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Locked-down lawyers warned Alexa is hearing confidential calls

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

#191

Post by kick »

EpicEng wrote: post #187
SilasX wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 mig…

>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. Google Now: 2012 Siri: 2010 Microphones in cell phones: longer than those two. It hasn't only been a few years.

Siri wasn't voice-activated until a couple (few?) years ago.

Google Now never was, to my knowledge, though I could be wrong.

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

#192

Post by dehrmann »

dwighttk wrote: post #175
aledalgrande wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if the whole voice recognition could be done on device? No voice sent over the net, firmware updates to improve recognition. Then just call the needed APIs to activate services etc.

What I don’t understand is that my Apple Watch definitely recognizes “hey Siri” and then does speech to text without internet access, but then (sometimes) cannot execute the command without internet access. That last part seems like the easiest.

No, that's the hardest. Intent recognition is significantly harder than text-to-speech.

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

#193

Post by Talanes »

pas wrote: post #124
akerl_ wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 standard is "could any random passerby do this with legal and common tools," not "is this technology used commonly." Regardless of how the definition of what is or is not considered common shifts, the fundamentals of the two situations remain different.

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

#194

Post by lainga »

DonHopkins wrote: post #171

>Amazon and Google say their devices are designed to record and store audio only after they detect a word to wake them up. The companies say such instances are rare, but recent testing by Northeastern University and Imperial College London found that the devices can activate inadvertently between 1.5 and 19 times a day. How can a device activate 1.5 times a day? Does it have to activate right before midnight then dea…

A device activation is a device activation, you can't say it's only half.

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

#195

Post by dwighttk »

dehrmann wrote: post #192
dwighttk wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don’t understand is that my Apple Watch definitely recognizes “hey Siri” and then does speech to text without internet access, but then (sometimes) cannot execute the command without internet access. That last part seems like the easiest.

No, that's the hardest. Intent recognition is significantly harder than text-to-speech.

Couldn’t it save:

When text is “start outdoor walk” then start an outdoor walk workout...

to the watch?

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

#196

Post by pas »

gotstad wrote: post #145
pas wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it’s not just re-interpretation away. From a legal standpoint it’s a whole other ballpark. It breaks the fundamental principle.

What is the principle exactly? Is that established in just one Supreme Court ruling? So can that simply overturned by a new one?

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

#197

Post by pas »

Talanes wrote: post #193
pas wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 standard is "could any random passerby do this with legal and common tools," not "is this technology used commonly." Regardless of how the definition of what is or is not considered common shifts, the fundamentals of the two situations remain different.

My point is that that standard was set in a Supreme Court ruling. And that is easily overturned by any other Supreme Court.

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

#198

Post by RandomBacon »

choward wrote: post #52
papito wrote: post #15

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

How do you know they are actually deleted?

And how do you know that's actually all of the recordings?

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

#199

Post by lima »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #149
lima wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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). This is absurd. Plenty of leaks clearly indicated that they succeded at breaking different types of SSL.

The working theory is that they had a practical attack on RC4, which made up a significant percentage of SSL traffic back then.

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

#200

Post by Nasrudith »

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…

That sounds like an out of context composite of concepts of dubious context. It was in the context of 'search vs in plain view' as distinctions and general availability was meant in terms of what was acceptable for technology to count as in 'plain view'.

The thermals were 'in plain view' technically but given that the technology was highly expensive and of limited application it was clearly disingenuous if the general public couldn't access it.

Essentially the argument is that just because a signal is emitted doesn't mean that the police have an automatic right to observe or decode it beyond a common observer.

Essentially if they had patrol bots on the street with human level hearing it is still 'in plain view' levels. If they started pointing parabolic microphones or laser mikes at people's houses that would be beyond plain view and into an outright search.

If that suggested interpretation jurisprudence were applied then audio bugs should have long been perfectly legal and not a search as nearly-everyone is already capable of hearing sounds and remembering them.

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