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Comment by 0n34n7 | Hacker News Reader

Let’s throw in our toasters, fridges and washing machines as well. Then some data scientist can correlate the best before dates of foods in my fridge by the number of panties in the washer in order to target me with ads for tummy meds.

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Not as creepy as giving a big corporation access to microphones around your house. It astounds me that much of America has done exactly that.

I assume you don't use a smartphone, for the sake of consistency. It's really hard for me to draw a distinction between home voice assistants that you can activate via a voice command and smartphones that you can activate via a voice command.

For voice assistants to be misused only takes malicious intent or incompetence on the server end since they hear and transmit (Perhaps with activation phrase) by design.

For my smartphone to be similarly vulnerable I would need the server side plus malicious or incompetent intervention on the client end to enable voice activation (I have voice activation disabled).

Plus my smartphone hardware is not as capable of picking up voices around the house plus I am not actively positioning it in several rooms to do so.

Siri and location services are the first things I turn off.

You're still trusting Apple to actually turn them off. I have zero reason to doubt Apple on this. However, I also have zero reason to think Alexa is transmitting even if it hasn't been woken up with the wake word.

We can't know everything for sure in this world, it's true. However, Apple has taken a stance on privacy, Amazon hasn't, and has made a name for itself in how it treats folks and where it prioritizes profit.

Now, I don't think they have mics on all the time either, as it would be impractical. But rest assured they are vacuuming up every morsel of information they can for monetization reasons. And law enforcement has been banging on the door to get access. After the next tragedy they will get through.

> And law enforcement has been banging on the door to get access. After the next tragedy they will get through.

Law enforcement wants access to Alexa devices? I don't doubt they do, but can you cite examples of them trying? What kind of tragedy are you alluding to?

Echo devices (with Alexa) also have explicit mic mute buttons, plus a UI that indicates when the mics are off, which my phone does not.

(And yes, you have to trust that Amazon's devices are behaving according to spec and to what Amazon has said...)

Same. Also Cortana or any other thing like it which is really sad seeing how useful they could be. To have to choose convenience or privacy sucks. I wish there was a middle ground. I would happily pay for a voice assistant that lives on my machine and respects my privacy.

Agreed, but to be honest I probably wouldn't use them even without the privacy implications. Would rather do a few taps than carefully craft a sentence that might not be understood.

A smartphone you generally have to pick up and talk into - by their nature home VAs are just always-on microphones all over your house.

I can't activate my smartphone with a voice command. And even if I could, I firewall everything off by default anyway.

How do you firewall your phone? What OS?

Is there evidence that the big name home devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo actually collect your speech? I was under the impression it was just a small ARM board that uses recognition to execute commands. My mom has a Dot, but I am clueless.

https://winbuzzer.com/2018/12/20/amazon-accidentally-sent-pe...

Thanks, somehow never noticed this article. For the record, my parent comment isn't rhetorical or sarcastic, I've just entirely avoided the trend and am not the target market.

The device itself has enough processing power to detect the wake word, everything you say after that goes to their datacenter to be processed.

Interesting. I guess I was fooled then when I took a cursory look at the specs (months ago), and only really noticed the first part. Definitely won't be buying into the trend myself.

Any ethical alternatives out there?

Yes - it's been very clearly communicated since the launch of the Echo in 2014 that the speech goes to the cloud after the wake word is detected (which happens on device).

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