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Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

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Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#121

Post by JoshTriplett »

I'm much less interested in gating audio recording (which I have reasonable confidence in the device itself doing) and much more interested in being able to use a device like this without turning on all of the various histories. Google Assistant refuses to do most of its interesting functions (other than trivial things like setting an alarm) without turning on search history, location history, voice history, and various device information.

There's no good reason for it to require that information for a request like like "play XYZ on YouTube".

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#123

Post by melling »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #98
melling wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you’d tell your chain smoking friend to quit smoking every time he lit a cigarette? At some point, I would think he would say it’s none of your business.

Peer pressure is the main reason I quit smoking. So yes-- if not every time, then at least regularly and consistently. When technology starts to look like a recreational drug, treat it like a recreational drug.

Perhaps you should write your concerns in a blog? Then you can post it every time. And I’ll post mine:

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/groundhog-day-amazon...

This will create a lot less noise, which drowns out any meaningful discussion.

For instance, saying that I use a piece of technology because it’s like a recreational drug is not very convincing.

Addressing the line between having an always listening smartphone with a gps, would be a great place to start.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#125

Post by eropple »

mrguyorama wrote: post #101
jedberg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too grew up in the time of card catalogs. And I learned a lot from reading through the other encyclopedia entries as I flipped the pages looking for the page with the info. Yes, you're right, the voice interface is not the astronomical leap that the cellphone was. But why is that your cutoff line? My voice assistants offer a lot of benefit to me. Especially with kids, I don't always have a free hand to pull out the…

My personal experience is that simply typing my query into a search engine or pressing the spotify logo to start my music requires less effort or fuss than attempting to figure out how I'm supposed to word my desire for the benevolent overseer to do what I want. IE, using voice commands is a downgrade IMO. Voice commands are not directly discoverable, and there's a lot more magic boxes.

I thought there'd be more problems with voice commands, but the Echo's not bad at it. I have to repeat maybe one thing a week, but "Echo, [room] lights on/off/dim to 50%" always works, as does "play X". I don't find myself having to structure a command in any particular way.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#126

Post by jethro_tell »

Someone1234 wrote: post #93
ninju wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they (the smart assistant makers) would promote the fact that their devices only go online after the trigger word is detected that would go far is assuaging people's fear of the always-on microphone

They have. The reality is that conspiracy theorists aren't interested in learning how things actually work, which is why they're conspiracy theorists. In reality your phone is a significantly bigger threat to privacy both in terms of normal day to day monitoring (e.g. location tracking) and even listening in (a closed source baseband that can communicate on a platform you cannot even monitor).

what's crazy, is that one of the biggest leaks here is cell tower location tracking from triangulation. Like not the gps data that gets constantly sent to google/apple but the fact that there is a middle man that sells all that shit to whom ever. This has been a problem since before smart phones but it's mostly transparent to the user so people don't seem to be bothered by it.

When people see the GPS is on all the time or can look up their location data off their phone, it feels uncomfortable, but then they make un-encrypted phone calls through ma bell and let their location get sold.

People are really bad a privacy and key on these obvious, invasive feeling, technologies but then miss the bigger picture.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#127

Post by ddtaylor »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #121

I'm much less interested in gating audio recording (which I have reasonable confidence in the device itself doing) and much more interested in being able to use a device like this without turning on all of the various histories. Google Assistant refuses to do most of its interesting functions (other than trivial things like setting an alarm) without turning on search history, location history, voice history, and vari…

> which I have reasonable confidence in the device itself doing

A few horror stories related to Alex hint that it might not be doing a very good job. The grammar/syntax it uses to wake is much more complex than what Alias is proposing as a safe alternative. The most blatant example would be the Portland, OR couple that found the Alexa device making phone calls to people as they had a discussion near it.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#128

Post by jdietrich »

hcurtiss wrote: post #7

I'm curious whether it will handle the audio trigger as well as Google/Amazon/Apple. It takes some pretty advanced audio algorithms to catch "hey Google" in a busy kitchen. It would be pretty frustrating if this device caused these devices to trigger even more inconsistently.

Nope. The Amazon Echo uses an array of seven microphones to isolate speech from background noise. There's no way that this device can pass through accurate spatial information, which will inevitably degrade speech and wake word recognition in noisy or reverberant environments.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#129

Post by shittyadmin »

bussierem wrote: post #75
heinrichhartman wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (they aren’t) How do you know? And, how do you know they will not do this silently in the future? Also worse detection does not mean more false positives. Usually, you can get the false positive rate very low by allowing more false negatives. In this way you have a choice, how you want to trade-off. Without this device, you are stuck with the choice that Amazon/Google make for you.

> How do you know? And, how do you know they will not do this silently in the future? Because it's a literal hardware limitation. The device is built in a way that requires a wake word before any recording can possibly happen, thanks to it being built with 2 separate control boards. If they ended up maybe changing the wakeword to "the", then maybe they could "silently" listen to everything, but that would be caught p…

> the device would be "lit up" constantly (another _hardware_ thing)

Unless the mic and lights are somehow wired together (they aren't), then this is really just more software which can be trivially updated away.

Re: Project Alias hacks Amazon Echo and Google Home to protect privacy

#130

Post by lancesells »

mrguyorama wrote: post #101
jedberg wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too grew up in the time of card catalogs. And I learned a lot from reading through the other encyclopedia entries as I flipped the pages looking for the page with the info. Yes, you're right, the voice interface is not the astronomical leap that the cellphone was. But why is that your cutoff line? My voice assistants offer a lot of benefit to me. Especially with kids, I don't always have a free hand to pull out the…

My personal experience is that simply typing my query into a search engine or pressing the spotify logo to start my music requires less effort or fuss than attempting to figure out how I'm supposed to word my desire for the benevolent overseer to do what I want. IE, using voice commands is a downgrade IMO. Voice commands are not directly discoverable, and there's a lot more magic boxes.

I'm an artist and paint most of the day. Having voice control of my lights and music and timers / alarms is a huge upgrade for me.
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