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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

#91

Post by McGlockenshire »

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.

The extension is only used by voice search. If voice search is disabled, the extension isn't used by anything.

A mountain is being made out of this molehill. If the extension was only downloaded at the time that the option was enabled by the user, nobody would care. Instead, they chose to have the extension always available and as a result people are having paranoid over-reactions.

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

#92

Post by Retra »

noir_lord wrote: post #90
Retra wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's success often seems to be the exception that proves the rule.

postgres, python, inkscape, XFCE, various shells, GTK, Qt, even libreoffice (which has gone through astounding refactoring), vim, emacs, apache, nginx. I don't think there is a rule.

That's a good point. Maybe it is a matter of perspective: none of those are consumer programs, they are developer tools. (Except libreoffice, but that has had its problems.)

So you could argue that they are not all that user friendly.

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

#93

Post by bduerst »

runjake wrote: post #66
Oletros wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listening all the time and sending the audio to Google would kill an smartphone in a moment. Apaty of the bandwith used

That's presuming it just doesn't cue up a text or audio[1] log on the device and upload it to Google the next time it's on wi-fi and plugged into a charger. 1. 4khz mono audio is sufficient for human voice recognition and tiny in terms of storage.

Pretty sure someone would detect that with packet inspection, even if compressed.

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

#94

Post by mindslight »

j42 wrote: post #34
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.

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…

c) (even more likely) The algorithm released in the blob is much simpler than the one locked in their servers, and it has many false positives. The audio from false positives is archived to help improve the simplistic algorithm.

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

#95

Post by noir_lord »

izzydata wrote: post #47

My only audio recording device is my webcam and it is incapable of being in use without the light being on as far as I am aware. So how would it send them audio data without the audio device realize it is being used?

> My only audio recording device is my webcam and it is incapable of being in use without the light being on as far as I am aware.

You assume that the light isn't controlled by the same software, that's not always the case, the FBI has admitted this.

https://grahamcluley.com/2013/12/webcam-spying-without-turni...

I take the view that anything under software control or the control of a chip I can't open is suspect, I've taped the webcam on laptops and physically disconnected built in microphones (I use a headset, built in ones suck).

I'm not really happy about my Nexus 4 at all either, I think my next phone will be a dumb mobile.

The sad thing is that I try to avoid paranoia with this stuff but the threat landscape is so large it's practically a full time job staying up to date with whats going on.

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

#96

Post by Too »

jimhefferon wrote: post #75

This is why there needs to be a switch on all computers to physically turn the microphone off. How is that hard?

Same for wifi, camera and speakers. Preferably a real physical lid for the camera, the switches are in most cases just connected to an io pin and could potentially be overridden. Even if they are not its just very discomforting to have a camera constantly pointing at you, I feel weird when i see a lens even when I know the power is totally cut.

For speakers it has happened to me a few times that something has started to play loud sounds and I can not mute it because windows is locked up somehow or im in fullscreen or whatever.

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

#97

Post by noir_lord »

Retra wrote: post #92
noir_lord wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

postgres, python, inkscape, XFCE, various shells, GTK, Qt, even libreoffice (which has gone through astounding refactoring), vim, emacs, apache, nginx. I don't think there is a rule.

That's a good point. Maybe it is a matter of perspective: none of those are consumer programs, they are developer tools. (Except libreoffice, but that has had its problems.) So you could argue that they are not all that user friendly.

> Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be very selective about who it decides to make friends with.

They are user friendly they just represent the usages of the type of user using them.

This is something I see said a lot, constraining an interface to your average completely new user who knows nothing makes it very difficult to have that interface adequately serve people with more experience, you load up the benefit on the front side and trash the backside in response - that said some powerful interfaces are just objectively bad but the tools utility overrides that.

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

#98

Post by mondoshawan »

ionised wrote: post #63
mondoshawan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop with the witch hunts and the desire to maim folks over minor infractions like this? Consider that you're one of the developers that wrote this feature. You try very hard to make sure your users privacy rights are respected. Normally your work is strong and you catch all of the corner cases, but this one you missed. You've fixed it upstream, but folks are demanding 5% of the company's bottom line because o…

> Consider that you're one of the developers that wrote this feature. You try very hard to make sure your users privacy rights are respected. Surely a developer working for Google knows that user privacy is not a priority for the company?

After working there for eight years, I can confirm the contrary of this statement. Google cares very much about user privacy -- the engineers doing the work even more so. The quote from one of their SREs swearing about the Snowden revelations was drop dead true, and engineers there have been working /very/ hard to fix issues like this.

Google does not operate like Apple -- there are many hands at the tiller, and the ship moves in almost arbitrary directions at times. Situations like this do come up, and they are most of the time honest mistakes or oversights.

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

#99

Post by mondoshawan »

tremon wrote: post #55
mondoshawan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop with the witch hunts and the desire to maim folks over minor infractions like this? Consider that you're one of the developers that wrote this feature. You try very hard to make sure your users privacy rights are respected. Normally your work is strong and you catch all of the corner cases, but this one you missed. You've fixed it upstream, but folks are demanding 5% of the company's bottom line because o…

This is not a minor infraction, nor is it the work of a handful developers (the GP said Google, not Chromium). This is a business decision, and a hugely flawed one at that. IMNSHO, user-hostile business decisions should be fined in a way that does impact the business. We've long since passed the point where this can be resolved with a slap on the wrist. So yes, 5% of revenue seems like an appropriate figure to start…

By fining the business you will directly affect whether or not Chromium continues to exist if at all, because it then becomes more of a liability than an asset to the company.

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

#100

Post by Too »

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…

You might not have entered your old friends in your computer ever but they might have entered you. Just "invert" this relation and its quite reasonable to assume you know them also. Still spooky though.
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