141–150 of 215 posts
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.
Apple doesn't really have a good track record with their data sharing without opt-outs in Siri :(
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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 t…
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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…
That's a neat phone, but we already know pretty much all phone communications are intercepted and recorded. This is why I do all of my communications over IPoAC[1].
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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 befor…
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You’re subtly altering the meaning of “in general public use”. As used in the court’s opinion, they’re drawing a distinction between whether the average person could perform this activity against another person. If the average person carried around thermal imaging tech that would have been capable of performing the same actions as the police, it would have not constituted an unlawful search. Extrapolating that to say…
Meh. These things are just a [re]interpretation away from each other. Even if we now think our model is clear and simple. That's why face recognition bans and other privacy protection laws ("personally identifiable information") are so welcome.
The recorded conversations are accessible via Amazon. You can go and listen to them yourself, and delete them.
I've been in the business long enough to know that if something is digitized, it often never ever goes away. You don't know (nobody does for sure, actually) what is the internal retention policy of this information or its metadata. You can delete the recordings but the only thing you know for sure is that you and you alone cannot access them anymore.
A couple of days ago, I lost all respect for a coworker when we were in a meeting and somebody said something which woke up the Echo he had on his desk.
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> 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…
This is absurd. Plenty of leaks clearly indicated that they succeded at breaking different types of SSL.
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Where is the keyword 'Alexa' recognized? On the device or back in Amazon towers? If the latter then every sounds is transmitted back to grep for 'Alexa'. Of course we believe they don't store that other noise data.
Both. First on the device, then in the cloud. The latter determines if it's a "false positive" or not. AFAIK there is no way to remotely start recording up to the cloud.
You can see this in their home defense feature on the echos, where the echo can have the sounds of broken glass and wood breaking added as wake words so it can notify you and/or police in the event of an intruder.