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That’s such a short sighted cop out to a legitimate threat. When you make the argument that “no one said the keyword so it isn’t uploading!”, you aren’t consid
by SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
That’s such a short sighted cop out to a legitimate threat.
When you make the argument that “no one said the keyword so it isn’t uploading!”, you aren’t considering that it’s listening for voices, your voice, your SO’s voice, how many unique voices, what time they are talking, what temperature it is, if there is a TV or music on, what station it’s on via pattern recognition, all manner of meta data that DOES NOT require a keyword or a large outgoing data stream.
It could store meta data for days and dump it with a single MQTT packet which it’s sending all the time, and they’re all encrypted.
We flat out have no idea what these things are doing on the data collection end that doesn’t have to do with someone saying “Alexa” first.
- kennu 7y agoI think you're right, I was only thinking about raw audio being uploaded to the cloud. In the future, there might be more and more local machine learning happening on the devices and the extracted metadata being uploaded unnoticed. On the other hand, I still think people can analyze the hardware and software running on the devices. If there are "black boxes" doing something unknown, we should be worried, particularly if they are always powered on and have the processing capability to analyze audio content. Still, the original claim in the article was that there is a lot of this metadata being uploaded right now. I don't think anybody has verified that claim, even if it could be true.