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AFAIK a reboot would trigger a reset from mic off to mic on. If true that is a very poor choice for a privacy switch.

by Daho0n 6y ago

dvdkhlng 6y ago
Also a minor hardware re-design may change mic switch behaviour in the future without that change being noticeable to the buyer. You'd really need regular tear-downs of a sufficient sample-size of devices to make sure that you can actually trust newly bought devices with sufficiently high confidence.
- mhaymo 6y ago
  It depends how paranoid you are. If you believe your audio is so valuable that Amazon would create a separate hardware model for you and those like you, and would succeed in keeping that a secret, then yeah you still shouldn't buy an Echo. You will also not want any other always-on devices with microphones and network connections, like a phone or laptop. 99.9% people are not in this category.
  - cool_dude85 6y ago
    I think you may not be worried about targeted attack here necessarily. Suppose for example that Amazon wants to know how many people talk about some topic or brand, and wants to sell that information, but they think that the mute switch will get in the way of collecting the data. All it would take is a relatively small sample - maybe 1/1000 Alexas randomly built in such a way that the mic can't be muted - and they would be able to sell these aggregated statistics with reasonable confidence intervals. Not that I think this is happening, but it is a possible reason I might not trust a single teardown, and it doesn't require worrying about a targeted attack against me personally.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    Presumably the threat isn't a targeted attack by Amazon, but rather that the the hardware mute will get 'value engineered' away in the future to save money.
Johnny555 6y ago
My Echo Studio preserves the mute state on reboot (I just tried it -- I usually keep it muted since I mostly just use it as a smart speaker for Spotify). So I don't know if that makes it more safe or less safe if the mute state can be set either way by the software

AFAIK a reboot would trigger a reset from mic off to mic on. If true that is a very poor choice for a privacy switch.

by Daho0n 6y ago

AFAIK a reboot would trigger a reset from mic off to mic on. If true that is a very poor choice for a privacy switch.

Also a minor hardware re-design may change mic switch behaviour in the future without that change being noticeable to the buyer. You'd really need regular tear-downs of a sufficient sample-size of devices to make sure that you can actually trust newly bought devices with sufficiently high confidence.

mhaymo 6y ago
It depends how paranoid you are. If you believe your audio is so valuable that Amazon would create a separate hardware model for you and those like you, and would succeed in keeping that a secret, then yeah you still shouldn't buy an Echo. You will also not want any other always-on devices with microphones and network connections, like a phone or laptop. 99.9% people are not in this category.
- cool_dude85 6y ago
  I think you may not be worried about targeted attack here necessarily. Suppose for example that Amazon wants to know how many people talk about some topic or brand, and wants to sell that information, but they think that the mute switch will get in the way of collecting the data. All it would take is a relatively small sample - maybe 1/1000 Alexas randomly built in such a way that the mic can't be muted - and they would be able to sell these aggregated statistics with reasonable confidence intervals. Not that I think this is happening, but it is a possible reason I might not trust a single teardown, and it doesn't require worrying about a targeted attack against me personally.
- michaelt 6y ago
  Presumably the threat isn't a targeted attack by Amazon, but rather that the the hardware mute will get 'value engineered' away in the future to save money.

Johnny555 6y ago

My Echo Studio preserves the mute state on reboot (I just tried it -- I usually keep it muted since I mostly just use it as a smart speaker for Spotify). So I don't know if that makes it more safe or less safe if the mute state can be set either way by the software