A device that records you and sends the data to a corporation! In 1984 people were freakin' forced to have one. In 2017 people WANT to have one.
Sorry for this short rant, but I just struggle with understanding what's wrong with people these days.
I have an Echo and I mainly use it to set timers and check the weather. If that, plus a few questions about "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?" constitute a huge cache of data on me, I'm honestly fairly relaxed about it.
Compared to the vast number of tracking pixels, cookie sync firings and God knows what else that happens if I happen to load up a web browser without a VPN & ad blocker, it's really small beer. Not to mention the location tracking that happens by default and is mandated by law in every smartphone.
Also, the 1984 comparisons just don't bear fruit. We're not living in a violent, single-party totalitarian regime. We're just not. If anyone is really relevant to this, it's Weber and his concerns over the rise of unaccountable and powerful bureaucracies and social alienation.
Our tendency to pattern match will only ever pick out what someone predicted correctly, it often overlooks what a thinker got wrong and Orwell was wrong about a lot of things in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Much of what he gets right relies on things like conflating the power of the state with the power of corporations, and equating businesses tendency to employ euphemism with the complete evisceration of language.
That's not to say that we shouldn't be mindful of privacy concerns and what we are allowing into our lives, but 1984 is a pretty blunt and emotionally charged instrument for critiquing something like Google Home.
I just don't see the big deal.
One particularly interesting example of this Kyllo v United States[1], where the use of infrared cameras to find grow lights inside a home was ruled a search (and thus needed a warrant) because infrared cameras were not common so the general public did not in practice see infrared emissions as "available to the public". The opinion of the court, however, did point out that their decision would be defunct when infrared cameras became generally available and used by the public. At that point the public would no longer expect infrared emissions to be private. (Presumably this expectation might create a market for e.g. ir-blocking paint? If that's even possible?)
Installing microphones that regularly send data to unknown 3rd parties normalizes the expectation that spoken word in the home is no longer private. When perceptions change, so will warrant requirements.
> We're not living in a violent, single-party totalitarian regime.
If that's you're criteria for when to act, you are always going to be too late to do anything. Some of us prefer the idea of detecting problems early - hopefully before the become violent.
> Law enforcement must have a valid and legal warrant
Kyllo v United States established a bright line test that the need for a warrant specifically depends on if the technology used is commonly available to and used by the general public.
At some point it is impossible to know the list of possible words you cannot speak and the public will simply start assuming that they may be recorded anyway. When that perception changes, so will legal doctrines.
You can own every single smarthome device in existence today and quite rightly assume that you are not being passively recorded. These concerns amount to overblown FUD.
Your argument is different to, and stronger than the parent's though. The parent's argument was not that we were on the thin end of a wedge to a totalitarian state, but that in some senses we had already passed that point because there was a voluntary element to it.
Still though, IR cameras by their nature are always-on and always transmitting data. They'd be pretty useless if they weren't! That's not the case for Google Home or any of the solutions currently on the market. Google Home also no-more violates this condition than say, a set top TV box that sends data on my TV viewing back to a central server.
If the public expects that a home might be recording their speech and sending it to a 3rd party - and thus theoretically has the opportunity to not speak or employ some sort of defense being recorded - then then Kyllo v United States suggests 4th Amendment protection no longer applies.
Just look at how many people here on HN already claim to no longer expect privacy.
> voluntary element
That's my point - your choice to voluntarily normalize surveillance impacts my 4th Amendment protections.
In the case of near-IR night vision CCTV cameras in common use, yes. The case of Kyllo v. United States specifically involved very expensive long-wavelength thermal imagers that are not typically used in civilian CCTV applications [0]. Furthermore, federal agents specifically pointed a mobile camera at the house to see temperature changes behind the walls, which differs from a static always-on installation.
[0] There are fixed thermal surveillance imagers (see http://www.flir.com/surveillance/display/?id=64664 for FLIR's latest), but they're typically used for military installation security. Unlike NIR cameras they require no external illumination, and are tuned to detect the black-body radiation naturally emitted by warm-blooded things.
... But we could be one day, and some people are. The transition to cloud listening devices in every house and the transition to totalitarianism each only need to happen once. The thing Orwell missed was that these devices could be made useful enough to consumers for that transition to be first.
If a person is concerned with the practical security implications of Amazon's Echo or Google's Home, I expect they should be terrified of the potential vectors for misuses that their mobile phone allows.
The future state of government regulation and the ability for those in power to use the digital tracks I've left do concern me, but I've found it very difficult to decide how to combat it without fully disconnecting and moving off-grid. There are ways to mask and obfuscate certain parts of that record, to be sure (Tor, proxies, not using Echo or Home, no connected devices, etc.) but I like the benefits that technology brings to me life and I don't really want to move into a remote, signal-free location to live a spartan life.
I don't think Orwell imagined that universal surveillance would happen due to consumer demand rather than imposition by the totalitarian state.
What 1984 didn't depict or foresee was that the same technology that can be used by corporations and governments to monitor citizens can be (and is) just as easily used by citizens to monitor the actions of the governments and corporations, and hold them to account.
To quote John O'Farrell of Andreessen Horowitz [1]:
“So, Orwell was partly right. The state uses ever more advanced surveillance technology to watch us, and our own ever-greater use of personal technology makes it possible. On the other hand, technology has fundamentally destroyed the state’s ability to control our access to information, and exposed its bureaucracy to unprecedented scrutiny. This may be the death of privacy, but perhaps it’s also the death of secrecy and impunity. In that respect, fortunately, Orwell was wrong. Thanks to technology, Big Brother may be watching us, but we’re watching him too.”
Whether or not society is overall healthier in this state than it was before the technology emerged, I'm undecided, but the powers of surveillance do seem rather more balanced than the dystopian view suggests.
[1] http://a16z.com/2017/05/15/andreessen-primack-dc-tech-policy...
I don't think we can revert the trend, but maybe at least try and redirect the stream to a solution that is concerned with privacy.
The same goes for the Whatsapp dilemma.
I can see some people not wanting this for themselves, but why care if I have one?
I wouldn't compare that to Google Home (or Alexa or whatever).
1) The current solutions are plain stupid. They impress me about the same way that speech recognition to type a letter in the early 2000s impressed me. Some things work. Most don't.
2) The current solutions are backed by corporations and (as someone that really dislikes all things Apple) among these three only Apple might be considered somewhat trustworthy (they aren't a shop that tries to sell you every product this planet has to offer nor are they the biggest and scariest advertisement company).
I like the Star Trek visions. I'd also like a replicator and a holo deck, but won't argue that a 3d printer and Google Cardboard are kinda there yet.
(Obviously it doesn't make sense to complain about YOU liking these products. I assume the GP feels just cornered by the inexplicable mass appeal/success of these products)
Other people not caring about privacy equals governments not caring, equals big brother for everyone, like it or not.
If government is the Leviathan, this undirected but quite strict framing of our choices is Cthulhu.
Note; I mean I don't acknowledge a downside from my perspective. I'm fully aware that it's always listening and sending data home when it hears a keyword. According to Google, it will only send voice data back when it hears the keyword. Now if it explicitly goes against its own stated privacy policy, that's a breach of trust I would not be happy with. That said, if they explicitly stated they send all audio back, I'd actually be fine with that too.
Huxley always seemed to have a better handle than Orwell did on what makes people tick.
Walk down to a local AA meeting and see people who at some point willingly made a decision and who are now, unfortunately controlled by it. This will always exist.
You are using the internet, you already have a big brother that can see everything you do.
Google at least show you what it have on you. It's a far bigger problem that governments don't.
As predicted by Brave New world.
Other people not caring about privacy equals governments not caring, equals big brother for everyone, like it or not.
If someone finds their home device to be "more than a dumb box" and doesn't want to remove it from their life, you're at an impasse. No one granted you the authority to just decide where everyone else gets to draw their own personal line.
I'd argue that those (should not) transmit audio data to any random company, but then I've never understood what Google Now/Google Assist or whatever it's called nor what Siri is about..
It has nowhere near 24/7 uptime.
Also, I don't carry the phone around with me everywhere.
On one hand, it is fundamental human nature (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_wi...).
On the other hand, it is a trade off. Your post to HN can be mined, aggregated in a similar manner. Even a level before that, your access to the internet can be mined, aggregated and a profile built of you by your ISP. You are voluntarily cooperating with that are you not?
I personally think there is an age where people decide; everything that existed before now is useful and nice, and everything new is evil. Kind of a technological puberty.
Drop the handset on the recently inspected switch, the mic ain't connected to nothin'.