4 ms·
The more important question is: how do we know whether these devices (or a particular subset of them) record all the time or only after the trigger word?
by jMyles 7y ago
The more important question is: how do we know whether these devices (or a particular subset of them) record all the time or only after the trigger word?
- jka 7y ago... while also considering the possibility of faulty software updates, bugs, and network attackers -- in an environment where hardware, network protocols, and APIs are proprietary and inscrutable. And would we know if they had been recording unnecessarily?
- cactus2093 7y agoWell they don't have big hard drives, so you can be confident they're not recording everything to disk that then could be unintentionally accessed or sent out later. And you can look at network traffic (e.g. from wifi router stats) to be pretty confident they're not constantly live-streaming audio up to the cloud. Of course most people will not actually do this monitoring themselves, but there are enough of these devices out there that if a significant number started recording constantly somebody would notice pretty quickly. And that would be terrible PR for the company involved, so I think google and amazon and apple have a pretty strong incentive not to do this.
- kadoban 7y agoHow much of a hard drive would they need to do speech-to-text and upload that periodically in with other legitimate traffic? The PR angle isn't that reassuring to me either, they've already absorbed some pretty bad PR hits on these devices and they're still going strong.
- skeletonjelly 7y agoBy a) viewing what they store via their log tools (though this isn't guaranteed to show everything, ie if they are recording everything they couldhide) b) monitoring outbound network connections
- kortilla 7y agoNeither of those things are indicative. Secretly recorded things could be hidden from logs and bundle up recordings with normal voice queries on the network calls.
- nodamage 7y agoRegardless of intent, we know that all three major voice assistant services (Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant) experience false positives and end up accidentally recording conversations when the device thinks the trigger word was spoken, but actually was not.
- swebs 7y agoI'd imagine using something like Wireshark to see how much data it transmits at any given time would be a good start.