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So they use power 24/7, do they also listen to what happen in the room? because those brands sure like to spy on what users are watching (even the HDMI in on so
by ta988 9mo ago
So they use power 24/7, do they also listen to what happen in the room? because those brands sure like to spy on what users are watching (even the HDMI in on some of them)
- john-h-k 9mo agoPresumably they don’t secretly listen in to the user because it would be very inefficient, easily detectable (that’s huuuge network traffic and battery drain), and awful PR. I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity
- pluralmonad 9mo agoBut tons of devices do listen. Go read the ToS for any modern hearing aid. They tell you directly that they do constant environment analysis and ship that data home.
- gruez 9mo agoSeems like a stretch to equivocate hearing aid telemetry with smartphones or TVs secretly eavesdropping?
- john-h-k 9mo agoIf a hearing aid was genuinely sending everything it recorded back then it would run out of battery insanely fast. It would also have insanely high network usage
- pluralmonad 9mo agoI do not believe it ships direct audio recording. It is analysis of the audio it processes (at least that is how I read it). Just because it sends lossy compressed data home (analysis output) instead of direct recordings does not mean it isn't listening.
- john-h-k 9mo agoIt just seems really far fetched that thousands of Amazon employees are conspiring to commit an insanely obvious and illegal breach of privacy for data that isn’t even all that useful (hard to analyse, computationally expensive, low signal to noise ratio). And that no one has ever noticed this even when security researchers test these devices
- fidotron 9mo agoCome on, the Alexa devices are designed to do what? They wake up on a keyword, perform some local analysis of the following data, and phone home on an encrypted channel on a regular basis. You quite literally can't tell by watching one what it is doing. You certainly cannot verify that all Alexas are not doing something.
- john-h-k 9mo agoI don’t think Amazon have a vast conspiracy (that no one has whistleblown on!) of secretly & illegally recording audio for advertising. It would be difficult, require huge amounts of processing, probably not help very much, and be incredibly illegal. It wouldn’t give them much value and would be incredibly risky
- fidotron 9mo ago> secretly & illegally recording audio for advertising This is a bizarrely specific thing to attempt to counter argument with.
- tehwebguy 9mo agoAmazon literally invented the class of products that sit in your house and listen to you
- john-h-k 9mo agoYeah of course they do the looped listening to pick up their wake sound. But extrapolating that to “constantly recording and sending that data to Amazon” without evidence is silly. Again, you’d be very easily able to see this just from network usage
- tehwebguy 9mo agoYeah it's more likely done the way ACR is done! https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1izq2oj/how_to_disable_acr_on_your_tv_and_why_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1izq2oj/how_to_dis...
- fidotron 9mo ago> I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity You mean the media stopped talking about it - it has no relation to whether it happens or not.
- brookst 9mo agoI just want to hear about this audio codec that’s so efficient that nobody has seen a single bit being sent.
- torginus 9mo agoHow would you even tell? - Even if you're some hardcore techie, all you'll see is that the TV periodically sends encrypted packets to some AWS IP address.' Also 99% of people don't even know how to do this, and of those that do, 99% won't bother.
- mmmlinux 9mo agoDon't forget the Amazon one has AI to "help you decide which artworks are the best fit for your room." So it 100% has a camera watching you.