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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

#131

Post by matz1 »

californical wrote: post #123
matz1 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is advertising industry harming me ? Especially compared to the benefit I get ?

Maybe not you specifically, but it can be hard to say. Generally though, by making people unhappy with what they have and by convincing them that they need to always be spending money on something new to find happiness. I've found a lot of improvement in my life satisfaction (and the size of my savings account) since getting rid of ads almost entirely. I've also found that I never feel the need to be in a hurry to bu…

Sure, they can try to convince people to spend money but you don't have to follow it, and then there is adblocker too.

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

#132

Post by snvzz »

throwaway122378 wrote: post #3
snvzz wrote: post #2

I find the title biased against Amazon to begin with. As if having assistants from other companies listening in was any safer. Why namedrop Amazon's own?

Alexa has been caught numerous times in the past

At least they were transparent about having a mic that's always listening.

Google sneaked a microphone in some speaker device trojan-horse style, enabling it only when lots of such speakers were already deployed. Sneaky.

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

#134

Post by zitterbewegung »

yellow_postit wrote: post #94
zitterbewegung wrote: post #25

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.

The performance of such a system would be bad compared to an internet connected one (frequent speech model updates and more compute) and the reviews would pillory the device for a nebulous to most privacy (unseen) vs. performance (seen) trade off. Try using a slightly older (early 00s) car with voice commands to get a sense.

You can separate the recognition system of the speech model by allowing software updates but not send the data or the captured audio to the cloud.

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

#135

Post by SilasX »

lima wrote: post #53
pdkl95 wrote: post #43

Alexa et al are also normalizing "always on microphone that sends audio to a remote business over the internet" technology . According to the bright-line rule from Kyllo v United States [1], when a technology is "in general public use"[2], police no longer need a warrant when they use their own devices based on that technology to see the "details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without ph…

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…

>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 your neighbor's apartment.

It has not been normal until the last few years for people to typically have an Alexa-like device that is always listening for the "I'm about to make a request" signal, which frequently gets turned on by accident.

It's not ridiculous that someone might conclude in the future, "if you're in someone's house with such a device, you should reasonably expect that some part of your conversation might get sent to the third party", which would mean a diminishing of the right to such privacy in 4th amendment jurisprudence.

And frankly, the whole concept of using voice to activate it is reckless. It is unavoidable to have significant false positives. It should be done with a non-audio signal that can't be faked (up to the limits of modern crypto), like an authenticated EM signal to turn on the listening.

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

#136

Post by pdkl95 »

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…

> How exactly do the police freely gain access

They don't, Kyllo v United States isn't about gaining access to someone's devices. The police used their own thermal camera to search Kyllo's residence:

>> In order to determine whether an amount of heat was emanating from petitioner's home consistent with the use of such lamps, at 3:20 a.m. on January 16, 1992, Agent Elliott and Dan Haas used an Agema Thermovision 210 thermal imager to scan the triplex. [...] The scan of Kyllo's home took only a few minutes and was performed from the passenger seat of Agent Elliott's vehicle across the street from the front of the house and also from the street in back of the house.

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

#138

Post by rtkwe »

pdkl95 wrote: post #43

Alexa et al are also normalizing "always on microphone that sends audio to a remote business over the internet" technology . According to the bright-line rule from Kyllo v United States [1], when a technology is "in general public use"[2], police no longer need a warrant when they use their own devices based on that technology to see the "details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without ph…

Those were about using devices from outside the home though. Physically going inside a home and planting a microphone. Installing something like this into a house by law enforcement would still be a step beyond that ruling.

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

#139

Post by morpheuskafka »

tprynn wrote: post #71
netsharc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a chip "physically disconnects" a device?

Presumably power is disconnected by the T2 chip. Different from mechanical disconnect via a physical switch, but equivalently effective if you trust the T2 chip. (And if you don’t ... well, you can’t use the MacBook securely at all.)

You had better not trust the T2 chip, because it is vulnerable to the checkm8 exploit and the checkra1n folks have already demonstrated total compromise. The encryption functionality isn't affected if you have FileVault on, because your password is not stored anywhere on the device, but everything else, from basic SMC functions like mic/cam/fans/touchbar to secure boot to verifying the microcode and ME firmware before loading are totally useless now.

AFAIK, the T2 is always powered on even when the main CPU is off, so this could have ultra-long-term persistence.

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

#140

Post by dehrmann »

pdkl95 wrote: post #43

Alexa et al are also normalizing "always on microphone that sends audio to a remote business over the internet" technology . According to the bright-line rule from Kyllo v United States [1], when a technology is "in general public use"[2], police no longer need a warrant when they use their own devices based on that technology to see the "details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without ph…

Supposedly they use on-device AI to recognize "OK, Google," "Hey, Alexa," etc., then send the following command over the internet. Supposedly.
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