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Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

bloomberg.com

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Re: Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

#111

Post by rapind »

lima wrote: post #56
einpoklum wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I doubt they listen for anything but their keyword > I can't imagine the NSA and other covert organizations not drooling at the chance to do just that. Why doubt? Why imagine? You know that, for data on big corporation's servers, the NSA already gets a copy of everything - and everything is recorded forever without you really being able to delete it. Why would this be so different for voluntary self-espionage d…

> You know that, for data on big corporation's servers, the NSA already gets a copy of everything This is squarely in conspiracy theory realm. Nothing in the Snowden documents or other leaks hinted at this (except for the NSA snooping on unencrypted internal links, which is useless now that everyone encrypts everything). > Why would this be so different for voluntary self-espionage devices (Alex, Dot etc.)? Why would…

"Why would a big tech company willfully infringe on their customer's privacy? How would they even do it? They have every reason to prevent it."

To sell advertising and recommend products?

Re: Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

#112

Post by to11mtm »

masklinn wrote: post #85
rebuilder wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you connect a plug to the audio jack, sure, the laptop probably defaults to using that jack for input and output. But you can still choose to use the built-in mic, right? So it's not physically disconnecting anything, just triggering a software disconnect.

AFAIK you're correct. Though it's possible most spying software just uses the default mic and doesn't have the capabilities to switch the input device?

Not a Mac user, and the last time I played with sound stuff in nix was almost 15 years ago...

But I feel like switching input (or even collecting multiple sound inputs) on a nix OS is not much more convoluted than dealing with the sound stack in general. But that's probably also related to how the driver itself interfaces with the audio device...

Re: Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

#113

Post by lonelappde »

zabana wrote: post #86
Foober223 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's only done on a targeted basis to people who are being monitored. Your location history however is being passively tracked. Except Amazon was caught with their hands in the cookie jar listening on 'regular' people's private conversations on more than one occasion.

Can you share more details?

Re: Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

#114

Post by lonelappde »

tprynn wrote: post #42
masklinn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My laptop has a microphone and video. Surely Microsoft could just start recording with the with right windows update? It's a commonly mentioned issue, and a somewhat regular occurrence with various malware or "security solutions". That's why a number of laptops have either visual indicators or shutters (though mostly for the cameras, sadly hot mics are rarely a consideration), and a rare few have physical disconnec…

Macbooks since 2018 physically disable microphones and webcams when the lid is closed: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-macbook-air-and-2018-m...

But the lid is open for several hours a day while I'm working!

Re: Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

#115

Post by rolph »

lima wrote: post #73
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, they can't constantly send microphone data even if they wanted due to power constraints. They use a dedicated DSP chip with the sole purpose of detecting the hot word.

then stabb the mic afew dozen times, and feed the hotword to the DSP with a button, or better yet use another DSP to bridge your own custom interface to the "hotword sniffer"

typing to an alexa device should be an option, just like having an AI chat.

Re: Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

#116

Post by cosmodisk »

6 years ago I used to work for a translation agency.We used to get some very confidential (and very interesting) texts from banks. We were not allowed to put a single word into google translate from client files and this stuff is 10 times worse. Having a permanent mic from large corps in your home is never a good idea...

Re: Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

#117

Post by cosmodisk »

Klinky wrote: post #110
masklinn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're trusting that the microphone is not listening The point of the original comment is mostly that devices like echos are expected to always be listening, and this has legal implication.

Can the police right now go to Amazon and demand to listen to anyone's Alexa in real-time? Can the NSA go to any landline provider, and demand a secret list of a person's entire call history(or they may already have this already)? The biggest profile case where Alexa audio recordings got turned over was during a murder trial after a judge's orders. I am not entirely clear that the ramifications of Kyllo v. United Sta…

Police- maybe some court decision is required. NSA- I very much doubt so.

Re: Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

#118

Post by rorykoehler »

nikofeyn wrote: post #103
capableweb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 "voic…

you have to give explicit permissions for those things. google assistant doesn't work on my phone because i never gave it permission to enable that feature.

me neither but i have no way of verifying if this is the truth or not without installing a vpn with a firewall and analysing the logs

Re: Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

#119

Post by jackpirate »

vidarh wrote: post #47
MereInterest wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't even matter how sincere they are. False negatives hurt the perception of the product, because then people need to repeat the key word. False positives do not hurt the perception of the product, because the recording occurs silently. Their incentives are aligned against privacy, and so privacy will suffer.

False positives does hurt the perception, because the device will usually do something or utter a response unless it fails to detect something intelligible or writes the request off as not intended for it (having two devices at opposite ends of a large open space living area can sometimes get frustrating, but looking at the history, you see how often they correctly determine which device should respond) An occasional…

That's not true. Amazon can have a significantly more accurate classifier running on their backend that processes the transmitted audio. And this classifier can be more accurate due to both more computation and it would have access to the entire data stream, not just the initialization words. You would never know that your data was sent to Amazon and then ignored.

Re: Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

#120

Post by toast0 »

eddyg wrote: post #91
papito wrote: post #15

The recorded conversations are accessible via Amazon. You can go and listen to them yourself, and delete them.

Only after the wake word has triggered the "start interpreting audio" code. These things are NOT constantly streaming everything they hear to the cloud (and this can be easily confirmed by monitoring traffic from the device's IP address on your network). That is a big distinction.

I'm willing to believe that it's only after it's been triggered by the wake word processing. The problem is a lot of things I say that aren't the wake word still triggers a wake up. If you've got one of these, turn on the accessibility options to make noises when it wakes up... I'm not a heavy user, so more than half of the wakeups aren't intentional.
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