5 ms·

How surprised would you be if in 5 years there was a Snowden-type revelation, that yes, the speakers and Facebook/Insta apps, Amazon echo, etc, etc, were listen

How surprised would you be if in 5 years there was a Snowden-type revelation, that yes, the speakers and Facebook/Insta apps, Amazon echo, etc, etc, were listening all the time? Sorry. And that there was a secret court ruling that meant all that data was live-streamed to NSA Utah. Not surprised at all, is the answer.

jasonvorhe 6y ago
I'd like to see the calculation of that bandwidth peak.
- feralimal 6y ago
  It might not be as high as you think, if they are processing the data and sending a summary over, rather than the raw sound file.
  - weehoo 6y ago
    Dragon Naturally Speaking ran on clients without network access in the 90s. A given household might have 20,000 words spoken in a day. With speech to text, then compression, this would be a 20kb network request. If you only sent data once a month the data/day could likely be reduced even further. This could easily be Trojan-horsed alongside valid requests without anyone noticing.
    - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
      As a CE I’m glad some people get this. I see all the posts here about “we could it’s not listening by looking at encrypted traffic amounts” or “it can’t do local speech recognition” or “they wouldn’t do that!” and want to bang my head against the wall. These devices can absolutely be abusing trust - it’s not even unlikely to some degree.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > “it can’t do local speech recognition” Yeah, I'm surprised about it too. ~13 years ago, I've been running my own completely off-line speech recognition system on a cheap PC to control music in my room. With a microphone mounted on a wardrobe. With very little pre-training, it worked pretty much flawlessly, and it could recognize commands over very loud music. And I built it in few afternoons using MS Speech API, which was included with the OS. That's why I don't buy "you need the cloud for speech recognition" arguments in general. And in context of this discussion, it means you could absolutely snoop on people through local speech-to-text on low-powered devices - particularly if you limit yourself to a set of keywords (vs. free-form dictation). And for usual profiling&advertising, a set of keywords (that can be updated over time) is more than enough - you could learn from it e.g. whether people talk about product X or politician Y in the household.
        Izkata 6y ago
        > ~13 years ago Beyond that, closer to 20 years ago, I remember on Win98 experimenting with an offline speech-to-text program I'd downloaded from somewhere. It required training, but I remember it being pretty accurate - I just didn't find a use for it because we had one shared desktop and I'd be annoying everyone else in the room. I think it was called Vox, or something like that...
        squarefoot 6y ago
        And 25 years ago there was that IBM card that allowed realtime voice recognition on a 486, no connection required. At the presentation I saw at IBM, the operator loaded a word processor, wrote a letter, saved it as an image, sent it as a fax, received it on a second machine and printed it without moving a finger. I also seem to remember one machine ran OS/2 Warp and the other one Windows. It wasn't that fast for sure, and she had to correct some errors, but the point is that if done on dedicated hardware (FPGAs?) the performance can be a lot higher than on software. A lot of powerful hardware can be fitted into those assistants, and unless they fully open source them, there's no way to know what they do and what they could do if instructed to.
        6y ago
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      These products required careful training to recognize one persons specific speech. They weren’t the quality we are used to today.
imglorp 6y ago
Some are for certain. The Samsung TV's for example explicitly do it and they have advised you not to have private conversations where the TV can hear you. https://imgur.com/Phy1uzX https://imgur.com/Phy1uzX
- mjangle1985 6y ago
  Welp I'm never buying a Samsung TV now. Stinks cause when I sold TV's for a living I love their products.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
changoplatanero 6y ago
As someone who has worked on speech recognition at several of these companies I'm quite certain that they are not listening all the time
- gentleman11 6y ago
  How certain are you that the long term game plan is not 24/7 listening? They seek to monitor you every other way and push the envelope relentlessly
  - changoplatanero 6y ago
    that information is just not that valuable. I think this myth that the companies are listening 24/7 comes from an egotistical mindset that everything you say must be interesting.
    - jhloa2 6y ago
      What a callous view point. It's true that most of what the majority of people say is not that interesting, but there's plenty of people who do have conversations that are valuable for 3rd parties to listen in to. Throw a big enough net and you begin to capture a lot of these
jankiehodgpodge 6y ago
I mean it's pretty easy to prove that's not true. Just stick it on a network and check the network traffic. The bandwidth required to do that would be immense anyway for basically no benefit.
- dr_kiszonka 6y ago
  Is there a simple app that notifies users about changes in internet traffic patterns of IoT devices on their networks?
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    You can't trust the devices themselves to tell you that, so the best approach is to put them behind a (hardware) firewall that protects both ways, not just from external connections but also to prevent devices to call home if their behavior is unclear.
  - wil421 6y ago
    Yes UniFi by Ubiquiti. There’s a price for admission.
- callmeal 6y ago
  >I mean it's pretty easy to prove that's not true. Just stick it on a network and check the network traffic. It's pretty easy to hide that network traffic too. Just save/compress everything to the local device and pipe it over when the phone/app is being used. (ever wonder why those apps take up so much memory and use up so much battery?).

jasonvorhe 6y ago

I'd like to see the calculation of that bandwidth peak.

feralimal 6y ago
It might not be as high as you think, if they are processing the data and sending a summary over, rather than the raw sound file.
- weehoo 6y ago
  Dragon Naturally Speaking ran on clients without network access in the 90s. A given household might have 20,000 words spoken in a day. With speech to text, then compression, this would be a 20kb network request. If you only sent data once a month the data/day could likely be reduced even further. This could easily be Trojan-horsed alongside valid requests without anyone noticing.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    As a CE I’m glad some people get this. I see all the posts here about “we could it’s not listening by looking at encrypted traffic amounts” or “it can’t do local speech recognition” or “they wouldn’t do that!” and want to bang my head against the wall. These devices can absolutely be abusing trust - it’s not even unlikely to some degree.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > “it can’t do local speech recognition” Yeah, I'm surprised about it too. ~13 years ago, I've been running my own completely off-line speech recognition system on a cheap PC to control music in my room. With a microphone mounted on a wardrobe. With very little pre-training, it worked pretty much flawlessly, and it could recognize commands over very loud music. And I built it in few afternoons using MS Speech API, which was included with the OS. That's why I don't buy "you need the cloud for speech recognition" arguments in general. And in context of this discussion, it means you could absolutely snoop on people through local speech-to-text on low-powered devices - particularly if you limit yourself to a set of keywords (vs. free-form dictation). And for usual profiling&advertising, a set of keywords (that can be updated over time) is more than enough - you could learn from it e.g. whether people talk about product X or politician Y in the household.
      - Izkata 6y ago
        > ~13 years ago Beyond that, closer to 20 years ago, I remember on Win98 experimenting with an offline speech-to-text program I'd downloaded from somewhere. It required training, but I remember it being pretty accurate - I just didn't find a use for it because we had one shared desktop and I'd be annoying everyone else in the room. I think it was called Vox, or something like that...
        squarefoot 6y ago
        And 25 years ago there was that IBM card that allowed realtime voice recognition on a 486, no connection required. At the presentation I saw at IBM, the operator loaded a word processor, wrote a letter, saved it as an image, sent it as a fax, received it on a second machine and printed it without moving a finger. I also seem to remember one machine ran OS/2 Warp and the other one Windows. It wasn't that fast for sure, and she had to correct some errors, but the point is that if done on dedicated hardware (FPGAs?) the performance can be a lot higher than on software. A lot of powerful hardware can be fitted into those assistants, and unless they fully open source them, there's no way to know what they do and what they could do if instructed to.
        6y ago
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    These products required careful training to recognize one persons specific speech. They weren’t the quality we are used to today.

imglorp 6y ago

Some are for certain. The Samsung TV's for example explicitly do it and they have advised you not to have private conversations where the TV can hear you. https://imgur.com/Phy1uzX https://imgur.com/Phy1uzX

mjangle1985 6y ago
Welp I'm never buying a Samsung TV now. Stinks cause when I sold TV's for a living I love their products.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

changoplatanero 6y ago

As someone who has worked on speech recognition at several of these companies I'm quite certain that they are not listening all the time

gentleman11 6y ago
How certain are you that the long term game plan is not 24/7 listening? They seek to monitor you every other way and push the envelope relentlessly
- changoplatanero 6y ago
  that information is just not that valuable. I think this myth that the companies are listening 24/7 comes from an egotistical mindset that everything you say must be interesting.
  - jhloa2 6y ago
    What a callous view point. It's true that most of what the majority of people say is not that interesting, but there's plenty of people who do have conversations that are valuable for 3rd parties to listen in to. Throw a big enough net and you begin to capture a lot of these

jankiehodgpodge 6y ago

I mean it's pretty easy to prove that's not true. Just stick it on a network and check the network traffic. The bandwidth required to do that would be immense anyway for basically no benefit.

dr_kiszonka 6y ago
Is there a simple app that notifies users about changes in internet traffic patterns of IoT devices on their networks?
- squarefoot 6y ago
  You can't trust the devices themselves to tell you that, so the best approach is to put them behind a (hardware) firewall that protects both ways, not just from external connections but also to prevent devices to call home if their behavior is unclear.
- wil421 6y ago
  Yes UniFi by Ubiquiti. There’s a price for admission.
callmeal 6y ago
>I mean it's pretty easy to prove that's not true. Just stick it on a network and check the network traffic. It's pretty easy to hide that network traffic too. Just save/compress everything to the local device and pipe it over when the phone/app is being used. (ever wonder why those apps take up so much memory and use up so much battery?).