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Comment by StringyBob | Hacker News Reader

Do these people have no idea how much they are annoying their own customers?

I just bought a google home (it's only just been released here), and if it either plays me adverts, or other adverts (ab)use it - I will return it to the store without hesitation. This was not sold as an ad-supported service.

To take an extreme position - Google should take Burger King to court via the computer fraud and abuse act - they've just performed a distributed denial of service attack on google's servers by using thousands of peoples google devices simultaneously without their permission.

Also - this is a key reason why google need to spend some time on supporting custom hot words for google home. 'OK google' and 'Alexa' are the audio equivalent of IoT devices with a default 'username:admin, password:password' on your network.

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> Google should take Burger King to court via the computer fraud and abuse act

It certainly is unauthorized use of a computer... not a stretch at all.

The CFAA only applies to us little guys. It doesn't apply at all to larger corporations. Especially ones in excess of 1$ billion a year revenue.

one would argue that when you voluntarily install a device that listens to unauthenticated verbal requests, you pretty much consent to everything.

In other words, people who buy alexa and ghome do not get to complain about unauthorized use, or privacy for that matter.

A verbal request from your TV is pretty much equivalent to typing in an URL "by hand", and AFAIK people got sacked under CFAA for the latter, because of "unauthorized" access to data.

In my layman's opinion, there's a potential for a case here.

Unauthenticated != Authorized

And for that matter

Authenticated != Authorized

Whether you can do something is orthogonal to whether you're allowed to do it.

Correct. Example: this user logged into my service. Let's try to log into gmail with the same password. It worked. I'm authenticated, but not authorized.

AT&T won the unauthenticated iPad emails thing, putting weev in prison. As far as i can tell, i have to divine the intentions of the owner of any computer i connect to before i connect to it, or i'm breaking the law.

really? People voluntarily installed a listening device in their homes. That should no way encroach on complete freedom of speech, no matter how tricky.

They didn't give Burger King permission to use the device.

Burger King knowingly attempted to access the device of thousands of people and then issue voice commands, without permission.

A corporation has no freedom of speech rights. It's important to remember that a corporation is not considered to the same rights as a person in these cases, nor should they ever be allowed to be.

Would you give us a citation for this point? AFAIK, a corporation was a Legal Person as far as the law went.

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