking device and keep it on them at all times and powered on at all times, he would not have believed it. I should add, any time I say anything even remotely negative about cell phones, I get beat up here at HN pretty good. This is a very good psychological indication that people have cognitive dissonance and denial around this topic.
LinuxBender 7y ago
You would know if your phone was uploading loads of voice and room data real time. There are of course more subtle ways to do this, but not for real time monitoring. You can transcode the audio with an encoder that does advanced mathematical quantization and batch upload it. If all you care about is human voice, then you could upload an hours worth of audio in a couple hundred kbytes, if even that much.
- Klathmon 7y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure you'd know. Modern phones have coprocessors that are dedicated to transcribing speech into text in a very power efficient manner (hell, my Pixel phone has a feature which allows it to identify songs playing at all times ins a very power efficient manner, even when in "airplane mode", even when the screen is off). Days worth of text could be compressed and sent off in literally dozens of kilobytes. And that's not even accounting for side-channels (a hypothetical targeted attack could conceivably look for "target phrases" and send a single bit of information using a side channel to some server to alert that the phrase has been said).
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    I was not aware they have speech transcription co-processors now. That would certainly be a game changer. Back when I used to help the FBI monitor cell phones, they were very slow processors and the user could tell when it was sending anything due to the heat. Best we could do was play with MWI on/off to get cell locations and use the mainframe (cell switch) to do audio monitoring, but that was very limited at the time.
    - Klathmon 7y ago
      I know it's ironic given the topic we're in, but the technology is actually really impressive! The coprocessors are really just ASICs designed to run neural networks efficiently. The real cool shit is in the compression and simplification of the networks that allow constant recognition from a small power-sipping chip. They're also doing a bunch of work with federated machine learning processes. So all of the training data can be kept on the device itself, but they can (i'm grossly oversimplifying this) basically "merge" a full neural net from somewhere else with data learned on-device. It's that last part that I'm extremely interested in, as it means we can have all the benefits of machine learning systems, but also keep all of our privacy in that all the processing happens locally, our training data doesn't need to leave the device at all, and the algorithms can still adapt and improve for each person individually. It apparently also has side effects that the neural network on your device can adapt to your usage individually much faster and more accurately than a "master" neural network ever could.
pnutjam 7y ago
Eventually someone is going to turn up the talking points used to generate these comments.

windexh8er 7y ago

It's very different. My expectation that of my smart phone is that it's not listening unless I want it to (I don't). If I find out it is listening/recording and it's configured not to then I will find an alternative. The "smart speaker", on the other hand, is 100% useless if the microphone is disabled. It also has microphones designed to hear as far away as possible given its design. Finally, the phone in your pocket and watch on your wrist likely handle the audio data very different than that speaker manufacturer. You might find it useful now, but don't discount now you'll ever find it intrusive.

BeetleB 7y ago
>My expectation that of my smart phone is that it's not listening unless I want it to (I don't). If I find out it is listening/recording and it's configured not to then I will find an alternative. >My expectation This is the key phrase here. Just as you have your expectations, Alexa/Home owners have their expectations. And if Alexa owners find out that Amazon/Google is using their inputs in ways they don't want it to, they'll drop it or find an alternative. Different people have different expectations. I was late into the whole smartphone thing, and refused to buy one for years because of the privacy leak it represents (heck, I refused to buy a dumb phone for years for the same reason). Back in those days, I would have been as unsympathetic for your rationale of owning a smartphone as you are of those owning smart speakers. Do you not see that there are different levels of comfort, and not everyone has the same level as you do? Furthermore, do you not see that on that continuum, even you have made compromises?
- zepto 7y ago
  Fair enough, and this is a great argument that the press are failing to sufficiently publicize that Amazon is collecting a repository of these private recording. Without being aware of what is going on, people can’t make these choices for themselves.
- windexh8er 7y ago
  Guess you better find alternatives: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://nos.nl/artikel/2292889-google-medewerkers-luisteren-nederlandse-gesprekken-mee.html&xid=17259,1500004,15700022,15700043,15700186,15700191,15700256,15700259,15700262&usg=ALkJrhhComqKPdEmwe0DXtuhWXimIP_Wtg https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...
wvenable 7y ago
A smart speaker has a tiny CPU designed to listen for the wake word and doesn't even fully power up until that is heard. Sure it's voice but it's the voice equivalent of pressing a record button.
- pjc50 7y ago
  These are also available in some phones, as provided by my employer: https://statics.cirrus.com/pubs/proBulletin/CS47L35_201507.pdf https://statics.cirrus.com/pubs/proBulletin/CS47L35_201507.p...
rando444 7y ago
Your phone microphone can be enabled remotely and the means to do so can be controlled through the baseband processor. The Snowden leaks revealed that this had been an attack vector available and used for years. The method they were using has since been patched, but one would be foolish to think that it has been impossible for interested parties to have found another way to do the same.
- windexh8er 7y ago
  I don't think my point was well understood based on your counterargument. What I'm saying is the expectation of a smart phone is that voice assistance is an option. That was my point to OP. Smart speakers are useless sans listening. They are not one and the same in their use case or normal operation. I'm also not disputing there are baseband controls a nefarious entity could abuse but I'm saying that people who choose to trust Amazon with always listening devices vs a smart phone are not comparing apples to apples.

_Codemonkeyism 7y ago

What Smartphone is listening all the time and sending the voice data to some people to listen in?

Klathmon 7y ago
I don't think Alexa nor the Google homes listen and send data to the respective "motherships" at all times. Both do local processing for the keywords until it hears one then sends the following data (and I believe a few seconds prior) to the servers for processing. My phone works the exact same way with the Google assistant. I don't know if other "assistants" (like Bixby) work the same way.
LinuxBender 7y ago
The smartphone is their; I mean, your GPS tracker for machine learning movement behavior. Voice (various project names), Text (SMS gateways) and Data (CarrierIQ) are just a value added bonus. I enjoyed the conversation with Alex Stamos (former CSO at Yahoo/FB), where pointed out that had George Orwell been told that people would willingly pay for a tracking device and keep it on them at all times and powered on at all times, he would not have believed it. I should add, any time I say anything even remotely negative about cell phones, I get beat up here at HN pretty good. This is a very good psychological indication that people have cognitive dissonance and denial around this topic.

LinuxBender 7y ago

You would know if your phone was uploading loads of voice and room data real time. There are of course more subtle ways to do this, but not for real time monitoring. You can transcode the audio with an encoder that does advanced mathematical quantization and batch upload it. If all you care about is human voice, then you could upload an hours worth of audio in a couple hundred kbytes, if even that much.

Klathmon 7y ago
I wouldn't be so sure you'd know. Modern phones have coprocessors that are dedicated to transcribing speech into text in a very power efficient manner (hell, my Pixel phone has a feature which allows it to identify songs playing at all times ins a very power efficient manner, even when in "airplane mode", even when the screen is off). Days worth of text could be compressed and sent off in literally dozens of kilobytes. And that's not even accounting for side-channels (a hypothetical targeted attack could conceivably look for "target phrases" and send a single bit of information using a side channel to some server to alert that the phrase has been said).
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  I was not aware they have speech transcription co-processors now. That would certainly be a game changer. Back when I used to help the FBI monitor cell phones, they were very slow processors and the user could tell when it was sending anything due to the heat. Best we could do was play with MWI on/off to get cell locations and use the mainframe (cell switch) to do audio monitoring, but that was very limited at the time.
  - Klathmon 7y ago
    I know it's ironic given the topic we're in, but the technology is actually really impressive! The coprocessors are really just ASICs designed to run neural networks efficiently. The real cool shit is in the compression and simplification of the networks that allow constant recognition from a small power-sipping chip. They're also doing a bunch of work with federated machine learning processes. So all of the training data can be kept on the device itself, but they can (i'm grossly oversimplifying this) basically "merge" a full neural net from somewhere else with data learned on-device. It's that last part that I'm extremely interested in, as it means we can have all the benefits of machine learning systems, but also keep all of our privacy in that all the processing happens locally, our training data doesn't need to leave the device at all, and the algorithms can still adapt and improve for each person individually. It apparently also has side effects that the neural network on your device can adapt to your usage individually much faster and more accurately than a "master" neural network ever could.

pnutjam 7y ago

Eventually someone is going to turn up the talking points used to generate these comments.