91–100 of 215 posts
The recorded conversations are accessible via Amazon. You can go and listen to them yourself, and delete them.
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> it won't be a good business decision You don't think it might be better to assume all this data will leak or be hacked? You most likely have decades of life ahead of you, and once a file is free on the net, it's there forever.
Yes it will be leaked or hacked eventually. That is given.
Until we have a home assistant that can be operated without a connection to the internet without going to the cloud there is always going to be this risk. I don't see any of the big players actually designing a system like this other than Apple.
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How so? The ruling is about agents using thermal imaging technology to bust a marijuana plantation, performed from a car on a public street. The court stated that this does not constitute a search, since any random citizen could've done the same thing using commodity equipment. Always on microphones that transmit via the internet (i.e. bugs) have been a commodity for... a few decades? But you still cannot legally bug…
> The court stated that this does not constitute a search From the court's opinion (the above [1]): >> ... obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the home's interior that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical "intrusion into a constitutionally protected area," constitutes a search--at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use. >> Based o…
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The thing in your pocket is always listening too.
The only things in my pocket are my wallet and keys. My phone[1] could probably be used for remote surveillance, but without a warrant, that's a crime. Note: intent and expectations matter. A cellphone by itself (without any type of "voice assistant" app or feature) is only intended to record audio when it's being used to make a call. Yes, malicious actors or buggy software could enable the microphone, but that's not…
Sure, a bit naive, but I digress. Even if it's illegal, it would be better if it was simply not possible in the first place. It's optionally having that functionality, rather than building solutions considering privacy in the first place.
> without any type of "voice assistant" app
I don't think you can uninstall Siri or Google Assistant on neither iPhone or Android, so that point is kind of null. Only with root or custom roms you'll be able to do that.
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Supposedly your smart phone and smart TV are not passively listening to your offline conversations. That's only done on a targeted basis to people who are being monitored. Your location history however is being passively tracked. Not defending it, but your smart phone is not quite as bad as Alexa. At least for the moment.
iPhones support “Hey Siri” 24/7 unless you turn it off. (As someone else said, google phones support “OK Google” as well) The only additional danger from an Alexa device is that you are trusting amazon as well, but the core functionality of an Alexa device to always listen for the wake word and communicate to a server if it thinks it heard the wake word locally is the same as what most smartphones have.
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You'll note that "OK, Google" works when your phone is on flight mode. Google aren't constantly sending your microphone data to their servers, the recognition of that phrase happens on your device.
Mine was activated many times in the past when it shouldn't have been, e.g. while watching TV (no, nobody said "OK Google"), and my mom has a tendency to somehow activate my phone by just talking... Once it is activated, it starts recording and sending audio data to google. Every such device has a false positive rate on keyphrase activations, and of course the do, there is only limited processing available in those p…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing in your pocket is always listening too.
The only things in my pocket are my wallet and keys. My phone[1] could probably be used for remote surveillance, but without a warrant, that's a crime. Note: intent and expectations matter. A cellphone by itself (without any type of "voice assistant" app or feature) is only intended to record audio when it's being used to make a call. Yes, malicious actors or buggy software could enable the microphone, but that's not…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
iPhones support “Hey Siri” 24/7 unless you turn it off. (As someone else said, google phones support “OK Google” as well) The only additional danger from an Alexa device is that you are trusting amazon as well, but the core functionality of an Alexa device to always listen for the wake word and communicate to a server if it thinks it heard the wake word locally is the same as what most smartphones have.
The activation word is supposed to be processed on the local device before audio is streamed to servers. I still disable it.