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Comment by free2rhyme214 | Hacker News Reader

Competition against Amazon Echo is always positive for consumers.

Yes, except I trust Google FAR less than I trust Amazon--simply because Google has permeated in many more facets of my digital life (gdocs, gmail, chrome, maps, search, etc).

Amazon just has my shopping history.

I don't really 'trust' either company, but the fact that I'm in so deep with Google already makes me less hesitant to add this one thing.

Google already knows me. I've basically slept with Google, so seeing me naked is just not a big deal. If Google uses that against me or gets compromised by a third party I'm screwed anyway and the transcripts from my living room will be the least of my worries.

Interesting take. I should rephrase this to say--I am less interested in allowing google to profit even more from me.

I don't really understand this motivation. Google profiting from your actions doesn't necessarily mean that you're losing something. It's not a zero sum game between you and Google, there are other actors in the system. A similar analogy would be how social systems are valued by their number of users. Their value is not coming from your pocket, you add value to them by being a user and they add value to you by providing you with some service that you enjoy (thus the reason you are a user of theirs). Granted, I understand if your reasoning is not wanting to "pay" more personal info to Google, I just wanted to point out that their profit has no net positive or negative impact on you in it's own right.

> I don't really understand this motivation. Google profiting from your actions doesn't necessarily mean that you're losing something.

It has nothing to do with "I should also profit from my data" but rather, I want to contribute less to Google's dominance.

Google has become very powerful--it's in the top 10 of lobby spending in the US.

Their power is tied to their profits, and limiting my contribution of one, should limit my contribution to the other.

Ah okay. That's fair, I wasn't really considering it as an adversarial situation in terms of power. I was looking at it more from a "purchase this product" or not in an isolated decision.

Biologically, you're much better off with commensal organisms that expect to have a long, profitable relationship with you, giving you things you want and benefiting from you in return, rather than organisms with a shorter time horizon.

I've worked at both companies, so i have a good sense of the soul of both. And I trust Google way more than Amazon.

I mean bezos vs sundar. Enough said.

> I mean bezos vs sundar

What about Bezos vs Schmidt?

Actually I would believe that your purchase history is far more lucrative to a company than anything else you listed.

Google also has it in receipt form (assuming Gmail)

There is a lot that can be extrapolated from your shopping history, more than you think (e.g. if you've got a new house, a baby, if you have health problems, if you're a geek, if you like drinking or not...). And it's not just your shopping history that gets saved. It's your searches (whether you purchased or not), whatever links you searched/clicked to get to Amazon, your wishlists, and so on.

This can be said for any website or app you visit regularly. How deep they go and whether they act on this data or not is in question, but Data Analyst positions are becoming increasingly popular for a reason.

Unless you use Amazon video, music, or AWS.

And a huge ad business they support. Oh, they didn't tell you about that?

Perhaps, but bear in mind that Google is a PRISM partner, whereas Amazon is not. The NSA will likely record every sound from your house, if you own this.

Edit: Downvoters, please educate me on where I am wrong. Thanks.

I personally think this is ignorant. Its already been proven several times that if the government wants access to a companies data they will get it. The shutdown of Lavabit has proven this. Marissa Mayer said explicitly thats its treason to not go along with the NSA.

http://www.businessinsider.com/lavabit-founder-letter-2014-5

http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-its-treason-to-...

There is a large difference between being a PRISM partner( broad hoovering of all data )and a party to a narrowly-scoped warrant or subpoena, as Amazon would be.

Meyer would do well to cite the specific statute that makes noncompliance into a charge of treason. Otherwise she's clearly lying to spin the actions of Yahoo for PR points.

Well we can go through a back and forth on this but we'll never really know the true extent of PRISM as whats been speculated is they have a direct connection to ISP's so the reality is that they probably know more than what even an individual company knows. Both Google and Apple have said the same, any access requires court order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

Google: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a backdoor for the government to access private user data."[112] "[A]ny suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' internet activity on such a scale is completely false."[113]

Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."[115]

Google is a very low-profile, high-importance contractor for the US Federal government, specifically for the intelligence agencies. It's kind of startling how little even HN readers know about this.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-...

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

I find it very difficult to believe that US Federal Contracts have not swayed their levels of cooperation at the highest level.

The belief that PRISM is targeted is 1. in contrast to the leaked slides, and 2. the determination of the PCLOB, which was appointed by . . . the executive branch of the US Government. The findings of the PCLOB are about as useful as lung cancer studies commissioned by Phillip-Morris.

PRISM partners' denials are, of course, standard and expected PR moves.

Is there any evidence that PRISM wasn't just the program where they tapped the private fiber lines between Google's data centers and siphoned off the data? That would fit in line with the code name (where they use a crystal to splice the light from the fiber line)...

I can't see the hundreds of people it would take at google staying quiet for this long about being involved in giving the NSA direct access to servers. There would be at least one whistle blower on that side of things...

[citation needed]

Last time I checked, the only connection Google had with PRISM was their fiber optics being hacked by NSA. I don't recall any proof Google was actively cooperating with them.

If I had to fathom a guess, your downvotes may spring from "The NSA will likely record every sound from your house".

I don't know much on all the subjects that would converge over _the NSA storing all the audio from everyones house_ but it seems unlikely. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about though.

I would guess the downvotes come from this:

>Perhaps, but bear in mind that Google is a PRISM partner, whereas Amazon is not.

We simply have no way of knowing, and our best guess is that the NSA/CIA/HS/FBI gets their own backdoor private APIs to any data source they want, Amazon included.

> The NSA will likely record every sound from your house, if you own this.

It would be very easy to detect something fishy was going on. Even if the device was locked down and the connection was encrypted, they couldn't hide it if the device was uploading large volumes of data with no explanation.

You don't need to upload large volumes of data for voice recognition (see Siri), and if you're only looking for specific keywords/sentences you can trickle the data over time.

Yes, but that's not what the person I was responding to said. They said the NSA would record every sound in the house, which would require a detectable amount of bandwidth even at low bitrates.

The hotword detection (OK Google/Hey Siri/Alexa) currently happens on the device - it would be terribly inefficient to do that in the cloud. If a security researcher notices their Google Home is transmitting significant amounts of data without them using the "OK Google" prompt, that would raise eyebrows.

Eh, the NSA can get it from Google instead of bothering with each individual device.

There is a very simple out, here. Google could simply claim that they do all audio processing in the cloud. They wouldn't need to hide it.

Siri, Google Now, and the Amazon Echo do audio processing in the cloud, but only after they've been triggered by "OK Google" "Hey Siri", or "Alexa". (Or by hitting a button.) It'd be pretty odd, and terribly inefficient, if the Google Home did hotword detection in the cloud.

I upvoted you before you went grey because I do think that's a salient point, but I would guess you're being downvoted because the suggestion that the NSA will record the activity in your home around the clock is considered excessively paranoid. These devices usually perform hotword detection locally and don't start sending data up to the cloud until the hotword is spoken, at which point they capture only a few seconds of audio.

Beyond that, there's really no difference between Google Home and a Nexus phone. If Google wanted to record all of the audio around you, they're already equipped to do so for like 50% of the population that runs Android (and there has been speculation that intel agencies are able to remotely activate cell phone microphones and listen in).

Interesting, I am not familiar with this subject - do you have any links on hotwords in this context or examples when this has happened in the past?

Odds are that you already have a phone near you, with a microphone. If they want to record you, they don't need a new device to do so.

Sure, so let's give them as many sources, streams, and means of accessing our lives as they want!

those documents are half a decade old. im sure amazon is as well now.

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