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Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

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Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#341

Post by flukus »

m0zg wrote: post #330
toomuchtodo wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My iPhone runs machine vision on my phone at night (locked, plugged in, on wifi) to determine which people are in which photos. My iPhone.

Your iPhone is also a $1k device that's faster than some laptops. And it still cant do convincing on-device text to speech a-la Google Tacotron, and its NLU capabilities _even in the cloud_ leave much to be desired.

Much of the cost of the iPhone is in the screen, battery, form factor and fashion accessory premium. Take that away and your much closer to raspberry pi territory.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#342

Post by bzbarsky »

matte_black wrote: post #258
bzbarsky wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your list is missing "pro-democracy advocates", "Muslims", "Christians", "Jews", "atheists", "women who want an abortion", "people trying to escape an abusive relationship", "people with interesting medical conditions", etc, depending on location. Please don't pretend that both "only criminals have something to hide" and "criminals are by definition bad people" are true statements. Neither is true.

If you live under a government where those examples are a reason to hide, then in the eyes of that government you are technically a criminal. Doesn’t describe my government. Even under the most oppressive governments though, there will still be a sizable majority that doesn’t have anything to hide and can feel secure using most technology, and they’ll be fine.

First, having talked a lot to people who actually lived under a somewhat oppressive government (USSR, and by the 80s it wasn't even that oppressive), most people _did_ in fact have something to hide.

Second, just because it doesn't describe your government now doesn't mean it won't in the future, unfortunately. Consider examples of a 1920s German, or a 1960s Iranian (the old regime was oppressive too, but in different ways), or a 2000s citizen of Poland.

Third, there are certainly places where the danger is not from the government but from your neighbors, including to some of the groups I listed. So thinking about this only from the perspective of governments and criminality is off. Hence my claim that "only criminals have something to hide" is a false statement.

Fourth, I suspect that perception of how much one has to hide is highly age-dependent. As people get older they discover more and more things that they either want to hide or wish they could have hidden. Maybe I'm wrong in my guess as to your age, of course, but if I am not, I strongly urge talking about this sort of thing with people a few decades older. It can be _very_ eye-opening. Certainly was for me.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#343

Post by [deleted] »

closetohome wrote: post #198
rchaud wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in my 30s too, and I remember reading articles saying that DHS had hundreds of thousands of hours of wiretapped conversations they would never get to because they all needed to be manually reviewed. When the company selling a suspiciously cheap home speaker ('stocking stuffer') is the same company that boasts of having infinitely scalable computing ability and is the only cloud vendor that meets the Pentagon's p…

Just so I'm clear here, you're proposing a conspiracy theory where Amazon, the DHS, and The Pentagon are in collusion to collect and transcribe audio from Amazon Echos -- in such a way that none of the many people who have hacked and extensively reverse-engineered them would be able to tell? I can't find any holes in that theory.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#344

Post by bzbarsky »

cortesoft wrote: post #265
bzbarsky wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your list is missing "pro-democracy advocates", "Muslims", "Christians", "Jews", "atheists", "women who want an abortion", "people trying to escape an abusive relationship", "people with interesting medical conditions", etc, depending on location. Please don't pretend that both "only criminals have something to hide" and "criminals are by definition bad people" are true statements. Neither is true.

I get what you are saying, and agree with you in principle... but the problem is, I am none of those things. I have none of the qualities that I need to hide from anyone, rather neighbors or the government. While it kinda feels creepy to imagine myself being listened to, I can't imagine any real consequences to my private conversations being heard. However, I know that there are lots of people who do have those thing…

Right, I have a hard time faulting people for deciding that they want to use voice assistants. That's more or less their choice. I am a lot more ambivalent about people who leave the voice assistants running when they have guests, because at that point they are making that choice for the guests too...

I think there's a lot of unexplored "how should/will society work" ground here, or at least explored only in science fiction, and it will be interesting to see how things shake out in the future. Maybe we will move to an "assume everyone is recorded all the time and put 0 weight on these recordings in anything that matters" world, for example... Hard to tell.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#346

Post by aero142 »

codyb wrote: post #340
aero142 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not parent, but I'll answer. 1) The implementation of the wake word recognition is implemented in hardware that cannot be updated remotely. 2) The device is unable to transmit information without lighting up a TX light. Implemented in unmodifiable hardware. 3) Voice recordings are processed and then deleted within one month. 4) The device is run by a company that doesn't make money through marketing or data analysis.

Can't you set up Alexa on a raspberry pi? I guess you could then have your own trigger word "hello pi" or whatever that you've programmed it to listen for, and only then activate Alexa maybe? Pain in the ass but you could open source it for the rest of the world.

Yeah, I think you are correct here. I think I would also be happy if someone else was selling me the hardware and I controlled it more, and it just was a hardware pipe to the voice service provider.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#347

Post by m0zg »

flukus wrote: post #341
m0zg wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your iPhone is also a $1k device that's faster than some laptops. And it still cant do convincing on-device text to speech a-la Google Tacotron, and its NLU capabilities _even in the cloud_ leave much to be desired.

Much of the cost of the iPhone is in the screen, battery, form factor and fashion accessory premium. Take that away and your much closer to raspberry pi territory.

It's closer to Apple TV territory maybe, that custom CPU inside costs a pretty penny to design and manufacture.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#348

Post by titzer »

stevecalifornia wrote: post #38
rdtsc wrote: post #17

I am baffled by how many people have no problems adding always listening and recording Google and Facebook devices to their living rooms. Some are considered tech people who should know stuff like this could happen, but they just don't care or don't think it will happen to them. Somewhere there is an ex-Stasi officer who is thinking "I wish we were that good and had people fooled to voluntarily install listening devi…

1) It's always listening for a keyword, and then it starts recording. It's a voice interface for a computer. 2) Your phone is doing the same thing except for it follows you around everywhere you go and records your map location, what apps you use, who you are talking to and what your web searches are. Your phone isn't recording just what you say...its recording what you do and where you do it and when you do it. It's…

1) It's always listening for a keyword, and then it starts recording. It's a voice interface for a computer.

Show me the source code!

...all of it, including what's running the entire cloud behind it! Until then, fuck no, no hot mics in my house. And actually then, still no hot mics unless I've plugged my Les Paul into my amp, in which case I switched them on.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#349

Post by dbdjfjrjvebd »

closetohome wrote: post #198
rchaud wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in my 30s too, and I remember reading articles saying that DHS had hundreds of thousands of hours of wiretapped conversations they would never get to because they all needed to be manually reviewed. When the company selling a suspiciously cheap home speaker ('stocking stuffer') is the same company that boasts of having infinitely scalable computing ability and is the only cloud vendor that meets the Pentagon's p…

Just so I'm clear here, you're proposing a conspiracy theory where Amazon, the DHS, and The Pentagon are in collusion to collect and transcribe audio from Amazon Echos -- in such a way that none of the many people who have hacked and extensively reverse-engineered them would be able to tell? I can't find any holes in that theory.

I agree the idea that a defence contractor might be working together with the Pentagon is totally preposterous.

Re: Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

#350

Post by calculi »

madrox wrote: post #104

I've never seen a demographic breakdown of HN, but I'm 37 years old. I'm definitely not the oldest guy here, but I see history repeat itself regularly. I remember when people used location tracking as a reason to not own a cell phone. I'm talking about flip phones, mind you, not even iPhones with GPS receivers. I recall the bulk of complaints in that vein died down around the time Google Maps for phones came out. If…

Totally agree with you. And it's funny to obeserve that history repeats itself in the comments of this post, like GPS vs voice assistance.

I'm in my 30s too and I can remember how I tried to walk to the library in the city for the first time: a map, tricks to figure out the orientation, and asking passerby. Back then, it's not as convenient as navigation with GPS/Google Map, but people were used to it.

The point is: concerns about privacy had and has never been a issue for any technology. The fact that everyone can own a cellphone with GPS, mic, gigabytes of storage makes them forget about that their location is being tracked by both cell towers, OS itself, and possibly some apps. It's totally possible that in the near future a device in the size of earpods can: help you learn a foreign language, teach you certain professional skills such as singing, and control all appliances. Then people will say something with absolute certainty: visual assistant really helps and my life will be a totally mess without it, but technology XYZ is too much, useless for me,and it tacks my movement.

PS: I use GPS related apps a lot on a daily basis: find nearest restaurant, navigate, and many other location-based apps. But here is a interesting report about taxi drivers rely on their memory instead of GPS: https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/exercising-your-b...

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