They're attempting to establish the precedent today. Tomorrow(figurative, not literal), when such devices send everything to the cloud to be processed "To reduce false positives", there will be much more data to mine.
I won't have one of these devices in my house. I won't have an xbone in my house for the same reason. Today, they're not much of a threat to privacy but long term, the risk is too great for my comfort. They can't be trusted.
At least this situation didn't give them the precedent; the defendant consented, so the court never got the ability to demand it from Amazon.
Wikipedia leak today claims hacks for Smart TVs. Perhaps in the future, basic things like light bulbs aren't even usable without an Echo-like device.
Bet on everything being recorded everywhere, at some point. Just look at what the satellite tech companies are doing now. If you are doing something off in a far remote area, you are still being surveilled, recorded in perpetuity. At this point I'm more concerned about AI actors than any government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%...
If and when that happens, we can fight it then. I'm a believer in picking my battles, and see no reason whatsoever to pick this one.
> just because they may, at some nebulous point in the future, be used against me in some nebulous way. If and when that happens, we can fight it then.
sounds very much like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
"If an argument uses valid reasoning, it would not be identified as the slippery slope fallacy,[2] and the term "slippery slope" may be used without an implying faulty argument."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope#Non-fallacious_...
If for no other reason, the behavior would be blatantly obvious to the kind of people that run Wireshark for funsies, the alarm would go up, and Amazon's reputation goes into the toilet.
Upd: > the behavior would be blatantly obvious to the kind of people that run Wireshark for funsies
Echo probably does not send the recordings all the time, it would be too simple to detect. However, it could simply send random parts of the recordings or send the data by a trigger from Amazon/random hackers. We can only say for sure that we have no possibility to check what it really does, since it is proprietary. I prefer not to trust for-profit companies (when it's possible). I only trust the source code.
The device itself has been rooted via a set of contacts compatible with what you'd use with a Raspberry Pi: https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/4inesj/rooting_the_...
and the ones that it mistakenly accepted as triggers, at least.
>No proof of any kind exists to even begin to suggest it does something other than that.
No proof exists to suggest anything about Echo. It is a question of trust. This is why I mentioned trust in my previous response.
Anyway, thanks for an interesting link.
It WILL be used if it isn't smothered in its crib.
It's the nature of both government and technology.
Today, it's about convenience and whiz-bang "Look at what we can do" demonstrations but if allowed to continue, it will become a tool of the surveillance state. It's too powerful a tool to be ignored.
When CALEA was up for debate, those of us who feared that it would lead to widespread surveillance were ridiculed. It turns out, we were right. We're right about this too.