Comment by gooseus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gooseus | Hacker News Reader

Are you serious? Oh, to be a fly on the wall of the conference room where these things are pitched and discussed...

> “We think about our guests’ perception and their perspective on how we interact with them, but on balance we felt this was a really positive way to connect with them.”

Perhaps I'm too cynical or jaded by the trends in the evolving relationships between individuals, communities, businesses and our shared technology, but I see way too much negative in this type of connection.

The only positive aspect to this is that Google/Amazon/Whoever must now find a way for users to create their own audio triggers for their devices in order to protect them from this type of invasive BS or else we need to go through the lengthy and expensive process of defining and legislating the relationship between users and their AI such that activating and using another person's AI is illegal... or is it even your AI to begin with?

Thanks for the philosophical/legal quandary Burger King, but as I've always personally maintained, fuck you.

Arguably it's already unauthorised access of a computer system which is illegal in USA and UK at least.

See, this is something that I would have assumed would have been brought up in that conference room where this idea was initially pitched... isn't it somebody's job at most companies to ask the "Are we sure this isn't illegal?" question when someone suggests some bullshit that nobody has ever tried before?

Perhaps it was. Some person on HN said something might be illegal. That does not mean the company's legal team came to the same conclusion.

Companies regularly do illegal things. In this case the risk of prosecution is practically non existent so they may get the go ahead even if it's technically illegal.

PS: I wonder if people on HN could contact a prosecutor about this? And if doing so would change anything.

Also the legal team would have probably put a price on it. The C-graders can then know they'll make enough to still pay themselves big bonuses, through the publicity of the court case, etc., and conclude that the personal risk to them is non-existent [go U-S-A!] and so it's worth doing any way.

I'm not sure the sort of person who's OK with an always-listening device in their home would find this particularly invasive.

I am and I would. I don't care if a computer is passively listening for a prompt — the computer has no consciousness and it doesn't do anything I'd even notice. I do care if somebody is trying to make my device do something without my OK.

If you are relying on good will and the spirit of co-operation to ensure that everything that makes sound is OK, you're going to have a bad day.

Nobody is talking about conscious computers here.

The issue is recorded conversions from your home being made available to the government: https://www.inc.com/joseph-steinberg/amazon-alexa-recordings...

This does not particularly concern me, as Alexa only transmits when you trigger it and stops transmitting soon afterward. If that's too much for you, I'm not going to try to change your preferences. All I'm saying is, I'm OK with a device that is constantly listening for a trigger, and I'm OK with a device transmitting messages at my request, but that doesn't mean I'm OK with advertisers attempting to exploit the device.

> Alexa only transmits when you trigger it

You really only have Amazon's word that the only data transmitted is for that particular command. Unless you tap the transmission, you only have Amazon's word that it only transmits when triggered.

Peoples' attention is getting expensive. The important thing is that your name is recognizable and easily associated with your product. Positive connotations can come later.

OTOH it will make it way easier to auto-mute TV ads :p

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