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Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

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Re: Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

#71

Post by fixermark »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #57
j42 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about consistently being bugged though--I see two troubling implications to this; a) Government A decides target B has valuable communications, and uses this audio capture functionality as an attack vector (ie, a MiTM server modifies the chrome binary blob request slightly to a version where chunked audio is sent back to a control server). b) (more likely) This binary blob contains a voice recognition algori…

This is true of any auto-updating software, including your operating system and all evergreen browsers. The problem with this blog post is that the author gets in a tizzy about what could happen, not what is actually happening. What could happen has not been affected by the recent Chromium screw-up, nor is it specific to Chromium.

That's not really a problem; it's a feature. The author is pointing out the significance of defense-in-depth to protect against the scenarios that can happen in light of what has happened.

Re: Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

#72

Post by jonknee »

plorkyeran wrote: post #68
jonknee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course there is a way to disable this, it's in the settings with all the other settings.

Where? You can turn off voice-activated search, but that doesn't actually disable the extension.

It requires Native Client, turn it off and it can't function regardless of your other settings.

Re: Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

#73

Post by fixermark »

jmnicolas wrote: post #22

I think this is the last straw for me : enough is enough. I need to sit and reflect a bit on this, but I'm contemplating abandoning every bit of non free software I currently use (and there's a lot of it since I'm using Windows and Android).

I think we're all missing the point of the article.

The author isn't claiming that free software is immune to this either (think about the flaw hiding in plain sight in OpenSSH for years). The author is saying that if you want to protect yourself from image / audio capture without your consent, make sure you can physically deactivate those features on your hardware in a way that software cannot physically re-activate them, i.e. mechanical switches.

Re: Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

#74

Post by fixermark »

Oletros wrote: post #50

has the author really tested if Chromium is listening? Downloading a binary blob is very bad, but the accusations that author makes wihouth a single proof is more FUD than anything

It's irrelevant to the argument. The author is making an appeal to the slippery slope (even if it's not happening right now, and even if Google is not doing it.... It could easily happen tomorrow and anyone could do it. Shutter your cameras and make sure your microphones can be physically deactivated).

Re: Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

#76

Post by fixermark »

spdustin wrote: post #43

Okay, I'm going to put on my tin foil hat for a bit here. Think of the corporate boardrooms with Chromebox for meetings, listening in even when not actively used for meetings. An exec at the Better Business Bureau [0] who chose Chromebox because they were excited to, "[reduce] the time [they spend] ... worrying about security concerns," is discussing the growing complaints the BBB has received about a competitor to a…

Yes it is. ;) The author wants us to remember that we live in a world that has these technological possibilities.

That doctor's phone should have had a mechanical switch to disable the microphone, is the author's point.

Re: Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

#77

Post by azakai »

metric10 wrote: post #23

Has anyone actually confirmed that Chrome is continuously sending audio back to Google? I highly doubt that this is the case. Instead, the plug in knows how to recognize "OK Google" all by itself. Once activated, then it starts sending audio data. IF it where really listening even when inactive, then people would be complaining about it sucking up bandwidth and data allotments.

The problem is that it cannot perfectly recognize "OK Google". There are going to be false positives, things that sound like "OK Google" to the plugin, but are not "OK Google". And it will send those recordings, plus what said after them, to Google servers.

Re: Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

#78

Post by Guvante »

51Cards wrote: post #25
metric10 wrote: post #23

Has anyone actually confirmed that Chrome is continuously sending audio back to Google? I highly doubt that this is the case. Instead, the plug in knows how to recognize "OK Google" all by itself. Once activated, then it starts sending audio data. IF it where really listening even when inactive, then people would be complaining about it sucking up bandwidth and data allotments.

I was thinking something similar... that would be a LOT of data being sent back continuously while Chrome was running, which for many people is 24/7. If you had an office of Chrome users the entire office pipe could be eaten up by what is essentially X number continuous VOIP calls.

It would be the worst possible implementation of the feature for a laundry list of reasons.

Re: Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

#79

Post by fixermark »

jonstokes wrote: post #33

Not surprised. I was a die-hard android user, but I kept having stuff like this happen to me, over and over again: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2kwbl2/im_convin... It also happens to my android-using friends. I've become convinced that Android phones are listening all the time so that they can figure out what we're about to search for and what to advertise to us. Given that this has been my (admittedly…

Targeted advertising is actually quite good at separating you the person from you your marketing footprint. Unfortunately, the ways it does this are hard to explain, but let me give an example.

A friend of mine was convinced that Google was data-mining his Gmail because it recommended a flight on a related search atop the dates he was considering visiting a friend (if I recall correctly, he looked up driving directions and Google suggested "You could get there faster if you took on ").

I punched in the same directions as him in an incognito browser session and... Got the same flight suggestion. Then I looked at the nearby flights and found that the suggested one was really just the cheapest one that week. Turns out his friend and he were planning to meet on a day they happened to be free... Because it was near a holiday, so a lot of people were free, so airlines factored that into their pricing model, so Google recommended a flight because it was a popular flight that a lot of people wanted to take between those two destination points.

It's far, far more likely that targeted advertising is working because we are not the special snowflakes we believe ourselves to be. The correlation algorithms can guess a lot from a few data points when they have billions of correlations to sort through.

Re: Google listening in to your room shows importance of privacy defense in depth

#80

Post by bduerst »

krisdol wrote: post #45
jonknee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any computer with a microphone (almost all!) has this capability.

Is that a valid argument for every phone being able to have this capability? Accomplishing this on computer either requires informed consent or some kind of malware/backdoor. On Google Android it's a feature.

You could sneak it through on a client update, if compelled.
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