7 ms·
The thing in your pocket is always listening too.
by Touche 7y ago
The thing in your pocket is always listening too.
- Foober223 7y agoSupposedly 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 agoMany Android phones have always-on "Ok Google" hotword detection that works exactly like the standalone devices. Source: Mine does, very useful!
- wolco 7y agoNo one who cares about privacy would turn that on.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mentat 7y agoAnd that's not the standard but rather in general use.
- friendlybus 7y agoSteve 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 agoSure, 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 agoMaybe 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 agoMaybe 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.
- wolco 7y agoChoose friends and partners wisely. If your roommate is doing something to endanger you let them know or change roommates. What if they were doing hard drugs? Would you live under the fear of cops busting down the door?
- Benjamin_Dobell 7y agoYou'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 agoWake word recognition happens on-device with Alexa as well.
- lima 7y agoYes, 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 agothen 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 agoMine 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 agoiPhones 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 agoThe activation word is supposed to be processed on the local device before audio is streamed to servers. I still disable it.
- daveFNbuck 7y agoThat'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 agoCan you share more details?
- bluemooner 7y agoA 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 agoThe 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 agoyou 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 agome 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