8 ms·

Alexa et al are also normalizing "always on microphone that sends audio to a remote business over the internet" technology. According to the bright-line rule fr

by pdkl95 7y ago

Alexa et al are also normalizing "always on microphone that sends audio to a remote business over the internet" technology. According to the bright-line rule from Kyllo v United States[1], when a technology is "in general public use"[2], police no longer need a warrant when they use their own devices based on that technology to see the "details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion"[3]. [1] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/533/27.html https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/533/27.html [2] Used throughout the ruling[1], but especially section II of Justice Stevens' dissent. [3] The ruling[1], 2nd paragraph

Touche 7y ago
The thing in your pocket is always listening too.
- Foober223 7y ago
  Supposedly your smart phone and smart TV are not passively listening to your offline conversations. That's only done on a targeted basis to people who are being monitored. Your location history however is being passively tracked. Not defending it, but your smart phone is not quite as bad as Alexa. At least for the moment.
  - lima 7y ago
    Many Android phones have always-on "Ok Google" hotword detection that works exactly like the standalone devices. Source: Mine does, very useful!
    - wolco 7y ago
      No one who cares about privacy would turn that on.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - mentat 7y ago
        And that's not the standard but rather in general use.
      - friendlybus 7y ago
        Steve Jobs said in an inteview that Apple did pretty well on the privacy thing. He wanted to ask the user for permission to access private data, others wanted to take it all without asking. That gives me enough information to guess there's people who would make apps that take the private data without asking, whether the option to turn off privacy feature blocks them all or not is the question.
      - beatgammit 7y ago
        Sure, and nobody who cares about privacy would own an always on smart home device from Amazon or Google. But you don't always know if one of those devices is listening, such a when going to a friend's house.
      - rapind 7y ago
        Maybe you do care but your significant other or roommate doesn't (and doesn't want to understand because... inconvenient). Thank Google / Amazon for creating drama where none existed.
        Silhouette 7y ago
        Maybe you do care but your significant other or roommate doesn't (and doesn't want to understand because... inconvenient). This is possibly the biggest single problem with modern surveillance/privacy culture. The idea of requiring an individual's consent to something that is potentially a risk for them is laudable, but it's also largely a symbolic gesture when some of the largest and most powerful organisations in the world are duping all of their friends into providing much the same information without their consent or even necessarily their knowledge anyway. The whole business model is fundamentally flawed, and privacy laws are a long way from catching up.
    - Benjamin_Dobell 7y ago
      You'll note that "OK, Google" works when your phone is on flight mode. Google aren't constantly sending your microphone data to their servers, the recognition of that phrase happens on your device.
      - rpdillon 7y ago
        Wake word recognition happens on-device with Alexa as well.
      - lima 7y ago
        Yes, they can't constantly send microphone data even if they wanted due to power constraints. They use a dedicated DSP chip with the sole purpose of detecting the hot word.
        rolph 7y ago
        then stabb the mic afew dozen times, and feed the hotword to the DSP with a button, or better yet use another DSP to bridge your own custom interface to the "hotword sniffer" typing to an alexa device should be an option, just like having an AI chat.
      - rndgermandude 7y ago
        Mine was activated many times in the past when it shouldn't have been, e.g. while watching TV (no, nobody said "OK Google"), and my mom has a tendency to somehow activate my phone by just talking... Once it is activated, it starts recording and sending audio data to google. Every such device has a false positive rate on keyphrase activations, and of course the do, there is only limited processing available in those phones (that also try to conserve power), and people tend to mumble sometimes so you have to be a little generous and balance false positives against false negatives - the latter of which people refer to as "shit don't work". Devices in lawyers' home offices aren't any different. And if the device encounters a false positive and activates, somewhere on some server some recording of your confidential conversation may get stored. Or worse, you buy 100 copies of "The Art of the Deal" off amazon by accident. Even worse if your client's name, or their wife's or mom's name, is Alexa... or Alexandra/Alexander, which also cause a lot of false positive activations, or so I heard from a friend of a friend with that name.
  - javagram 7y ago
    iPhones support “Hey Siri” 24/7 unless you turn it off. (As someone else said, google phones support “OK Google” as well) The only additional danger from an Alexa device is that you are trusting amazon as well, but the core functionality of an Alexa device to always listen for the wake word and communicate to a server if it thinks it heard the wake word locally is the same as what most smartphones have.
    - nitrogen 7y ago
      The activation word is supposed to be processed on the local device before audio is streamed to servers. I still disable it.
      - daveFNbuck 7y ago
        That's also how the smart speakers are supposed to work.
  - zabana 7y ago
    > That's only done on a targeted basis to people who are being monitored. Your location history however is being passively tracked. Except Amazon was caught with their hands in the cookie jar listening on 'regular' people's private conversations on more than one occasion.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Can you share more details?
      - bluemooner 7y ago
        A quick search online yields the following [1] with an associated discussion on HN [2]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-you-on-alexa-a-global-team-reviews-audio https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513
- pdkl95 7y ago
  The only things in my pocket are my wallet and keys. My phone[1] could probably be used for remote surveillance, but without a warrant, that's a crime. Note: intent and expectations matter. A cellphone by itself (without any type of "voice assistant" app or feature) is only intended to record audio when it's being used to make a call. Yes, malicious actors or buggy software could enable the microphone, but that's not the expected behavior of the device. Kyllo v United States is all about what the public understands and expects about a technology. [1] https://www.cdw.com/product/att-trimline-210-corded-phone/3043715 https://www.cdw.com/product/att-trimline-210-corded-phone/30...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - capableweb 7y ago
    > The only things in my pocket are my wallet and keys. My phone[1] could probably be used for remote surveillance, but without a warrant, that's a crime. Sure, a bit naive, but I digress. Even if it's illegal, it would be better if it was simply not possible in the first place. It's optionally having that functionality, rather than building solutions considering privacy in the first place. > without any type of "voice assistant" app I don't think you can uninstall Siri or Google Assistant on neither iPhone or Android, so that point is kind of null. Only with root or custom roms you'll be able to do that.
    - nikofeyn 7y ago
      you have to give explicit permissions for those things. google assistant doesn't work on my phone because i never gave it permission to enable that feature.
      - rorykoehler 7y ago
        me neither but i have no way of verifying if this is the truth or not without installing a vpn with a firewall and analysing the logs
      - 7y ago
lima 7y ago
How so? The ruling is about agents using thermal imaging technology to bust a marijuana plantation, performed from a car on a public street. The court stated that this does not constitute a search, since any random citizen could've done the same thing using commodity equipment. Always on microphones that transmit via the internet (i.e. bugs) have been a commodity for... a few decades? But you still cannot legally bug your neighbor's apartment.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- californical 7y ago
  But if they set up their own microphones in their home that are accessible through a public IP address, you can play the audio that they bugged themself with
- pdkl95 7y ago
  > The court stated that this does not constitute a search From the court's opinion (the above [1]): >> ... obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the home's interior that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical "intrusion into a constitutionally protected area," constitutes a search--at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use. >> Based on this criterion, the information obtained by the thermal imager in this case was the product of a search. >> the imaging in this case was an unlawful search
  - akerl_ 7y ago
    You’re subtly altering the meaning of “in general public use”. As used in the court’s opinion, they’re drawing a distinction between whether the average person could perform this activity against another person. If the average person carried around thermal imaging tech that would have been capable of performing the same actions as the police, it would have not constituted an unlawful search. Extrapolating that to say that if the average person chooses to use always-on microphones to record themselves inside their homes, the police can record people inside their homes, is not an equivalent argument. It is totally viable to say that because so many people have the ability to record conversations in public places, the police can record conversations in public places. But that’s not the same thing at all.
rtkwe 7y ago
Those were about using devices from outside the home though. Physically going inside a home and planting a microphone. Installing something like this into a house by law enforcement would still be a step beyond that ruling.
dehrmann 7y ago
Supposedly they use on-device AI to recognize "OK, Google," "Hey, Alexa," etc., then send the following command over the internet. Supposedly.
- sib 7y ago
  The wake-word spotting for "Alexa," "Computer," and "Echo" is done on-device. I wouldn't call it AI in any meaningful sense of the word. Source: worked on project for ~3 years.
  - aledalgrande 7y ago
    Wonder if the whole voice recognition could be done on device? No voice sent over the net, firmware updates to improve recognition. Then just call the needed APIs to activate services etc.
    - dwighttk 7y ago
      What I don’t understand is that my Apple Watch definitely recognizes “hey Siri” and then does speech to text without internet access, but then (sometimes) cannot execute the command without internet access. That last part seems like the easiest.
      - dehrmann 7y ago
        No, that's the hardest. Intent recognition is significantly harder than text-to-speech.
        dwighttk 7y ago
        Couldn’t it save: When text is “start outdoor walk” then start an outdoor walk workout... to the watch?
bdowling 7y ago
> [3] The ruling[1], 2nd paragraph You cited the summary, which may be useful but isn’t legally binding. The actual opinion starts after “Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court.” Also, Kyllo isn’t relevant to your concerns. A microphone and radio which picks up audio and transmits it is a technology which has been around for more than 60 years. Use of that technology has been addressed by the court in Katz and its predecessors, which collectively found that warrantless use by the police of such tech is often prohibited by the fourth amendment. A more relevant question is whether the fourth amendment would allow police to access records stored by Amazon in the case of conversations picked up by Alexa devices. Usually, such data is fair game (third-party doctrine), but there are some constitutional restrictions (See e.g., *Carpenter v. U.S., 2018). However, even if there were no restrictions, the question is probably moot because other laws (Wiretap Act, Stored Communications Act) restrict police behavior. Basically everyone believes that these restrictions apply to Alexa recordings. Recently there was a case in which a police department served Amazon with a subpoena for Alexa recordings from the scene of a suspected murder. I don’t remember the outcome in that case, but that too is irrelevant to concerns about warrantless collecting or searching of Alexa data, because there a warrant was or could have been obtained.
Nasrudith 7y ago
That sounds like an out of context composite of concepts of dubious context. It was in the context of 'search vs in plain view' as distinctions and general availability was meant in terms of what was acceptable for technology to count as in 'plain view'. The thermals were 'in plain view' technically but given that the technology was highly expensive and of limited application it was clearly disingenuous if the general public couldn't access it. Essentially the argument is that just because a signal is emitted doesn't mean that the police have an automatic right to observe or decode it beyond a common observer. Essentially if they had patrol bots on the street with human level hearing it is still 'in plain view' levels. If they started pointing parabolic microphones or laser mikes at people's houses that would be beyond plain view and into an outright search. If that suggested interpretation jurisprudence were applied then audio bugs should have long been perfectly legal and not a search as nearly-everyone is already capable of hearing sounds and remembering them.

by pdkl95 7y ago

Touche 7y ago

The thing in your pocket is always listening too.

Foober223 7y ago
Supposedly your smart phone and smart TV are not passively listening to your offline conversations. That's only done on a targeted basis to people who are being monitored. Your location history however is being passively tracked. Not defending it, but your smart phone is not quite as bad as Alexa. At least for the moment.
- lima 7y ago
  Many Android phones have always-on "Ok Google" hotword detection that works exactly like the standalone devices. Source: Mine does, very useful!
  - wolco 7y ago
    No one who cares about privacy would turn that on.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - mentat 7y ago
      And that's not the standard but rather in general use.
    - friendlybus 7y ago
      Steve Jobs said in an inteview that Apple did pretty well on the privacy thing. He wanted to ask the user for permission to access private data, others wanted to take it all without asking. That gives me enough information to guess there's people who would make apps that take the private data without asking, whether the option to turn off privacy feature blocks them all or not is the question.
    - beatgammit 7y ago
      Sure, and nobody who cares about privacy would own an always on smart home device from Amazon or Google. But you don't always know if one of those devices is listening, such a when going to a friend's house.
    - rapind 7y ago
      Maybe you do care but your significant other or roommate doesn't (and doesn't want to understand because... inconvenient). Thank Google / Amazon for creating drama where none existed.
      - Silhouette 7y ago
        Maybe you do care but your significant other or roommate doesn't (and doesn't want to understand because... inconvenient). This is possibly the biggest single problem with modern surveillance/privacy culture. The idea of requiring an individual's consent to something that is potentially a risk for them is laudable, but it's also largely a symbolic gesture when some of the largest and most powerful organisations in the world are duping all of their friends into providing much the same information without their consent or even necessarily their knowledge anyway. The whole business model is fundamentally flawed, and privacy laws are a long way from catching up.
  - Benjamin_Dobell 7y ago
    You'll note that "OK, Google" works when your phone is on flight mode. Google aren't constantly sending your microphone data to their servers, the recognition of that phrase happens on your device.
    - rpdillon 7y ago
      Wake word recognition happens on-device with Alexa as well.
    - lima 7y ago
      Yes, they can't constantly send microphone data even if they wanted due to power constraints. They use a dedicated DSP chip with the sole purpose of detecting the hot word.
      - rolph 7y ago
        then stabb the mic afew dozen times, and feed the hotword to the DSP with a button, or better yet use another DSP to bridge your own custom interface to the "hotword sniffer" typing to an alexa device should be an option, just like having an AI chat.
    - rndgermandude 7y ago
      Mine was activated many times in the past when it shouldn't have been, e.g. while watching TV (no, nobody said "OK Google"), and my mom has a tendency to somehow activate my phone by just talking... Once it is activated, it starts recording and sending audio data to google. Every such device has a false positive rate on keyphrase activations, and of course the do, there is only limited processing available in those phones (that also try to conserve power), and people tend to mumble sometimes so you have to be a little generous and balance false positives against false negatives - the latter of which people refer to as "shit don't work". Devices in lawyers' home offices aren't any different. And if the device encounters a false positive and activates, somewhere on some server some recording of your confidential conversation may get stored. Or worse, you buy 100 copies of "The Art of the Deal" off amazon by accident. Even worse if your client's name, or their wife's or mom's name, is Alexa... or Alexandra/Alexander, which also cause a lot of false positive activations, or so I heard from a friend of a friend with that name.
- javagram 7y ago
  iPhones support “Hey Siri” 24/7 unless you turn it off. (As someone else said, google phones support “OK Google” as well) The only additional danger from an Alexa device is that you are trusting amazon as well, but the core functionality of an Alexa device to always listen for the wake word and communicate to a server if it thinks it heard the wake word locally is the same as what most smartphones have.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    The activation word is supposed to be processed on the local device before audio is streamed to servers. I still disable it.
    - daveFNbuck 7y ago
      That's also how the smart speakers are supposed to work.
- zabana 7y ago
  > That's only done on a targeted basis to people who are being monitored. Your location history however is being passively tracked. Except Amazon was caught with their hands in the cookie jar listening on 'regular' people's private conversations on more than one occasion.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Can you share more details?
    - bluemooner 7y ago
      A quick search online yields the following [1] with an associated discussion on HN [2]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-you-on-alexa-a-global-team-reviews-audio https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513
pdkl95 7y ago
The only things in my pocket are my wallet and keys. My phone[1] could probably be used for remote surveillance, but without a warrant, that's a crime. Note: intent and expectations matter. A cellphone by itself (without any type of "voice assistant" app or feature) is only intended to record audio when it's being used to make a call. Yes, malicious actors or buggy software could enable the microphone, but that's not the expected behavior of the device. Kyllo v United States is all about what the public understands and expects about a technology. [1] https://www.cdw.com/product/att-trimline-210-corded-phone/3043715 https://www.cdw.com/product/att-trimline-210-corded-phone/30...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- capableweb 7y ago
  > The only things in my pocket are my wallet and keys. My phone[1] could probably be used for remote surveillance, but without a warrant, that's a crime. Sure, a bit naive, but I digress. Even if it's illegal, it would be better if it was simply not possible in the first place. It's optionally having that functionality, rather than building solutions considering privacy in the first place. > without any type of "voice assistant" app I don't think you can uninstall Siri or Google Assistant on neither iPhone or Android, so that point is kind of null. Only with root or custom roms you'll be able to do that.
  - nikofeyn 7y ago
    you have to give explicit permissions for those things. google assistant doesn't work on my phone because i never gave it permission to enable that feature.
    - rorykoehler 7y ago
      me neither but i have no way of verifying if this is the truth or not without installing a vpn with a firewall and analysing the logs
    - 7y ago

lima 7y ago

How so? The ruling is about agents using thermal imaging technology to bust a marijuana plantation, performed from a car on a public street. The court stated that this does not constitute a search, since any random citizen could've done the same thing using commodity equipment. Always on microphones that transmit via the internet (i.e. bugs) have been a commodity for... a few decades? But you still cannot legally bug your neighbor's apartment.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
californical 7y ago
But if they set up their own microphones in their home that are accessible through a public IP address, you can play the audio that they bugged themself with
pdkl95 7y ago
> The court stated that this does not constitute a search From the court's opinion (the above [1]): >> ... obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the home's interior that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical "intrusion into a constitutionally protected area," constitutes a search--at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use. >> Based on this criterion, the information obtained by the thermal imager in this case was the product of a search. >> the imaging in this case was an unlawful search
- akerl_ 7y ago
  You’re subtly altering the meaning of “in general public use”. As used in the court’s opinion, they’re drawing a distinction between whether the average person could perform this activity against another person. If the average person carried around thermal imaging tech that would have been capable of performing the same actions as the police, it would have not constituted an unlawful search. Extrapolating that to say that if the average person chooses to use always-on microphones to record themselves inside their homes, the police can record people inside their homes, is not an equivalent argument. It is totally viable to say that because so many people have the ability to record conversations in public places, the police can record conversations in public places. But that’s not the same thing at all.

rtkwe 7y ago

Those were about using devices from outside the home though. Physically going inside a home and planting a microphone. Installing something like this into a house by law enforcement would still be a step beyond that ruling.

dehrmann 7y ago

Supposedly they use on-device AI to recognize "OK, Google," "Hey, Alexa," etc., then send the following command over the internet. Supposedly.

sib 7y ago
The wake-word spotting for "Alexa," "Computer," and "Echo" is done on-device. I wouldn't call it AI in any meaningful sense of the word. Source: worked on project for ~3 years.
- aledalgrande 7y ago
  Wonder if the whole voice recognition could be done on device? No voice sent over the net, firmware updates to improve recognition. Then just call the needed APIs to activate services etc.
  - dwighttk 7y ago
    What I don’t understand is that my Apple Watch definitely recognizes “hey Siri” and then does speech to text without internet access, but then (sometimes) cannot execute the command without internet access. That last part seems like the easiest.
    - dehrmann 7y ago
      No, that's the hardest. Intent recognition is significantly harder than text-to-speech.
      - dwighttk 7y ago
        Couldn’t it save: When text is “start outdoor walk” then start an outdoor walk workout... to the watch?

bdowling 7y ago

> [3] The ruling[1], 2nd paragraph You cited the summary, which may be useful but isn’t legally binding. The actual opinion starts after “Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court.” Also, Kyllo isn’t relevant to your concerns. A microphone and radio which picks up audio and transmits it is a technology which has been around for more than 60 years. Use of that technology has been addressed by the court in Katz and its predecessors, which collectively found that warrantless use by the police of such tech is often prohibited by the fourth amendment. A more relevant question is whether the fourth amendment would allow police to access records stored by Amazon in the case of conversations picked up by Alexa devices. Usually, such data is fair game (third-party doctrine), but there are some constitutional restrictions (See e.g., *Carpenter v. U.S., 2018). However, even if there were no restrictions, the question is probably moot because other laws (Wiretap Act, Stored Communications Act) restrict police behavior. Basically everyone believes that these restrictions apply to Alexa recordings. Recently there was a case in which a police department served Amazon with a subpoena for Alexa recordings from the scene of a suspected murder. I don’t remember the outcome in that case, but that too is irrelevant to concerns about warrantless collecting or searching of Alexa data, because there a warrant was or could have been obtained.

Nasrudith 7y ago

That sounds like an out of context composite of concepts of dubious context. It was in the context of 'search vs in plain view' as distinctions and general availability was meant in terms of what was acceptable for technology to count as in 'plain view'. The thermals were 'in plain view' technically but given that the technology was highly expensive and of limited application it was clearly disingenuous if the general public couldn't access it. Essentially the argument is that just because a signal is emitted doesn't mean that the police have an automatic right to observe or decode it beyond a common observer. Essentially if they had patrol bots on the street with human level hearing it is still 'in plain view' levels. If they started pointing parabolic microphones or laser mikes at people's houses that would be beyond plain view and into an outright search. If that suggested interpretation jurisprudence were applied then audio bugs should have long been perfectly legal and not a search as nearly-everyone is already capable of hearing sounds and remembering them.