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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

So now we're putting always-on amazon microphones everywhere in our companies too?

How exactly are companies going to be ok with private, trade-secret conversations? How about confidential meetings? How about Amazon competitors? How about employee law about potentially being eavesdropped on, all day?

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The same way they're okay with all of their current audio and video conferencing equipment?

If we're going to hypothesize that any device with a camera or microphone can watch you at all times, why aren't people afraid of Cisco?

Plenty of people are probably afraid of their Cisco devices.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/cisco_shippin...

Isn't Siri and Google's 'Ok google' thing basically the same? Everyone in the room has that running all day everywhere they go.

I bring this up every time someone complains about devices like the Echo. Unless you ban cell phones, you must not be worried too much about having tons of always-on microphones around.

If you allow cellphones and don't use a noise generator like rabbler, your meeting isn't secretive enough

so do opsec like tony in the sopranos and leave all you mobiles out side the room

You mean, where someone can easily get to them to install a sniffer/ copy all content?

It's a thing that people have noise generators running while they have meetings? Isn't that annoying?

I was going to say that modern phones don't have the resources to perform recognition/recording outside of a trigger phrase without an obvious hit to battery life. But then there is the Pixel 2 which can identify a few thousand songs with little performance impact. All of the wired assistants don't even have this issue.

I use Sleep Cycle for my alarm clock, which uses the microphone to listen to your sleep and wake you up when it's a good time and you're ready for it. My bedside charging cable has been malfunctioning the past few days, so my phone has been running off the battery all night while doing this. Despite this, my battery only drops a small amount between when I turn the alarm on and when I wake up.

If the app was designed correctly it would probably only be listening within a ~1 hour window of when you want to wake up

That would be smart if it was just an alarm, but it also presents a full analysis of the entire night’s sleep, and notes and records any snoring it detects.

Alexa, would you mind signing this NDA?

Amazon has a device that is always listening, that's true. It's listening for the trigger word.

If it did more than that, do you think companies deploying these devices wouldn't notice?

Outside of monitoring everything these devices store to flash and send across the the network, how would anybody notice? If an enterprising hacker gained control of these you may need to analyse side channels like ultrasonic messaging too.

"...send across the the network"

You know, major companies don't just plug ethernet cables to routers and forget about them.

They WILL notice the traffic.

No, we've always assumed that it's just waiting for the trigger word. But wasn't there that murder case where the police wanted recordings from the victim's Echo and they got them?

I don't remember the specifics.

Everyone here is absolutely right about "why are you complaining when you carry a phone" etc. Yes it's also risky. It's just such a bizarre normal we're in nowadays.

> But wasn't there that murder case where the police wanted recordings from the victim's Echo and they got them?

Well, strictly speaking, no, it was the suspect’s Echo. And the suspect agreed to allow Amazon to release them. But I can't find any indication that it involved any recordings except ones triggered by the wake word. See, e.g., http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/30/us/amazon-echo-arkansas-murder...

Do you own one?

Echo has a history of requests. Songs that you play, apps you launch, basically all your requests. In my home I even have the requests to turn on/off devices. That info is sent to Amazon (obviously). And is available to you.

So there maybe some data that leaks that you wouldn't want to. For business this is important (meeting names can be confidential). Not sure how Amazon addresses these.

However, that's a bit different from always-on recording, which I doubt it does. I see no unusual activity in my home network, with 3 echos.

I actually did buy one (an Echo Dot) but I unplugged it after a day. I actually bought it to test out some custom apps I wanted to build.

I would imagine that most companies that are in the market for this have already decided to trust Amazon with most, if not all, of their most sensitive applications and data.

Maybe eventually they will come out with an AVC, like a GVC but more betterer.

Maybe this will lead to a modern equivalent to the Enigma machine ;)

Most companies already use Skype for business/Slack/Hipchat for private conversations.

Maybe at startups, but most enterprises self-host things - including Skype for Business (formerly Lync).

If you mean companies smaller than 100 people, you might be right. Otherwise i know enough small companies != startups using skype and whatever was used at the beginning and/or someone was using before.

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