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Comment by mlazos | Hacker News Reader

At least for me the reason I’m fine with my phone is that it’s a metered connection. If it was sending that much data to the mothership you’d probably hit the ceiling on your data plan really quickly. Since my home connection doesn’t have such a ceiling it’s a bit scarier.

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Certainly getting into the conspiratorial, but telco providers have this concept of zero-rating for content they don't want applied to data rates. For example, there are zero-rating projects for stuff like calls to analytics platforms. So were a telco to have a zero rate agreement in conjunction with some eavesdropping system, it would not show up.

With decent audio compression you're talking something like 50 or 60 megabytes per hour of audio (half that in mono, come to think of it). Assuming your listener software is doing a little work to not send silence or unintelligible noise, I bet the data usage would be totally dwarfed by regular use of the phone.

With a low bitrate speech codec, you can get well down to 1 or 2 megabytes per hour.

Why would it need to send audio? Convert it to text in the device and send that.

You're right, but most of the real intelligence in the voice-to-text these devices are relying on comes from computation done on the server side, I believe. That way they get to constantly train the algorithm with new data, and so on and so forth. (the point still stands, either way: the network bandwidth these things use is not a big deal)

Yes, it is a metered connection, but unless you implement the metering, you don't know how much data you're leaking. For example, in some plans, Netflix data is not counted towards the plan.

Not necessarily, there are lots of phone service providers who except certain websites or services from the data tracking. Some of them Google services already -- Virgin Mobile in Australia excepted YouTube traffic for years.

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