Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

threatpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 424 posts

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#241

Post by ams6110 »

Kiro wrote: post #214
lisper wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference: having a GPS in my phone means I never have to worry about buying or carrying a map with me ever again, at the cost of potentially revealing my location to someone who I'd rather not know it. Having a voice assistant means I don't have to spend a few seconds typing, at the cost of having everything I say potentially overheard by someone who I'd rather didn't hear it. By my quality metric, th…

You totally underestimate the utility. Getting a voice assistant was life-changing for me. GPS comes nowhere close.

I hate talking to computers, so I don't see a voice assistant in my future ever. I'm in my early 50s by the way, and have been coding since I was in high school.

Maps/navigation is the only reason I even have a smartphone.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#242

Post by mikekchar »

matte_black wrote: post #103
accnumnplus1 wrote: post #12

This is just facebook all over again. Why can't people see trouble-tech? I never used facebook and won't ever use an alexa, nor whatever google's thing is.

The thing is that for most people avoiding this kind of tech and platforms is unlikely to have any kind of payoff for them. Life is too short. Most peoples lives are as simple as going to school and work, raising a family, taking vacations, paying bills, and then passing away. There will never be a moment where they can say “ Yes! My avoidance of Facebook and Alexa for all my life has finally paid off! Hahaha! ” The…

What would you say if the voice recordings were used to offer you differential pricing of items on Amazon? What if they profiled you and charged you 20% more because your speech patterns indicated you had more money? What if they sold this profiling data so that everybody charged you more? What if they shared the data with governments which ended up resulting in you not being able to get stop over visas, etc because you are and "undesirable" person to that government?

I'm not actually suggesting that Amazon does this right now, but it would be pretty easy for them to do so. People should be very worried about this technology and if they choose to use it, they should be absolutely sure the data is being used in a way that doesn't screw them over. Your boring data is absolutely interesting to people who want to abuse you. That's why there's such a big price on it!

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#243

Post by saagarjha »

wavefunction wrote: post #230
saagarjha wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this device grab the current weather and buy things offline?

I believe the intention is providing a voice recognition system you can use to interface with other things, like APIs. Products from Big Data (in my usage like Big Oil, Big Tobacco, etc.) offer convenience at the cost of privacy. For many people, this is a minor trade-off. For others, alternatives with perhaps less convenience.

I think it’s misleading to sell this as a “privacy-focused AI” (specifically, similar to Siri or Google Assistant) when it’s really an offline speech recognition tool. This keeps the “privacy” part accurate, and makes it clear that intents are still being sent out from the device (as opposed to audio recordings).

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#244

Post by Bartweiss »

Kiro wrote: post #214
lisper wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference: having a GPS in my phone means I never have to worry about buying or carrying a map with me ever again, at the cost of potentially revealing my location to someone who I'd rather not know it. Having a voice assistant means I don't have to spend a few seconds typing, at the cost of having everything I say potentially overheard by someone who I'd rather didn't hear it. By my quality metric, th…

You totally underestimate the utility. Getting a voice assistant was life-changing for me. GPS comes nowhere close.

I'd be fascinated to hear how.

I can imagine things a digital assistant could do that I'd value quite a lot, but none of them are done by what's currently on the market. (And most of them would involve heavy smart-home integration, which makes their privacy failings even worse.) Meanwhile, the offerings I've actually seen so far look like their maximum utility would be converting tablespoons to cups while my hands are messy from cooking.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#245

Post by LinuxBender »

j88439h84 wrote: post #171
LinuxBender wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just my opinion, based on my experience and personality. Voice first running entirely on prem with no internet connectivity, sure I would go for that. Talking to the internet? No way. Not even if I had root on the device with the source code to the OS, firmware and applications.

> Talking to the internet? No way. Not even if I had root on the device with the source code to the OS, firmware and applications. Can you explain how this is different from running your linux computer with a webcam attached?

I don't leave a webcam attached, or a microphone.

I can also debug any code running on my machines and have some idea of what they are doing. I can also limit when they are allowed to talk to the internet and to what address.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#246

Post by saagarjha »

binomialxenon wrote: post #225
saagarjha wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this device grab the current weather and buy things offline?

It can get data from the internet, I think the point is that it "lives" on-device and hence can be interacted with offline, unlike Siri/Alexa/Cortana which live entirely on the company's servers.

Siri/Alexa/Cortana are assistants, while the part you are talking about is speech recognition. Sure, it’s great that this is done offline, but I don’t think it’s fair to compare it to more services because at that point you do need to get data from the internet just like any other service.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#247

Post by LinuxBender »

briandear wrote: post #100
LinuxBender wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Nobody can prove that. It's always listening and you have to assume always recording and transmitting. 2) My phone is a $12 throw away that speaks voice and sms (text). 3) Loose lips sink ships.

And your SMS is logged as well as cell towers to which you connect. Is the “phone company” more secure than any other? If you really are someone in need of a tin foil hat, you should ditch the phone completely and communicate solely with dead drops and one-time pads.

SMS is actually clear text over SS7. I would not send anything I care about over it. It is also trivial to spoof.

All you need is 1 SS7 link and you can be any phone, kick anyone off a cell site, override call congestion and bump people off, change the display on your phone to any text, too many things to name.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#248

Post by flukus »

amai wrote: post #204

There is an alternative to the spying devices of Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft: https://snips.ai/technology/ "Our technology runs on-device, works offline and guarantees Privacy by Design"

I can't believe that so many people, especially the ones on tech sites like this, bought into the idea that speech recognition is such a hard job that it needs to be run on the supercomputers of tech giants. We had somewhat decent voice dictation software on desktops 20 years ago, when 100Mhz processors and 32MB of RAM were top of the line, yet now it's impossible with an order of magnitude more resources.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#249

Post by cc439 »

bootaccount wrote: post #116
pmontra wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can opt out of basically every Google login/tracking in Android, except the Play store. I know because I'm logged out of everything and I disable location services. Google Maps keeps working. What I don't understand is why they have to store voice recordings instead of deleting them once they understand the vocal command. There could be a number of reasons and I don't like any of them.

try disabling Google Maps location access permission. For me it triggers an endless loop requesting Location permission, rendering the app unusable. Google's always mining data behind the scenes and gapps are constantly phoning home, your "opt-out" preferences are meaningless.

This is one of those massive privacy violations that I cannot believe has been allowed to exist as long as it has without people making a concerted effort against it. I remember way back in the early days of Android when it was excused for reasons of allowing Google's live traffic mapping feature to work.

That excuse made sense in a time where public trust in these companies was justifiably high but it's turned into a situation where the major tech giants have the power to become a modern day Stasi on steroids (and increasingly show their willingness to play that role). We had to place enormous trust in these company's ethics (mostly on a subconscious level as they all used to go to great lengths to afford us the ability to implicitly trust them) in order for the smartphone/mobile revolution to occur. Now that these devices are a necessity in modern society, they've all dropped the pretenses that allowed us to trust anything to do with the information they're collecting.

We're living in a cyberpunk dystopia and I don't see an easy way out.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#250

Post by cc439 »

Klathmon wrote: post #73
LinuxBender wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Nobody can prove that. It's always listening and you have to assume always recording and transmitting. 2) My phone is a $12 throw away that speaks voice and sms (text). 3) Loose lips sink ships.

If we are playing the "you can't prove that" game, then you also can't prove that your $12 throw away phone isn't always recording, or that you new kitchen countertop doesn't have a recording device embedded in it, or that the maker of whatever device you are using to type that comment isn't breaking a plethora of laws to record everything you type or say or do around that device at any time.

At least you can pull the battery out of most "burner" tier dumbphones.
Post reply on HN