4 ms·

There is nothing in this report that suggests this is anything more than the record of actual requests to the devices. So no, these devices are not "spying on y

by tensor 6y ago

There is nothing in this report that suggests this is anything more than the record of actual requests to the devices. So no, these devices are not "spying on you". When you send out a request to a 3rd party service, yeah, it's going to be subject to this sort of thing.

danShumway 6y ago
> So no, these devices are not "spying on you". - False positives for smart speakers aren't zero, the 3rd-party contractor controversies from a while back should have already killed this myth. - Most normal people probably aren't thinking about the implications of sending requests to 3rd parties when they set up these devices in their kid's rooms, and the marketing of the devices doesn't make any of that risk clear. - Most normal people outside of HN probably aren't even fully aware of the fact that their recordings are stored for this long. And even if it doesn't technically fall under the banner of "spying", it still has privacy implications, and we should be working to educate both technical and nontechnical people about what those privacy implications are; otherwise they won't be able to make informed choices about what level of risk they feel comfortable taking on. Nontechnical people do not have the instincts or training to think about how device information can be stored, who can recover it, and how that information can be chained together and used against them. It is unambiguously good for publications like Wired to educate them about those risks.
danso 6y ago
Yeah this doesn't seem significantly different than what police can already request of your Internet traffic and search history. It's obviously a privacy issue, but not one of an increased scale...in the way that say, having the devices be switched to always-on-always-transmitting would be, e.g. akin to the FBI breaking into Tony Soprano's basement and planting a wire in his lamp, but being able to do it remotely.

by tensor 6y ago

danShumway 6y ago

> So no, these devices are not "spying on you". - False positives for smart speakers aren't zero, the 3rd-party contractor controversies from a while back should have already killed this myth. - Most normal people probably aren't thinking about the implications of sending requests to 3rd parties when they set up these devices in their kid's rooms, and the marketing of the devices doesn't make any of that risk clear. - Most normal people outside of HN probably aren't even fully aware of the fact that their recordings are stored for this long. And even if it doesn't technically fall under the banner of "spying", it still has privacy implications, and we should be working to educate both technical and nontechnical people about what those privacy implications are; otherwise they won't be able to make informed choices about what level of risk they feel comfortable taking on. Nontechnical people do not have the instincts or training to think about how device information can be stored, who can recover it, and how that information can be chained together and used against them. It is unambiguously good for publications like Wired to educate them about those risks.

danso 6y ago

Yeah this doesn't seem significantly different than what police can already request of your Internet traffic and search history. It's obviously a privacy issue, but not one of an increased scale...in the way that say, having the devices be switched to always-on-always-transmitting would be, e.g. akin to the FBI breaking into Tony Soprano's basement and planting a wire in his lamp, but being able to do it remotely.