201–210 of 215 posts
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You can turn it on each time you need too use it, maybe with a trusted voice activated power switch that isn't connected to the cloud.
At that point why bother getting it in the first place? The whole appeal of it is that you can just say "hey google" from anywhere in the house and it would answer you. If you have to walk over and turn it on, you might as well use your phone.
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>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.
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That would be illegal for other reasons, which would seem at least to me to violate the principal they are using to justify this. Certainly using a thermal camera in this manner is not illegal for a random bystander.
are you sure? I mean I think in most states, if you were parked outside a person's house with a thermal camera pointed at the house, and the police drove up and asked what you were doing and you said "I'm using my thermal camera to spy on what people are doing in that house, and they don't know I'm doing it LOL!" I think the police would probably take you in. Now as to whether they could find anything to charge you w…
As you imply, none of this prevents the police from arresting you and taking you downtown anyway. They can even say they thought it violated peeping tom laws (Heien vs. North Carolina). Beyond that, "you can beat the charge but you can't beat the ride" is an old truism among abusive police.
Kyllo is almost 20 years old, so the likelihood of a city having a law contravening it is probably low (IANAL).
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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…
Police- maybe some court decision is required. NSA- I very much doubt so.
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are you sure? I mean I think in most states, if you were parked outside a person's house with a thermal camera pointed at the house, and the police drove up and asked what you were doing and you said "I'm using my thermal camera to spy on what people are doing in that house, and they don't know I'm doing it LOL!" I think the police would probably take you in. Now as to whether they could find anything to charge you w…
With its paparazzi industry, California probably has one of the more restrictive Peeping Tom Laws, and that law requires the peeper to be looking into a door or a window while on private property . I infer from a little extra googling that most/all of the states' laws are similar in this way. As you imply, none of this prevents the police from arresting you and taking you downtown anyway. They can even say they thoug…
I think you're wrong that they generally require the peeper to be looking while on private property because if that were the case the peeper would be trespassing and could be charged with that, although certainly it may be the case in some places. State by state basis makes it difficult to say for sure.
I guess it might be beneficial to have peeping tom laws limited to what one does on private property with the understanding that rich people have big enough property that you have to get on it to reasonably violate their privacy. Thus you can construct the law to protect the privacy of rich and poor alike as long as they have 5+ acre estates. And it is true that is is nice to have multiple things you can charge someone with, so they can plea bargain some of them away. So that they can be charged with trespassing still doesn't mean that they wouldn't want a law to charge them with peeping as well.
But as I understand it the reasonable expectation of privacy generally applies to stuff like your home, or a private dressing room (if talking about actors) and so forth.
Thus if someone is having a shower in the upper bathroom and you have climbed up a high tree off their property to look through an open window that they would not expect anyone to climb because wtf, then you are probably a peeping tom and violating a peeping tom law if it exists in that state.
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I’m referring to voice activated assistants, and I was referring to the case when the typical (middle class) household had one, which happened long after their initial release (and arguably hasn’t even happened yet, depending on how you define “typical”).
Siri and Google now are both voice activated. Who wasn't using Android or iOS when they launched?
In any case, 4 years vs 10 years doesn't matter. The point is, a court hasn't addressed it in the context of changing norms, at which point I claim there is a danger that it will re-evaluate what counts as private, just as OP was.
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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.
Couldn't a software update then change that behavior to send the data to the cloud?
I have no doubt they are able to hear anything happening in the room they happen to be installed in. But I doubt they listen for anything but their keyword, and I seriously doubt they listen, record and send off to their overlords what they hear on a massive basis. However, they clearly CAN, and while they almost certainly don't on any massive scale, if they by their overlord or a security hack, did on a targeted bas…
Which I figured someone would raise a fuss about. It makes me sad that we can say that and just accept it. It shouldn't be this way.
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It wasn’t always the case that teleconferencing providers could listen in. At least Skype was peer-to-peer originally. And only corporate firewalls and some bad providers would prevent it from working today. My email provider surely isn’t reading my mail, but then again, I seem to be in a minority that doesn’t use gmail. The threat of real-time speech-to-text is real, but police all over the world have made the mista…
Which email provider do you use?
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>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.
Hasn't Google Now (and now Assistant) always required a button/icon press before the mic turned on? And they only understand "OK Google" until after you say "OK Google?"