Even though I like Apple stance on privacy, I always turn off microphone access to apps like 'WhatsApp' and others.
Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
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Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
#212I've told my roommate I'm moving out if he ever buys an Alex/Google/Apple assistant device. I have a microphone and I've been intending to get one of the open source solutions working and just tie it in to mpd, weather and a few other things. But all the processing should really be done on your own device, by hardware you own, software that's open and that you configure, and not send up to someone else's computer (ak…
So what's the story with that phone in your pocket? ;)
you have one, right?
Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
#213Wouldn't that be a crime to record someone without consent and share that to a 3rd party? I would have called the police or is Amazon too big for the law to grasp?
That's an interesting point. In California and some other states, having a device actively recording any conversation without consent from everyone involved is illegal, much less sharing it.
Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I gather, if you need fine-grained location information in a building, you can do this without cameras and just a handful of strategically placed wireless access points. Less likely to be seen as creepy and such systems already exist. If you just need 'is a person in this room' or 'how many people are in this room' levels of data, solutions to this problem have existed for decades. No need to over complicat…
This assumes you don't leave your phone in the charger as you wander around your house.
If you are cleaver you can use the wifi signals as a radar and find people/objects even when they don't have a wifi device on them.
I'm pretty sure all current technology only works with the have a wifi decide on your person. It is significantly easier to do this and for the most part good enough.
Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
#215I've told my roommate I'm moving out if he ever buys an Alex/Google/Apple assistant device. I have a microphone and I've been intending to get one of the open source solutions working and just tie it in to mpd, weather and a few other things. But all the processing should really be done on your own device, by hardware you own, software that's open and that you configure, and not send up to someone else's computer (ak…
You may be interested in https://mycroft.ai/
Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from cell tower location tracking, you’d know because it would absolutely tank the battery life of your pocket computer.
I doubt it. Recording audio is pretty cheap. Lots of smartphones can now do continuous “wake word” listening just like smart speakers while on battery power.
"Pretty cheap" is still likely an order of magnitude or more than actual standby, and using a small ring buffer to identify a pre-established wake word is similarly going to be cheap compared to actually streaming audio to disk.
If you actually care, this would be pretty trivial to verify using an oscilloscope to observe the energy draw from the battery while different things are said around your device.
Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm skeptical of the "wake word" idea now. As nerds, it makes sense to us to do local wake recognition and only upload a request phrase after that. But in reality, this not the first time[1] we've learned that continuous speech was getting uploaded. Charitably, it could be a mistake, maybe the previous request never terminated and it just kept streaming. But again, not the first time. More likely, my opinion, is ther…
What's with using the tickers over just typing Google or Amazon?
Mainly it gives people an opportunity to get Apple's ticker wrong (AAPL is correct, APPL is very commonly misused).
Re: Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
#218Google let me listen to my own queries following, "okay, google." Mostly they were reasonable, but sometimes it heard "okay google" in what sounded to me like regular driving noise. It's a good reminder that even though we've trained computers to recognize sounds and images, we didn't train them to listen & see the way that we do. The mistakes that these algorithms make need not be anything like the mistakes that a person would make.