I don't understand why anyone would want to have such a device in their home. How long before they start data mining conversations for better ad targeting? What if a state actor gets access to such devices?
Is no one worried at all?
Is no one worried at all?
I do, but I know that sentiment is not widely shared on HN.
Enabling state spying would destroy people's trust, and hence their business. I think Google is highly motivated to keep your data private.
Do you think devices like this have no remote vulnerabilities, that nation states don't have the resources to find and exploit them, or that they can but don't?
Question: "Jason you don't worry about the data Alexa is collecting on you and your conversations that you're having unwittingly around this device?
Answer: "Your privacy is an Illusion, uhh it's been gone for many years, the NSA is listening to any coversation it wants to through your phone already. So the idea that we have any privacy at this point is sort of laughable... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9fnY5rIjb4
In case you are wondering he's bullish on the Echo and Amazon
I get that better ad targeting may not seem like much of an issue at first thought, and may even seem like a benefit, but I'd suggest that the perceived benefits may start to unravel if you consider it from a different point of view.
Companies that are involved in delivering targeted advertising are basing what ads to show you on the profile they're building up about you and what they perceive as similar people to you. The idea being to give you more of what they think you'll like. What this leads to is a filter bubble. When you're in a filter bubble (and I'd argue most of us are), the culture you're exposed to is increasingly limited by your past likes and dislikes, increasingly tailored based on market demographics, far less likely to broaden your range of experience.
We shouldn't welcome the filter bubble, we should act to break out of it, and resisting the mechanisms behind targeted ads is one such way of doing so.
Google is a different story. I imagine that they would try to sell a device that listens 100% of the time and targets ads at you based on what you talk about. Google makes money by selling ads, not by making buying stuff convenient. Their incentive is different.
Ideally, I'd love for Apple to create such a device, but it won't be open, would cost an arm and a leg, and would probably use Siri, which lags behind the Echo in what it can do by quite a bit now.
I think the rest of your post is conjecture, but does this change your opinion? Amazon is a diverse business that wants to sell many things, including your eyeballs (or ears in the case of Echo) to others via advertising.
Second, sure Amazon does ads on the side, but the majority of their money is made by selling their own products. Occam's Razor suggests that they simply want to sell you stuff using one more way. Notice that the Echo didn't do almost anything when it was initially released, except allowing you to buy stuff. That was the part that they worked out before launching it.
Also, don't forget that Amazon also has a number of other devices that are very similar: the Dash button and Amazon Fresh come to mind. The Echo fits nicely in line with it.
I am not saying they couldn't use it for something nefarious: they could definitely abuse it. I just think that they have less incentive to do so than Google.
It's not like there's a law of physics requiring that always be true, you're trusting that to:
A) Be true now, and B) Keep being true in the future.
And it's the sort of claim that is very very easy to lie about.
State adversaries are a different story. I don't doubt the NSA might somehow break into Snowden's Echo, but most people don't have such adversaries.
State adversaries have repeatedly demonstrated a desire to "collect it all" and sort it out later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
The entire emphasis of what Snowden revealed was precisely that the method employed by the NSA were not targeted.
(I mean, what the hell - deep in the options of Google Now I can actually allow the phone to be unlocked by my voice - but if and only if it is plugged to a charger. They had to explicitly code in a special condition to make Google Now less useful.)
(and yes, I know you meant other kind of "always listening")
They always listen but only execute when they hear the triggering phrase.
Otherwise they'd never hear the trigger...
Whether they locally store what they hear prior to the trigger is the concern. I doubt they do but technically it's not challenging.
I can't tell if this is satire.