The point is, they subject you to the same threat as an Alexa. You can’t say “Europeans don’t use Alexa because it could XYZ”, and yet they use phones which could also do XYZ.
Anyways,this is one if those problems that should be addressed in criminal law. Unfortunately most law is retroactively created,this means society will have to face irreversible damage of technology abuse before laws are updated.
Your iPhone might be closed-source, but Android devices can be compiled from source and fully inspected.
https://www.scmagazine.com/home/news/black-hat-mobile-carrie...
It's easier to make that argument for the SIM card, which is actually not a SIM card but also a small ARM core that runs Java code. You can embed small programs into the SIM card which is something a lot of carriers do. The SIM card and baseband work in tight concert though and you should just assume that the connections of the baseband are available to the SIM card.
The vast majority of people both in Europe and the US use stock phones from a mainstream manufacturer without changing the default OS.
NOTE: I own an Echo and love it, despite being otherwise fairly privacy conscious (I know that these two statements are wildly inconsistent).
Sure it’s possible that that’s a lie, but that’s a different question.
What do you mean? All digital assistants I know about use a wake word and they all seem to respect it very seriously:
- Incidents where the assistant has misheard the wake word causes headlines across the Internet and there's always a reply from an official spokesperson (e.g: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/17391898/amazon-alexa-pri...)
- When Google Home Mini had a (hardware) bug where the button could cause it to record all the time, Google issued a software update which disabled the button completely. For months the button was a no-op. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-dumps-home-minis-top-touch-...
- In the Google Home app you can see all recordings that the device has done, play them back, and see how it was interpreted. It's pretty clear that they want to be transparent about what the device does.
All in all it seems to me that Google/Amazon is aware that a "we record everything"-scandal can be devastating for the product.
And now slightly tangential, my phone will never accidentally hear the hot word, start recording, send the recording. It can’t accidentally misunderstand my pronunciation and do whatever the hotword squatter wanted to do.
It’s easier to abuse the one core functionality of a device than one that’s an afterthought and can be more easily disabled or stands out when it’s used. That’s because the legitimate and abusive behaviors almost perfectly overlap from a user point of view in a digital assistant.
Imagine being spied through an always on live streaming camera and being spied through camera that’s off most times. You may notice it powers on and sends data it shouldn’t.
There’s no real difference between “my Echo claims to only do low power wake word recognition when idle, but actually sends everything to Amazon” and “my cell phone claims not to listen to me, but actually sends everything it hears to the manufacturer.”