401–410 of 573 posts
Legislation we need: "smart" devices need to come packaged with labels for people to put on their door warning guests that there is audio recording equipment inside and no expectation of privacy can be provided.
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What does having a Nest thermostat get you? I'm a tech dude, I build modern software, but I live in a dumb, old fashioned house. My programmable Honeywell thermostat, which has no internet connection, does a perfectly fine job of keeping my home the right temperature. My door locks use a key, and keys have great battery life, and my smoke detectors beep instead of speaking to me. What am I missing by not having inter…
A programmable keypad is nice. I have a Z-wave one which can notify my Smarthings hub which notifies me when it's locked or unlocked. The Nest thermostat allows me to control the heat remotely. These two things are great for rental properties. Guests often forget to lock the door, I have records of when guests or maintenance people are coming or going, I can adjust the heat to 55 when nobody is there which saves a lo…
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Lazy engineering gets to market first, and if most users don't find it harmful, the company wins?
Lazy, half-assed, corner-cutting everything gets to market first. This is a problem . It's also why markets accrue regulations over time.
The second most correct answer is to just opt-out if you feel spied on and get to feel very smug watching people who didn't opt-out get burned by their choices. Honestly, I recommend that solution unless one encounters a situation where opt-out is impossible.
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All of these are addressable engineering challenges if privacy were a priority. It's just that privacy is not a priority. (1) is not that hard, just subscribe to feeds or query cloud services from the device. (2) is harder but could be done by treating the devices as a cluster or sending data up only when it can't be easily recognized and storing it only long enough to be useful in training (and storing it anonymousl…
Let's not forget the other important issue: aligned with privacy-invasive technology is the business incentive towards turning products into services. This is what drives most of the bad engineering in IoT products - perhaps even more than the secondary revenue stream of selling users' data. When you make your device depend on the Internet for its most basic functions, you secure yourself a recurring revenue stream.…
It's also a lot easier to debug and improve software running on machines in a cloud one owns than on local heterogeneous architectures out "in the wild." Ask anyone who's done backend web development vs. frontend how fun it is to get "It don't work" bug reports from end-users with no logs and only spotty event metrics to guess what failure mode they got into and how they could get out of it (including failure modes such as "their ad blocker decided to kill half your functionality because your JavaScript's name had 'ad' in the URL").
There's a lot of incentives aligned for thin clients and fat servers.
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I gotta be that guy and recommend DuckDuckGo. No, it's not always as good as Google search, but it's still usually good enough and when you -really- need Google you can simply add "g!". Every other time, you can rest assured your searches aren't feeding some AI. DDG is at least a reasonable way to ween yourself off Google search rather than needing to go full cold turkey.
As I always do when this is suggested, I recommend using “!s” for Startpage instead of “!g” for Google. Similar to DDG, Startpage provides results in a privacy respecting way, but it uses Google instead of Bing (and Oath), which DDG uses. There’s a common misconception amongst some that using !g on DDG is private, but it’s just a redirect, so Google can gather information from that search. Using !s as the fallback in…
I do find the mention of DDG using Oath rather alarming, though, since Oath seems particularly obnoxious, at least with their GDPR pop-up on Tumblr. What does DDG do with Oath?
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I think it looks comfortable in the Star Trek universe because it is implied that voice activated stuff is controlled by a super-AI. That is, the AI won't give humans access to the audio. Which in turn means we are going to have a super-AI that can restrict our rights and itself have access to vast amounts of information about us. I.e. Star Trek is a society essentially controlled by the AI, as it will be above us.
>a society essentially controlled by the AI, as it will be above us. This is the highest probability of the realistic outcome of AGI as it will advance in capabilities so much and so rapidly that we won't be able to keep up. I personally think it will be benevolent and care for us like we do for our pets which won't necessarily be a bad thing.
These comments are lunacy. He's suggesting etiquette if someone puts a Nest recording device (not a thermostat) inside their house purposefully, probably for security purposes. Security cameras have existed for decades and nothing has changed here.
Welcome to hacker news, where facts don't matter and big tech is always out to get you.
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> I have voice-activated assistant on my droid turned off, meanwhile Siri is active on all iDevices This is not true, voice-activated Siri is a setting as well and turned off on my iPhone.
Also, 'Hey Siri' is supposedly processed locally on the phone using the Neural Engine part of Apples custom ARM chip so it should only upload voice data after you have said 'Hey Siri' or held down the home button to activate it. You can test this if you put the phone in airplane mode or go somewhere with no reception and say 'hey siri', it still recognises that you want to ask it something but just presents a message…
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Siri has been enabled by default since iOS 9[0]. [0] http://ios9news.net/setup-hey-siri/
The always-listening portion is not. Also “enabled by default” still requires active user consent and agreement to plain English privacy terms. It is a step that cannot be missed when setting up the phone.
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Having a cell phone does not invalidate their legitimate critique.
Of course not, but phrasing it in this way (that phones are a separate exception) minimizes the legitimate critiques of always-listening cellphone privacy.
I'm willing to make some sacrifice so that I can get GPS/maps anywhere I go, ability to make emergency phone calls, etc.
Smart speakers really don't have the same value add.