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

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

threatpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 424 posts

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

#371

Post by cm2187 »

jancsika wrote: post #321
lisper wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference: having a GPS in my phone means I never have to worry about buying or carrying a map with me ever again, at the cost of potentially revealing my location to someone who I'd rather not know it. Having a voice assistant means I don't have to spend a few seconds typing, at the cost of having everything I say potentially overheard by someone who I'd rather didn't hear it. By my quality metric, th…

> Having a voice assistant means I don't have to spend a few seconds typing, at the cost of having everything I say potentially overheard by someone who I'd rather didn't hear it. You're underplaying it in order to artificially inflate your mileage. Having a voice assistant means not having to learn to change application contexts inside an operating system follwed by a few seconds typing. You are ignoring the hundred…

Except that voice assistant are not self-discoverable (in addition to being very unreliable and sluggish, which granted could be improved over the long run). And it forces me to memorize commands. Not just "switch on x". But like I want to play that song from that band I don't remember the name of but I remember it is a blue album a few songs after that radiohead song in my playlist. I don't want to have to memorise all these names.

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

#372

Post by gpvos »

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…

Well, I'm in my late 40s and I avoid Google Maps like the plague. Osmand or other off-line navigation apps are really easy to use nowadays. Also, I'm still not happy that my phone is leaking my location through GSM.

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

#373

Post by tonylemesmer »

adrianN wrote: post #364
jancsika wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having a voice assistant means I don't have to spend a few seconds typing, at the cost of having everything I say potentially overheard by someone who I'd rather didn't hear it. You're underplaying it in order to artificially inflate your mileage. Having a voice assistant means not having to learn to change application contexts inside an operating system follwed by a few seconds typing. You are ignoring the hundred…

Everything a voice assistant does could be done with an device that has nothing but a keyboard and a text input field. People are not complaining about the great natural language comprehension these things have, they're complaining about always-on microphones in their homes.

But even with typed instead of spoken commands, wouldn't the natural language processing still done in the cloud? Admittedly, typed instructions instead of recorded sounds is less intrusive but still intrusive because it requires the internet, not processed locally.

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

#374

Post by krageon »

gpvos wrote: post #372
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…

Well, I'm in my late 40s and I avoid Google Maps like the plague. Osmand or other off-line navigation apps are really easy to use nowadays. Also, I'm still not happy that my phone is leaking my location through GSM.

Easy to use, but heavy if you travel a lot (the maps are big). Also it doesn't offer anything in the way of alternative routing for traffic jams/road repair proactively (so you don't spend an hour driving back or looping instead of taking a route that is maybe 10m slower from the get go). There are many smaller examples that make Osmand not really something I would recommend to anyone else, even though it is what I use (I use it because google maps simply won't work on my phone because of how it is set up).

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

#375

Post by krageon »

whatshisface wrote: post #216
closetohome wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people who have "hacked and reverse engineered" the Echos don't have access to what happens on the server side. We are facing a situation of either trusting or not trusting, because verification isn't possible. There should be a word for believing that someone is working for your interests even though you have no reason to, as a counterpart to "conspiracy theory" which implies that you believe that a group is wor…

There is a word for people like that. In fact, there are many. It's just that they're very, very rude words that we shouldn't use in polite discourse.

If people have a conspiracy theory about secretly being helped by a large faceless power, that would probably fall under the label "pronoia".

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

#376

Post by krageon »

jacquesm wrote: post #295
illumin8 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there is: traffic data.

That could be an optional enhancement. And it still does not require your exact position to be sent to Google.

It requires the route you will take and the time at which you are estimated to be at certain points along it. I would say that this is even worse than your current exact position.

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

#377

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#378

Post by krageon »

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.

Hotword recognition does already exist and works on fairly modest hardware (I've never tested it on a pi, so I don't know specifically how well that would work - or more accurately how fast). The trouble is that it's an enormous hassle to set up and while it is open source, it involves some company or other having it's grubby paws all over the recognition networks. Which may or may not rub you the wrong way.

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

#379

Post by lorenzobr »

cheeze wrote: post #66
accnumnplus1 wrote: post #12

This is just facebook all over again. Why can't people see trouble-tech? I never used facebook and won't ever use an alexa, nor whatever google's thing is.

I disagree. Amazon seems to actually care about privacy and takes things like this pretty seriously. One could certainly criticize AMZN data collection, but I think Amazon has shown that it does care about privacy of this data. Mistakes do happen which is unfortunate, and I think there is a good argument for no company, no matter their intentions to record this much data. On the other hand, this is Facebook's busines…

I find it's funny how people these days think the problem is with Facebook.

Literally every company that has access to users' data has in one way or another some kind of business model based on selling that data. Every day I come across 2 or 3 articles from big newspapers giving Facebook some shit about selling user data. But what about Experian? What about phone carriers? They all sell users' data, maybe anonymous maybe not but they are still making profit on people's privacy.

And when some shit goes down, we make a big fuss about it for a few days and then we go back to normal. Equifax anyone?

Honestly, companies in the position of making profit on users' data have been doing it for the better part of 15 years now, I don't understand why we are acting so surprised now.

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

#380

Post by kurtisc »

tonylemesmer wrote: post #373
adrianN wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything a voice assistant does could be done with an device that has nothing but a keyboard and a text input field. People are not complaining about the great natural language comprehension these things have, they're complaining about always-on microphones in their homes.

But even with typed instead of spoken commands, wouldn't the natural language processing still done in the cloud? Admittedly, typed instructions instead of recorded sounds is less intrusive but still intrusive because it requires the internet, not processed locally.

If it was implemented using something like hitting super/the Chromebook search button and then typing your intentions, it would be a more deliberate choice to send the data than it is using a voice assistant which is constantly recording to look out for the keyword.
Post reply on HN