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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, sam

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.

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.