4 ms·
its listening for that keyword, whose to say its not listening for others
by gmadsen 7y ago
its listening for that keyword, whose to say its not listening for others
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoAs an EE, this is the exact point of failure I see even from tech people on this topic. There is LITERALLY ZERO way to tell that your “Assistant” is not listening for words like Trump or Sanders then marking down in a log if they were mentioned with other words like “Fucking” or “Communist” or whatever. No one has or realistically can do a full reverse engineer of the firmware here, you’re talking about the same protections used in game consoles and smart phones. The “research” into “is my Alexa spying on me” looks at large pattern encrypted traffic and determines they aren’t always uploading. But they absolutely could be collecting metadata of what you talk about without the words themselves. The meta data of your habits and conversations for a month would be kilobytes at most and sent in a single HTTP/MQTT message that could look a ping or keepalive or some normal traffic.