Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

privateinternetaccess.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 124 posts

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

#101

Post by mondoshawan »

dreamfactory2 wrote: post #54
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…

> If you don't like the company's behavior, /don't use the software/. Simple, clean, and effective in large numbers -- more so than regulation action By that reasoning, tobacco and asbestos shouldn't be regulated

Web browsers are not addictive, nor are they toxic. The argument doesn't hold water in this case because there are alternatives.

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

#103

Post by Oletros »

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.

You still have the problem of battery consumption by the mic listening 24/7

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

#104

Post by Retra »

noir_lord wrote: post #97
Retra wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expe…

At this point, I don't even know what "user friendly" means.

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

#105

Post by dreamfactory2 »

mondoshawan wrote: post #101
dreamfactory2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't like the company's behavior, /don't use the software/. Simple, clean, and effective in large numbers -- more so than regulation action By that reasoning, tobacco and asbestos shouldn't be regulated

Web browsers are not addictive, nor are they toxic. The argument doesn't hold water in this case because there are alternatives.

Massive security risk to the user and anyone around them. That's a dangerous and unsafe product which absolutely should be regulated as it can endanger the public interest. At least it's a good thing these innocent developers aren't writing software for planes I guess.

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

#106

Post by deoptimo »

deoptimo wrote: post #21
rasz_pl wrote: post #8

I wonder if European Commission would be interested in adding this to their investigation, couple of hundred million dollars should be enough penalty for violating users privacy.

I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think a competition investigation is the appropriate forum to deal with this. There should be a fine, perhaps through a class action or criminal conviction. I certainly hope the penalty for illegally wiretapping hundreds of millions of people is more than $1 per head. I value the privacy of my conversations (and life) way more than that. Besides, if I opt-in to this service, wh…

Why the down vote?

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

#107

Post by noir_lord »

Retra wrote: post #104
noir_lord wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 expe…

At this point, I don't even know what "user friendly" means.

user friendly - designed to aid the user in doing whatever task they are doing.

The software for making a photo collage for Grandma and the software for controlling replication across a hundred database nodes can be radically different and still be user friendly.

Lots of software tends to assume that the user is a new user but the problem then is that a new user rapidly becomes a not-new user and those things that helped initially now hamper productivity (cough Clippy cough).

I'm not saying everyone should have a Symbolics terminal and that requiring lisp knowledge should be mandatory so much as lots of people say open source isn't "user friendly" when what they mean is it's not particularly friendly to new/inexperience users coming from outside.

http://rippedwire.sourceforge.net/images/hbgtk-video.jpg for example, to a new user that is very unfriendly but if you use it frequently and or understand what you are trying to do that kind of no-nonsense interface is user friendly.

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

#108

Post by kale »

DennisP wrote: post #40
jonknee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In theory, that's only true if the user has given permission for some remotely-accessible application to activate it. In practice, the NSA almost certainly has ways to accomplish it, but that doesn't mean we should make it trivial.

The FBI have activated the microphone of a feature phone in an organized crime case. The phone wasn't on a call, but the mic was activated, evidence was gathered, and was used in trial.

It's interesting to note that the mic can be activated with the cell phone "turned off", as some models at the time didn't fully shut down even being powered down.

Here's an article from 9 years ago on the case that the government decided to make public. http://news.cnet.com/FBI-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdroppin...

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

#109

Post by BostonEnginerd »

Mithaldu wrote: post #31
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 just tried the feature out on my windows pc with chrome, and chrome only reacts to ok google when you have a new, empty tab, or the google search page open and active as the main tab. Additionally i checked with procmon what network activity chrome was making, and while it starts sending stuff AFTER "ok google" is activated, it doesn't send any between me saying it and chrome confirming it. The theory that it's a s…

I'm not sure of the use of the feature if it requires you to touch your keyboard and mouse in order to open up a new window to use it.

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

#110

Post by j42 »

valas wrote: post #69
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…

What sort of transparency would satisfy you in this case?

In this case, either the speech-recognition feature being included in the chromium source (and not as a raw network-reconciled binary), or else have the feature be opt-in, not enabled by default.
Post reply on HN