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They mention Google in the first sentence. I think it's important to not overly freak out about these home assistants. Your phone company or video conferencin

They mention Google in the first sentence. I think it's important to not overly freak out about these home assistants. Your phone company or video conferencing company is already listening to your confidential client calls. Your email provider is reading your email. Your internal applications run on Amazon's servers. Your upstairs neighbor has their ear to the floor. I think lawyers are used to thinking "as long as it's not in writing, we're okay", but with speech recognition getting better and better, your phone calls / VCs are going to show up in court someday.

take_a_breath 7y ago
Your phone or video conference company is providing the platform that allows you to have the conversation in the first place. Same with your email provider, same with applications running on the cloud. Those are the infrastructure We pay monthly to support business and communication. If my neighbor was listening to my conversations AND running the third largest ad platform on the internet, it would alarm me. These aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons.
- jrockway 7y ago
  I think in all cases the service provider has a pretty strong incentive to not violate your trust. You'll cancel your Zoom subscription if they start feeding your meetings to the person that sues. You'll stop buying from Amazon if Alexa starts feeding your meetings to the entity you're engaged in litigation with. In both cases, the incentive exists to keep your confidential meetings confidential. But, incentives are not crypto. There is probably nothing nefarious going on, but if you use open-source software with strong cryptography, a service provider that wants to be nefarious is simply unable to do so. That is what lawyers should be aiming for; freaking out about Alexa is a feel-good stopgap at best.
  - take_a_breath 7y ago
    Is this really an example of “freaking out”? ==“Perhaps we’re being slightly paranoid but we need to have a lot of trust in these organizations and these devices,” Hancock said. “We’d rather not take those risks.”== Seems like a pretty reasonable measure and advice. The baseline assumption you make is that you know the who, what, where and when of Amazon sharing data. Does Amazon actually have an incentive not to violate your trust? You could make the same argument about Facebook and they have routinely violated users trust. It seems the real lesson is that without legal protection for consumers, companies will continue operating in the gray area.
mtsr 7y ago
It wasn’t always the case that teleconferencing providers could listen in. At least Skype was peer-to-peer originally. And only corporate firewalls and some bad providers would prevent it from working today. My email provider surely isn’t reading my mail, but then again, I seem to be in a minority that doesn’t use gmail. The threat of real-time speech-to-text is real, but police all over the world have made the mistake of spying on lawyers now and then.
- malux85 7y ago
  Which email provider do you use?
  - a3n 7y ago
    Fastmail for me.
  - mtsr 7y ago
    I use a smallish independent provider in NL.
    - malux85 7y ago
      What's it called?
_jal 7y ago
I agree, freaking out is pointless. You treat these things as third-party listening devices - bugs, because that is exactly what they are, and adjust your conversation accordingly unless/until it is unplugged. Look at it from a lawyer's perspective: imagine your privileged conversation with your client did leak. Your client sues you. If there was a surveillance speaker in the room it doesn't matter if it leaked because of it. You just demonstrated extreme lack of care by discussing privileged information in front of a networked microphone.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
perl4ever 7y ago
Voice mails and instant messages have been produced in court cases for many years. Even some famous cases have hinged on that. There's also a thing where if a communication is privileged, and you accidentally produce it, you may not be able to unscramble the egg just because in principle it was covered by lawyer-client privilege. So there is a real risk to recording things even if there are rules protecting you.
snvzz 7y ago
>They mention Google in the first sentence. Sure. But the title is what it is.

take_a_breath 7y ago

Your phone or video conference company is providing the platform that allows you to have the conversation in the first place. Same with your email provider, same with applications running on the cloud. Those are the infrastructure We pay monthly to support business and communication. If my neighbor was listening to my conversations AND running the third largest ad platform on the internet, it would alarm me. These aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons.

jrockway 7y ago
I think in all cases the service provider has a pretty strong incentive to not violate your trust. You'll cancel your Zoom subscription if they start feeding your meetings to the person that sues. You'll stop buying from Amazon if Alexa starts feeding your meetings to the entity you're engaged in litigation with. In both cases, the incentive exists to keep your confidential meetings confidential. But, incentives are not crypto. There is probably nothing nefarious going on, but if you use open-source software with strong cryptography, a service provider that wants to be nefarious is simply unable to do so. That is what lawyers should be aiming for; freaking out about Alexa is a feel-good stopgap at best.
- take_a_breath 7y ago
  Is this really an example of “freaking out”? ==“Perhaps we’re being slightly paranoid but we need to have a lot of trust in these organizations and these devices,” Hancock said. “We’d rather not take those risks.”== Seems like a pretty reasonable measure and advice. The baseline assumption you make is that you know the who, what, where and when of Amazon sharing data. Does Amazon actually have an incentive not to violate your trust? You could make the same argument about Facebook and they have routinely violated users trust. It seems the real lesson is that without legal protection for consumers, companies will continue operating in the gray area.

mtsr 7y ago

It wasn’t always the case that teleconferencing providers could listen in. At least Skype was peer-to-peer originally. And only corporate firewalls and some bad providers would prevent it from working today. My email provider surely isn’t reading my mail, but then again, I seem to be in a minority that doesn’t use gmail. The threat of real-time speech-to-text is real, but police all over the world have made the mistake of spying on lawyers now and then.

malux85 7y ago
Which email provider do you use?
- a3n 7y ago
  Fastmail for me.
- mtsr 7y ago
  I use a smallish independent provider in NL.
  - malux85 7y ago
    What's it called?

_jal 7y ago

I agree, freaking out is pointless. You treat these things as third-party listening devices - bugs, because that is exactly what they are, and adjust your conversation accordingly unless/until it is unplugged. Look at it from a lawyer's perspective: imagine your privileged conversation with your client did leak. Your client sues you. If there was a surveillance speaker in the room it doesn't matter if it leaked because of it. You just demonstrated extreme lack of care by discussing privileged information in front of a networked microphone.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

perl4ever 7y ago

Voice mails and instant messages have been produced in court cases for many years. Even some famous cases have hinged on that. There's also a thing where if a communication is privileged, and you accidentally produce it, you may not be able to unscramble the egg just because in principle it was covered by lawyer-client privilege. So there is a real risk to recording things even if there are rules protecting you.

snvzz 7y ago

>They mention Google in the first sentence. Sure. But the title is what it is.