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

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

#281

Post by Analog24 »

flukus wrote: post #248
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.

20 years ago you spoke directly into a microphone and could only use an extremely limited set of supported languages and locales/accents.

You're also missing the point. I don't think anyone has ever claimed that speech recognition can only be done on supercomputers. Your laptop can surely run one of these models (though it would take a long time to train one). But there's a reason why an Echo Dot cost $20 and not $1000.

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

#282

Post by jeremyjh »

falcolas wrote: post #140
stevecalifornia wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) It's always listening for a keyword, and then it starts recording. It's a voice interface for a computer. 2) Your phone is doing the same thing except for it follows you around everywhere you go and records your map location, what apps you use, who you are talking to and what your web searches are. Your phone isn't recording just what you say...its recording what you do and where you do it and when you do it. It's…

Point 1: Keyword triggers and is actually said are miles apart, as shown by the Alexa creepy laugh episode. There is no practical way of knowing when Alexa has heard a keyword and recorded content around it. Not to mention the Google play incident where a poor wiring job made the devices think the "enable assistant" button was constantly being pressed. Point 2: My phone, an iPhone, offers a way to turn off the keywor…

> There is no practical way of knowing when Alexa has heard a keyword and recorded content around it.

This is incorrect. If you want to know what your device has heard and processed (or failed to understand), you can look at the Alexa app on your phone. It will tell you what it thought you asked for and what it told you or played for you, and you can replay the recording of your voice request.

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

#283

Post by blacksmith_tb »

whatshisface wrote: post #216
closetohome wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I'm clear here, you're proposing a conspiracy theory where Amazon, the DHS, and The Pentagon are in collusion to collect and transcribe audio from Amazon Echos -- in such a way that none of the many people who have hacked and extensively reverse-engineered them would be able to tell? I can't find any holes in that theory.

The people who have "hacked and reverse engineered" the Echos don't have access to what happens on the server side. We are facing a situation of either trusting or not trusting, because verification isn't possible. There should be a word for believing that someone is working for your interests even though you have no reason to, as a counterpart to "conspiracy theory" which implies that you believe that a group is wor…

I'm not sure I follow - just capturing packets from them tells you how much they're sending to their respective motherships, e.g.[1].

Amazon of course is not exactly conspiring to try and get me to buy more stuff from them (they're very upfront about it), which makes them both more crass and also easier to trust in some ways than Google.

1: https://www.iot-tests.org/2017/06/careless-whisper-does-amaz...

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

#284

Post by vertexFarm »

cortesoft wrote: post #261
sbov wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New technology is scary, old is not. With the third party doctrine the only way to really protect yourself is to not participate in modern society in any way.

Or at least don't do anything that would be considered 'suspicious' within that modern society. Of course, it is hard to know what will be considered suspicious....

Whatever's convenient to dispose of people in the way of the status quo. Remember that the feds really started rounding up pot smokers on a large scale for the first time as a way to legally get rid of Vietnam war protestors. It'll happen again, and next time they'll have an infinite pit of dirt to dig through.

Nobody is 100% law-abiding or morally clean. Nobody. We're definitely all vulnerable to prosecution and blackmail. People who think they have nothing to hide aren't using their imagination properly.

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

#285

Post by jkaptur »

vertexFarm wrote: post #277
closetohome wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so I'm clear here, you're proposing a conspiracy theory where Amazon, the DHS, and The Pentagon are in collusion to collect and transcribe audio from Amazon Echos -- in such a way that none of the many people who have hacked and extensively reverse-engineered them would be able to tell? I can't find any holes in that theory.

It wouldn't have to be perfectly covert. Also it wouldn't have to be purposeful, spooky collusion between private and public sector from the start. That's an unfair assumption and a bit of a straw-man. What's going to happen is Amazon and others will develop methods to collect ambient data at all times and sift through it efficiently for marketing info--come on, you know for a fact that they are doing that--and event…

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-agrees-to-hand-over-data-in-echo-...

Not exactly as you described, but fairly close.

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

#286

Post by Ruthalas »

oulipo wrote: post #98
randyrand wrote: post #23

Is there a good non-internet connected device for turning on lights with your voice?

Yes! You can take a look at what we are building at https://snips.ai (disclaimer: I'm a co-founder) for exactly this reason We believe that people can have both cloud-grade Voice AI (look at our accuracy at https://medium.com/snips-ai/snips-brings-cloud-level-spoken-... ) which is privacy-aware Everything runs 100% on-device and is private-by-design, and we are open-sourcing the platform over time It works in english…

What is your monetization strategy?

Browsing your site it is hard to see what you will charge for, and I am confused by the inclusion of some sort of token system. (It seems directly in conflict with the desire not to be beholden to an outside company to use the hardware if they are tied together?)

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

#287

Post by ndnxhs »

samplesize wrote: post #35
miles wrote: post #13

Not the first time: Amazon Echo records private conversation and sends to co-worker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQrv5GbOKhc

User who doesn't understand how device works accidentally sends voice message to coworker.

The original article stated that they do know how it works but the device malfunctioned and detected a command where there was none without the owner even being aware that it was activated.

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

#288

Post by lemming »

cortesoft wrote: post #265
bzbarsky wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your list is missing "pro-democracy advocates", "Muslims", "Christians", "Jews", "atheists", "women who want an abortion", "people trying to escape an abusive relationship", "people with interesting medical conditions", etc, depending on location. Please don't pretend that both "only criminals have something to hide" and "criminals are by definition bad people" are true statements. Neither is true.

I get what you are saying, and agree with you in principle... but the problem is, I am none of those things. I have none of the qualities that I need to hide from anyone, rather neighbors or the government. While it kinda feels creepy to imagine myself being listened to, I can't imagine any real consequences to my private conversations being heard. However, I know that there are lots of people who do have those thing…

Hey Alexa, do these symptoms sound like cancer?

"Sir, we have decided for unspecified reasons to suddenly decline your medical insurance. Have a nice day."

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

#289

Post by kbenson »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #232
kbenson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However I suspect the majority of iphones have "Hey Siri" enabled, and probably the same with whatever android uses IIRC, there's been a lot of coverage here about how Apple put in hardware to detect the "hey siri" phrase without having to go to software and bypass any security. That was it can always listen in "dumb" mode and switch to actively listening/recording and decoding request when the right phrase is hear…

I turned hey Siri off, but found something unsettling. If I say RED FIRE TRUCK to my iPhone with HeySiri turned off, and immediately hold the home button down for Siri, “she” sometimes has fire or fire truck pulled up already. This was WAY WORSE with Hey Siri turned on where it would always have those words and sometimes even more. So best case, they are always caching a little bit and maybe only upload or process it…

That's interesting. I often have a similar experience with pressing the voice button on Android, where if I was streaming some podcast the last few words would precede my intended voice search in what was actually entered. That's usually when streaming in the car through bluetooth though, and I think there's a couple second delay in audio there anyway, so that may explain it in my case. I can't seem to get it to do it manually right now with the phone's mic.

> So best case, they are always caching a little bit and maybe only upload or process it when I hold the button down - but it’s definitely clear they are doing a little general pre-recording of all words.

That is somewhat troubling to hear. I had some thoughts about how possibly some dedicated hardware is buffering and only handing it off on notification of the manual siri request, but on thinking about it, if the OS can request the info whenever it wants, that's not really any more secure than the OS recording it itself.

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

#290

Post by jacquesm »

madrox wrote: post #104

I've never seen a demographic breakdown of HN, but I'm 37 years old. I'm definitely not the oldest guy here, but I see history repeat itself regularly. I remember when people used location tracking as a reason to not own a cell phone. I'm talking about flip phones, mind you, not even iPhones with GPS receivers. I recall the bulk of complaints in that vein died down around the time Google Maps for phones came out. If…

There is no reason Google maps should be an online service.
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