If You Care About Privacy, Throw Your Amazon Alexa Devices into the Sea | Hacker News Reader

If You Care About Privacy, Throw Your Amazon Alexa Devices into the Sea

gizmodo.com

32 pointskupatrupa22 comments

Every time I visit a friend or relative who's all excited about their new voice assistant gadget, I make sure to do my best to demonstrate the potential problems with the technology.

"Hey Siri, who around here can sell me a few kilos of cocaine?"

"Hey Alexa, add a thousand feet of rope, a half-dozen ballgags, a box of latex gloves, and a few shovels to my shopping basket."

"Hey Google, give me the addresses of every ammonium nitrate seller, gun store, cargo van rental company, and elected official in a hundred-mile radius."

Wheras presumably amazon or pure internet search history does not provide exactly the same function?

I mean yeah, audio does provide a new attack vector, but then pretty much every new technology does.

There is a difference between deliberately typing those sorts of queries into a search field on a website, and a remotely-administered audio bug capturing every random bit of conversation within earshot.

a website quite literally is a remotely administered user input gatherer. I understand the concern about open microphones, but we've had this conversation about everything from laptop microphones to smart TVs before. I don't see how something like a new device changes the equation much compared to those things.

You and I and many others on internet forums may have had that conversation, but most non-geeks in my social circles haven't. Deliberately fucking with their voice assistants is a great way to quickly get them thinking hard about the issue with a minimum of conversation. It's past time to appeal to logic. It's now time to go straight for the emotional jugular by inducing some panic.

... followed up by "And now that search is tied to you! Have fun in prison!"

This could be a source of plausible deniability.

"I didn't search for that. My friend said it as a joke!"

What happens if you care about privacy AND the environment?

Turn it into a minature flower pot.

don't buy it in the first place.

Or give it to an elderly family member and sue Amazon for negligence if something happens and their surveillance device doesn't summon an ambulance?

I guarantee it's buried in their TOS that you can't sue them for inability to deal with emergency situations. Relatedly, do you remember all the smartphone pop-up warnings about lack of emergency-line (e.g. 911) access when using a wifi connection?

I was on a zoom call with a coworker. It turns out you can order things over zoom. She now has 10,000 rolls of toilet paper queued up.

I am curious how sensitive these devices are. If I add a sub-audible track to a youtube video, could I get millions of people to order a case of beef jerky?

Is there any evidence that the general public's attitude toward privacy and surveillance is changing? Is _anyone_ persuaded to care who isn't already privacy-conscious?

I see articles like this all day long about Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, telecom providers, device manufacturers, DHS, Walmart, etc, etc.

Snowden's revelations about the NSA were in 2013, for God's sake.

And I don't evidence of any systematic change: no legislation to protect personal privacy (like the EU's GDPR), no effective boycotts of companies that abuse privacy.

It feels like we're losing, or have already lost.

I got my grandma on board with avoiding Facebook.

She thought that the principle of "don't broadcast me, just make my stuff accessible" was in play.

I sat down with her and explained what they really do, and it really turned her off. I've been pondering whether I could implement something better. A "this is me" web-connected data vault with fine grained, easy to adjust access controls; but I'm not sure there's any way to streamline the process enough where you could hand it to the user and not have them instantly be out of their depth. I don't believe a centralized solution is the way to go. Too much potential for abuse, and it makes it too easy to manipulate.

Plus, Mastodon may beat me to it.

Also, I've gotten my family/friends to give the various voice assistants a wide birth, sans Siri unfortunately.

Funny how being the techie in the family has turned me into a comparative Luddite. Then again, no one I talk to tends to like being productized either.

Could you elaborate on what you explained to her?

Do you have any points written out with examples when you explain to your folks? I could use those. Thumbs Up!!! for being successful in weaning a person off from such portals and getting them to understand Privacy and Security.

Basically, I just took some time to sit down and talk with her. Spent about a week with her on vacation. Talked about a lot of things.

Specifically though, if I had to hone it down to something I think it was when I connected the dots for her about how Facebook really works. She'd thought it was more of a "place I can put stuff where friends could reliably get to it." A sort of classified ad as a service as it were I think is how we boiled down her understanding of it.

Then she had said she kept getting flustered because people she didn't know kept popping up in her feed.

That's when I explained to her that Facebook wasn't like a passive paper. They were actively utilizing any data she made available to them to expand their network, to the point of actively putting her information in front of people she hadn't even met, and may very well not care to.

Then I explained to her the whole "Big Data" thing. Basically how more and more, things one would just do were being made in ways that they generated data trail that businesses would sell to other businesses. There was no such thing as professional discretion anymore.

She really didn't like that and honestly never realized that that sort of thing happened. She knew they were a valuable company, but didn't realize it was because they were selling access to the user base.

Talked to her a bit about the history of the company, and it's CEO's more controversial statements, and connected those with a couple of personal experiences I've had fighting to "do the right thing" in the industry with minimal luck.

I learned that week that people want somewhere to provide a "social media experience" as it were, but what I got from her is there was a much higher expectation of privacy and control of who got access than she was experiencing.

She still "checks it" occasionally to keep up with other members of the family, but I"m happy to say, she's much more satisfied with how I streamlined her email client than what she gets out of her Facebook account.

I don't know if it'll work for anyone else. She was already only tentatively dipping into the platform as it was, so it just may not have taken as much convincing to get the dots connected. Hell, it may not have been anything I said about it, but just that it disturbed/stressed me out so much that did it.

But nevertheless, I got Gram to back slowly away from Facebook. That means I've at least convinced one person. Should get easier from there right?

Thank you.

>Funny how being the techie in the family has turned me into a comparative Luddite.

It's the same mechanism at work for accountants. You'd be surprised at how many of us are leftist, if not straight-up socialist. We see how the sausage is made and we don't like it. (And we generally have no respect for those fucking koolaid-drinking reality-denying economists.)

The only time I've ever even mentioned it was when I was at a friend's house, saw he had a slick new Samsung smart TV, and relayed a news story about the microphone on the TV being 'always on' and phoning home.

It felt overly preachy to bring up this stuff if it's not related to the topic of conversation. I mean, he already spent $500 on it, an always-on mic isn't enough for him to send it back.

Me, I'm going to hold on to my "dumb" TV as long as possible. I have no reason to upgrade except for 4K, which, outside of live sports, really isn't of any interest to me. 1080p is good enough for me.

Also have a Samsung "Smart" TV. I banned it from the internet when it started showing me ads inside the OS. Since then it's been great, although I've had to invest (had is strong, I could have gone with a cheaper solution maybe) in an Apple TV box to get Plex/Netflix and the like.

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