Do you not walk around with one in your pocket most of the time? (I don't have one of these devices either, just playing devil's advocate)
Perhaps I have misunderstood you, but I fail to see the difference between my phone and an Echo. Now the difference to me is that Apple claims (claims that appear to be backed by evidence) that they won't sell me out. But as far as listening, I believe they function in similar manners.
As for the distinction, doesn't really matter to me, I'm in the "no way in hell is Amazon getting one of those in my house" camp. :-)
I don't see a conflict if people admit the potential invasion of pirvacy is worth the utility of a phone, but not the utility of an Echo device. But apparently that alone isn't good enough.
You can buy a non-smart phone right now. It's not hard to live without one, it's a choice that you are now downplaying because it fits your narrative.
So far at least, Apple claims to be privacy focused and makes money hand over fist by selling essentially luxury goods. Aside from selling your data to some third party (which seems unnecessary for a trillion dollar company), there's not much Apple could do with it.
TL;DR Personally, I have more trust in Apple not to "spy" because they seem to have nothing to gain from it. Amazon and Google have plenty to gain from spying.
Google purchasing MasterCard purchase transactions so they can link to their profile of users is a great example of them having zero respect of your privacy.
You signed the paperwork that gave MasterCard the right to sell your data and your bitching about the company that bought it? For real?
It blows me away just how many people are willing to use services where they are the product (and that's MasterCard and Visa these days too) and then whine when they get sold. Google is just doing what it can to remain competitive. Don't sign anything that means signing away your identity and stop whining.
For Maastercard, hiding “we can sell your data” in a 8+ page contract full of small print legalese that’s designed for people to skip over is hardly fair notice. Should people read and understand it? Yes. But most don’t.
Also, it’s silly to say that “you’re the product” with Visa and MasterCard. Most cards have a fee associated (with the norm for any rewards card being around $80-120 in Canada) and they have a insane 20% interest on purchases. That’s vastly different than using Facebook for free.
The privacy quip was directed to Google. Just because they -can- do something, doesn’t mean they should.
The third most valuable company in the world hardly needed to purchase offline purchases to further profile people who don’t know they’re being profiled “to remain competitive”.
And filtering out the background conversation is a difficult problem in machine learning, but one that has to be accomplished in order to make the service work correctly.
We don't store the audio, much less the filtered-out noise, but I don't imagine there's any way I can prove that. Maybe an appeal to cost? There's way too much data to do that, even if we wanted to.
The parser output (text) is stored, mind you. You can find that on the Google dashboard.
And I’m not saying Google or Amazon are doing this today. If not then it may be one bad earnings call away for some engineer to say “well....we could...”.
Anything is possible in the pursuit of profits. I’d Google is willing to buy users offline credit card transactions to link to their profiles, it’s clear they will slurp up all data available for them. Why not that listening device in people’s home? “Overheard user X saying they signed up at google-ads-customer.com” “overheard user Y saying google-ad-customers service is fantastic”
This has gone wrong when erroneous connections were made, and IMO, Amazon are overly aggressive about enabling this feature.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
In both cases you aren't really sure it's the case, you wouldn't know if it were suddenly disregarded or circumvented, and you're just trusting in the good behavior of your chosen provider.
However, we all make certain risk tradeoffs based on numerous things, including proxy signals. For instance, I would be intensely surprised to find out my downstairs neighbor was recoding me, based on multiple years of interactions. Likewise, I find the signal Apple sends ("We need a US-based GDPR") about privacy rather more compelling than the signal Amazon sends ("scour the mic for hints about product we can shift").
I mean, sure, while both $huge_bank and your hypothetical deadbeat relative might both steal your money, I bet I know which one you choose to to leave your money with.
Totally tangential, so feel free to disregard:
This statement reminded me of my experience during my brother's TS clearance (Canada). CSIS readily had accurate data (in surprising detail) about my time spent during a short period they must have observed his family members to use during an interview with him. It was pretty fascinating, mildly disconcerting— but in this case didn't bother me (in the context, I understood why. I certainly wasn't interesting at the time). They only could have captured the data they had by a combination of tailing (however brief or otherwise more expensive much more technical means) and bank records. I was of course none the wiser.
Advertisers are another matter. I have a Google Home Mini. It remains unplugged 100% of the time we're not using it. My phone can always go in another room. If we decide to turn it on to play with it (search something benign or play trivia) then we'll have it on. It's good for that kind of thing, and those are useful enough we don't mind letting Google have the little data that might produce.
To the other point, I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with the patents, but it's at least an Echo simply gleaning more from a voluntary engagement with it. I think the general feeling is an Echo is "spying" when it engages itself to listen to your home.
Of course, I have no way to know if my echo is doing that, or if it were to start, and it's out of my hands to prevent it. The same with a smartphone.
If Amazon wanted to spy, probably a smart tactic would be to deliberately "flaw" the wake word recognition such that it could plausibly be a bug, but the result is activating very often randomly. They already kind of do that, it would just need to be more frequent.
In any case having the capability to spy on you is fundamentally different from having the actual on-paper intent of doing so, such as a patent.
One can check if a device is compromised or not behaving as expected fairly easily by monitoring network traffic.
Disclaimer: I could be completely wrong, and/or the situation could change over time due to improved hardware and software. There was a rumor earlier this year that the Google Assistant might add custom hotword support in the future:
https://9to5google.com/2018/01/29/google-app-7-20-assistant-...
Main source: Apple’s article about “Hey Siri”:
Still doesn't change the fact that placement of the Alexa is stationary, so your phone (regardless of how low the probabilities are) is still a considerably more "high risk" device in terms of what it could pick up than an Alexa.
To me this just sounds like another person in a whole line of them that screams about privacy unless they have to give up something that's extremely valuable to them. The Alexa isn't valuable to you. Your phone sure is.
At the base of the claim that Amazon is listening to what your echo can hear is the assumption that they're lying, and at the base of the claim that your iphone isn't listening to you is the assumption that Apple is not.
Personally, I wouldn't put it past either company to massively violate my trust if the incentive stars aligned just right, and I think it's silly to pretend otherwise.
The problems of putting a surveillance device in your home and carrying one in your pocket are roughly equivalent, and the rest is a debate about which huge collection of people with a wide array of beliefs and ethics is gooder
A more likely path is law enforcement's habit of putting them in the PR hell of "we could have saved Little Tiny Baby X if these companies weren't so hell bent on protecting perverts and terrorists". Once you have the device, it's only a matter of someone making a sympathetic enough public case that they need access to it.
On that front, I think Apple is taking more proactive steps to keep themselves out of the situation, I'm just not sure it's possible to avoid it completely.
Even if you turn Siri off, it is up to Apple whether or not to really stop listening.
My phone probably doesn't listen to me right now, but what exactly do I know?
The point was that the vast majority of people, even us techies, are willing to sacrifice some privacy for the benefits these devices bring us.
(And yes, sometimes these benefits are the direct result of spying. When I shop on Amazon, I often look at the section "Customers who looked at X ultimately bought Y." Thank you, Amazon, for spying on those customers, and recommending a better product.)
These in-home "smart speakers" exist only to be agents listening for wake words.
I am not sure why use of a smartphone is painted as hypocrisy when countering the argument that consumers should be cautious about installing smart speakers in their homes. Clearly most people who are cautioning against the use of smart speakers turn off the listening agent features on their smartphones and recommend that others do that as well.
You make an extremely valid point, though. What I would actually like (and what seems really hard to find) is a dumb phone with a 4G hotspot and which does not run Android in any way, shape or form.
Any suggestions
It runs KaiOS, which is a fork of Firefox OS IIRC. It's basically a dumb phone, but with some critical "smart" features like wifi hotspot, contacts/calendar sync, etc. It was a breath of fresh air for me.
Edit: Review link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/16/nokia-811...
https://support.kaiostech.com/support/solutions/articles/350...
Apart from the fact that it seems to be exactly what I'm looking for it's also reasonably cheap at ~90$.
Just, thank you!
That's for you to decide, I think. In terms of privacy, we decide what we're willing to give up. The usefulness of an Echo may be worth sometimes seeing ads for chicken soup to some. Some might even think of it as a feature!
If you don't want to know online advertisers to know when you're sick, you're going to be more mindful of just your cell phone and any nearby Echos. Don't have your friends tag you in posts on social media asking how you're doing (this one is completely out of your control), don't search for drug stores or which medicine you need to combat your symptoms, etc. I get the point is to limit your profile as much as possible, but this case seems unreasonably high on the effort to payoff ratio.
Does a smartphone make me a hypocrite?
To me, it does. Not to pick on you personally, but 99% of the people freaking out about the Echo own smartphones and carry them around all the time. For the convenience. It makes no sense, unless you realize that the person has just drawn their arbitrary convenience-privacy tradeoff line differently than the Echo owners have.
An Echo is just the tiniest subset of a smartphone but with some serious privacy risks, all of a very minuscule benefit in convenience. A gimmick most would probably say, the killer app to this day seems to be a kitchen timer. To compare that with a smartphone where tons of every day things can be quite inconvenient without one.
I get your point and on principle I agree. But the line most definitely isn't arbitrary set (even if you do find some practical use for an Echo). The difference is astronomical. That's not to say the current state of affair is depressing and we ought to really try to improve it.
If you say that the relatively low utility of an Echo means it’s not worth the potential downsides, that’s perfectly reasonable.
If you say that people who buy an Echo are insane for willingly putting a spy device in their house, that’s hypocritical and irrational if you have a smartphone.
I think there’s a useful discussion to have in the former case, but alas most of the conversation involves the latter.
Echo's only feature is listening and reporting. Its a different device in kind
If your phone has a spying feature, are you sure it can be turned off? How do you know?
Echo, like phones, uses low-power, always-on algorithms to listen for a specific phrase. Only when it hears that phrase does it actually start recording and sending your audio back home.
Are you worried about that low-power, always-on part listening to you? If so, then avoiding the Echo while carrying a phone with the feature switched off is sensible. But I don’t see why this would be worth worrying about, since the data stays local and isn’t saved.
If you’re worried about the device secretly recording you and sending that data to someone else, then the two are equivalent in their threats.
Further, despite being generally pretty locked down to the average consumer, smartphones are far less of a black box than the echo/home/etc.
Both are a concern, but technically skilled users are at least able to take steps to reduce the potential for their phones to spy on them. The only way to reduce any spying potential with the echo/home/etc, is not to have one at all.