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Property managers bring in Alexa to manage tenants

wsj.com

156 pointsdsr12166 comments

My wife works in a woman's shelter and Alexa / smart home devices is a common way women in abusive relationships are harassed and monitored...

Edit for clarity: Even if a woman has a restraining order against the abuser, the abuser will turn on music in the middle of the night, mess with the lights, turn the thermostat down etc. If the woman still lives with the abuser, smart devices (not necessarily Alexa) are used to monitoring comings and goings.

One person often sets up the devices and the other person has no understanding of how to turn these things off. Even more often: the harassed woman doesn't even realize what's happening is due to the man controlling smart devices— the harassed is "gaslighted" and thinks they're going crazy ("why does the temperature keep PLUMMETING?").

Alexa also has the drop in function that turns it into an audio listening device

Never even thought about this, geez. Do we have any rough stats on how often this happens?

Also, just another reason I don't use smart devices.

It'd be amazing if there were an open smart device protocol (maybe there is one?) that was widely implemented. There's no reason turning on the lights in your room or changing what Spotify is playing on your speakers needs to be tied to your Amazon/Google/whatever account.

EDIT>> Totally misunderstood the parent post.

No, I mean smart devices are used to harass women in entirely new ways.

Men often are the ones who setup the devices. Even if they have a restraining order they will turn music on in the middle of the night, mess with the lights, turn the thermostat down etc. Before a restraining order smart devices are often used for monitoring.

No, you can do a lot of griefing with the ability to remotely control locks, fixtures, appliances and thermostats.

Why would they "surely" mean the opposite of what they said?

Have I just become a curmudgeonly old man yelling at kids to stay off my lawn? I mean I don't feel old and out of touch, but something is off?

Is everyone else really out there demanding these types of services and technologies be installed in their homes as a prerequisite to even living there?

If you're one of the people who use these kinds of devices, and you don't mind me asking, why is it you guys like these types of devices and services? And do the privacy issues here concern any of you at all?

As a matter of full disclosure, the privacy issues seem obvious and deal breaking to me, but clearly that's not the consensus view.

All I want is a thermostat with a better screen and a UI that doesn't require cycling through abbreviated options. Beyond that, I don't want a "smart home", and especially not one connected directly to FAANG. We don't need these devices, and even non engineers aren't exactly clamoring for them. It's more like everyone just likes the novelty of it all, but is generally disappointed when the devices under deliver.

People should reject devices from Amazon. As I have mentioned in other HN threads, I am speaking as someone who quit their job to build a business based on Alexa. You have no real control over such devices, they are prone to flipping on randomly, and most of the advantages are in Amazon's favor.

One day, these tech companies might become our literal governments. I'm not going to help them do this because controlling my house with my voice is a neat parlor trick.

I have a thermostat from the 90s with a pretty clean UI using old fashioned LCD . It allows me to set times and temperatures for "sleep", "wake", "leave", and "return" for weekdays and weekends. No silly abbreviations other than the three-letter names for the days of the week.

If I tweak the temperature it keeps it until the end of the window unless I press the "hold temp" toggle button, which locks it indefinitely.

It doesn't need a full OS and a full pixel display. Just clear, thoughtful design.

Making one of these things nice (even with a good LCD!) should really not cost much. Honestly wondering if it's worth just going into the market for making "dumb" home stuff that has a slick UI that people want.

The only problem I've seen with it is that the people who would actually think about buying them are similar to my family members: tech-savvy enough to want something like this, yet still wanting it to be internet connected. ("Why should I not be able to WiFi control my thermostat? WiFi chips are so cheap nowadays!")

The problem I see is that (a) most people don't really care and will stick with whatever they have, while (b) the people that could care usually want IoT devices and (c) the people that do care are a very small, remaining portion of the rest (e.g., some proportion of the usual HN audience).

You can't get VC for any consumer hardware product that doesn't generate a continuing revenue stream. That means either charging a monthly fee for cloud connectivity or selling customers' data. Both require Internet connectivity, even though that doesn't really add much objective value (and creates huge security problems) for so-called "smart" home devices.

As far as I can tell, you wouldn't need VC funding for that anyway. A thermostat, as far as I can tell, is really a set of relays that are toggled by a circuit board connected to a thermometer. A quick search on the topic brings up a lot of successful attempts at making thermostats with Raspberry Pis. It doesn't seem like advanced hardware by any stretch of the imagination.

Prototyping should be very easy. I'm sure that a Pi Zero would suffice, along with a board with relays connected to GPIO as well as a thermometer circuit, and an LCD screen. The production product could use a custom built stripped-down ARM board with integrated components, and probably be made for cheap. I'd pay $150 for a dumb thermostat that has a nice LCD screen. Even better if it's hackable(i.e. I can install my own software on it).

RPi is overkill. It could easily be done with an Arduino--including wifi if you wanted. The tough part is building a business around it. But maybe if you focus on sustainability rather than growth and exit, you could do it without VC money.

>We don't need these devices, and even non engineers aren't exactly clamoring for them.

Even "smart" thermostats can be really crap. My mother got one and it couldn't connect to her wifi network because it doesn't support some characters in the password. She just leaves it offline since she doesn't want to change the password and deal with updating all her devices.

anything that connects to wifi should support at least any character on a standard keyboard. I have a printer that I had to start a side network for because I couldn't type an apostrophe on it...

One of my previous bosses didn't believe in non-ASCII characters because he felt they were "invalid". For some reason, he thought that latin1 database encoding was "standard" and that utf8mb4 is some kind of hack. I explained to him why we should support UTF-8, but he wouldn't hear it.

Instead of migrating the database to use utf8mb4, he had me strip out the "invalid" characters from user input, which I wrote as Rack middleware if I remember correctly. Either the characters would be replaced by their closest ASCII cousins or get removed entirely.

This was totally unnecessary and made it impossible for the product to support other languages.

I imagine there are other bosses just like him out there who think it's "invalid" when someone uses characters other than A-z in their passwords, and told the engineers to do what I did for things like your printer.

Today, I learned why printers get taken over so much. The brute force dictionary is much smaller

No, it's because they don't blocker attackers after finite attempts, and often have default or blank passwords

Enter internationalization... äüöß is just the beginning.

The UI of my thermostat is a simple dial showing the heat/cool setpoints and the current temperature. It is completely dumb and that's the way I like it, because its only job is to keep my house at a constant temperature.

Others are often surprised that I work in tech, yet everything else about me has been described as "luddist" --- but that's because I know about the "dark side" of all these new "smart" things.

A constant temp house wastes money and pollutes the environment.

...and all these new e-waste-generating technologies don't?

Also, thermal fatigue is a well-known failure mode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_cycling

If having a thermostat at all is considered "luddite" in USA, then I'm glad I live in a "commie block" and the only temperature control is a valve on a central heating radiator. Can't get wiretapped through that. Though now I wonder if it was possible to attach a microphone to the radiator, and listen to sound picked up from other flats...

I have wanted the Star Trek world where we talk to computers for a long time. But at no point did I envision everything Kirk said to the computer being transmitted, monitored, and recorded by Big Brother. Especially when there's no technical reason it has to be this way. Fuck FAANG, I'll keep my keyboard.

It was always that way, except it was never used by corporate entities to abuse you.

In Star Trek TNG, everyone can track everyone else. That was a common plot point in almost every episode..

Playing chess with my microwave everyday to input simple instructions is frustrating to say the least. I think we need to focus on usability over IoT for a lot of home appliances.

> a thermostat with a better screen and a UI that doesn't require cycling through abbreviated options.

Love my Ecobee.

How would you rate it on a scale of "big tech obtrusiveness"?

I ask because I've just moved in to a new condo which has ye olde thermostat that I find impossible to program properly, so I'd like to replace it with a modern one, but unfortunately Nest is owned by Google. :( I'd like something that doesn't connect to the cloud.

Unfortunately, it does connect to the cloud, but as far as I know, it's not under the control of any big-tech yet (although, I could, admittedly, be naive in that regard). I have the 3, which isn't alexa-enabled, but the 4 is. It's a nice UI that's easy to program, and has a lot of options like room sensors that detect temp and whether the room is occupied (some may not like that, but the sensors are an add-on). I suppose I'd rate it a 3 or 4 on an intrusiveness scale of 10.

I can understand the worry about big tech due to the scale, but on a personal decision like that, I'm much more worried about giving my data away to an ecobee type company.

As an owner of an ecobee, I’d say it falls into the category of “ok” overall. The remote sensors feature is neat, but the home IQ calculator is clearly meaningless. They even managed to mess up weather forecasting. It’s functionally reliable, but definitely some disappointments. In short, it does not really benefit from internet access at all. In fact, I may just disconnect it and see if it still serves me well enough.

I've been pretty happy with my ecobee - the HomeIQ stuff seems like a gimmick (and is geared toward making the Ecobee seem like it's saving you money), so I don't really care about it, but the thermostat does a good job of it's core function of warming my house to the setpoint at the right time.

I used to set my old programmable thermostat to turn on the heat an hour before I wake up and sometimes the house was too cold, the Ecobee turns on the heat somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes before I wake up to get the temperature up at the right time. Not sure if it uses weather data or just looks at how cold the house is to make that decision, but it does a good job.

The internet connectivity is useful for me since I'm away from home a lot, so I like the ability to get low temperature alerts as well as the ability to turn on vacation mode remotely or adjust the temperature (so if the forecast is going to be below 0F, I can turn up the heat from the normal 50 vacation temp to 60 to make frozen pipes in exterior walls less likely). If you don't care about that, then yeah, the internet access is not really necessary.

I'm super happy with my Ecobee. On multiple occasions I've gone on long trips and forgotten to put the A/C on vacation mode. It's real nice to be able to control it from my phone.

Similarly, the City of Austin has an energy savings program in summer where on hot days they will (with your consent) remotely turn up all connected smart A/Cs by a few degrees, which drastically reduces strain on the electric grid. I think I got $75 when I joined. And it can be overridden, so overall it has been a great boon.

I'd never heard about that Austin program. That's pretty cool!

Link: https://savings.austinenergy.com/rebates/residential/offerin...

Same here, though I like the connectivity because it lets me do things like turn the heating or AC on remotely if I’m heading home at an unusual time. Otherwise, I get no real benefit from it being connected.

The Ecobee thermostat seems to provide that, it's a fully functional smart thermostat even without a Wifi connection. You don't get weather adjustments, remote access with the app, and online reports, but otherwise it's fully functional.

Depending on your heat source, it may be fairly easy to make your own thermostat. Although I have a heat pump, which is much more efficient than electrical resistance heaters, I have found that I can actually save money in winter by closing a couple interior doors and putting up a couple of interior curtains to somewhat separate the room I spend 99% of my time in and one bathroom from the rest of the house thermally, and then heat just that room with an electric space heater. The heat pump thermostat is in that room, so the heat pump stays off. I check the rest of the house now and then, and when it gets too cold I open the doors and curtains, turn off the space heater, and let the heat pump get the whole house back in range.

That's a net win because although the heat pump is more efficient, the gains from that are more than made up for by heating parts of the house I'm not in.

I dialed the space heater temperature setting way up so that it would be on whenever it had power, and plugged it into a DLI IoT Relay [1], and hooked a Raspberry Pi up to the IoT relay's control interface. I added a DS18B20 temperature sensor [2] to the Pi. The only other parts needed are a 4.7 K resistor, and whatever you want to use to connect things (I used a small solderless breadboard [3] and premade jumper wire [4]).

Wiring is easy. GPIO06 to Relay Control+, Ground to Relay Control -, 3.3 V to DS18B20 Vcc, GPIO04 to DS18B20 DATA, Ground to DS18B20 Ground. 4.7 K resistor between DATA and Vcc on the DS18B20.

Then it's just a matter of some Python code to watch the temperature [5][6], and turn the space heater on and off via the relay to keep it in range. I went for simplicity, and just have a print statement that periodically prints the time and temperature, the min and max setting, and whether the heater is on or not, and I can check that via ssh. The min and max settings come from a text file, which I can ssh in and change. It would not be hard to add to this generating a graph and making it available on the web, and making a web interface to change the range, but I don't need that.

Interface is whatever you want to build on top of that.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WV7GMA2

[2] https://www.amazon.com/TOOGOO-DS18B20-Digital-Temperature-Ar...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EV640I6

[4] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M5WLZDW

[5] https://pastebin.com/JaakzGsZ

[6] As with many projects of this type, that code started out as quick experimenting, reached a point where although it was still ugly throw away code it actually did what I needed, and so I never got around to then writing a writing a proper production version with comments, good error handling, and so on.

You're asking the wrong crowd here, really. HN is far more aware of privacy issues than the general Echo-buying public. In my experience most people don't think twice about it.

That said, I do think twice about it and I have a Google Home. I also have a baby, and it makes it very easy to play music, turn lights on and off etc. without using my hands (which are usually busy).

I wish Apple made a HomePod Mini. I trust them far more with my privacy and Siri can do all the things I do with my Google Home anyway. But at this exact point in my life I'm OK with the privacy trade-off of my Google Home.

I fail to understand why we should trust apple.

By default, we don't really own the device; we rent it from them at purchase prices.

I cannot run my own programs. I cannot add my own app store. I cannot do anything unless Apple has explicitly allowed it.

And combined with

https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/apple-itunes-privacy-l...

Shows they are willing and able to get in the pool with Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Trust is when I have power, and grant you some of the power because you are a good steward. In this case, Apple has all the power. And they don't trust you with any.

> I fail to understand why we should trust apple.

I don't think anyone says we should. Do I trust apple? No. Do I trust apple more than google or facebook? Yes.

It's all a balance of QoL features we personally want. I heavily enjoy the features and hardware of Apple. Yes, there are downsides. I left my vast Google ecosystem for Apple, not because Apple is perfect, but because they appeared better.

Sure, I could throw away my watch, change to linux, get a flip phone (because I don't want to use hand-downs from Google's OS), but Apple is where I chose to draw my line between privacy and convenience.

> Do I trust apple more than google or facebook? Yes.

Why?

They also have cloud services.

Sure, but if you wanted the features and had to pick a provider, which would you choose?

You wouldn't choose Facebook over Apple, would you?

Yeah, but that lawsuit is bogus. Apple gives developers access to my data only if I click to allow that developer access to my data. Which I, personally, almost never do. But if you do that, then yeah, that developer can take your data and do whatever he wants with it.

Which is why you shouldn't do that.

You're right about one thing though, and that is Apple not trusting me with most powers. They don't trust me, or anyone else with power. I like that stance. I think that should be the default stance of every company that deals with user data. No one gets access to it without the expressed consent of the user.

If you're saying that Apple is giving out your data willy nilly the way FB or Google does, you're just wrong. Now of course, that's a completely different issue than trusting Apple. You should trust no one. And neither should Apple. (To be completely frank, Apple shouldn't even trust you.)

What people like about Apple is that they hold up their end of the bargain. They trust no one.

Apple will trust whomever offers them more economic advantage in the long term if they need to be open about the relationship - and short term if they don't and don't think it's too much of a reputational risk. However, never think that you'll always be the one providing them the economic advantage forever - just note that, they'll most likely keep your data forever. Choose wisely.

A business model based on receiving user payment, a stated mission of protecting privacy, and a history of resisting government attempts to compromise privacy, all provide some reason to trust Apple more than most other companies. A business model based on profiting from private personal information (often obtained in sneaky ways) leaves almost no room to trust Google. For those reasons, Trust(Apple) >> Trust(Google). With that said, I don't trust Apple any more than I have to for the conveniences that are useful to me.

> I fail to understand why we should trust apple.

If you have an iPhone, you already trust Apple enough to have a HomePod in your home. Ditto for Google/Android phone/Google Home.

I really don't get how people are fine having an always-connected mic/camera/GPS in their pocket but balk at the idea of always-connected mic in their home, made by the same company.

(If you specifically don't trust Amazon, then that's of course a different story. And regardless of which company builds the device, if it's under the control of the landlord... well, hell no.)

> If you have an iPhone, you already trust Apple enough to have a HomePod in your home. Ditto for Google/Android phone/Google Home.

Well, no. I have an iPhone, but I don't trust Siri, so I leave voice recognition off. I do trust Apple enough that when I turn off mic access for an app, the app doesn't get mic access.

It would piss me off to no end to have this shit in my home.

Electrical mosquito zappers (those battery powered tennis rackets) are very effective in killing silicon without visible external damage.

If someone bugged my apartment like that, I'd give em the high voltage treatment. "Maybe it was a lighting strike?"

This. I will never understand why people opt in to their own surveillance. I typically don't rent but if I bought a home that had this type of spy gear in it, it would be quickly made inoperable. When I sold it, I'd market it as "privacy oriented" and point to the drill holes as upgrades.

So I take it you don’t carry a smartphone? Because they all have the exact same assistants built in.

Not the OP, but they can be disabled in the phone, and many people, like me, have those disabled.

If you don't trust Apple/Google enough to have one of their standalone assistants in your home, how can you trust them enough to believe disabling the workalike assistant on your phone actually truly disables it?

Because I expect, even if naively, for things to work as described.

If a phone assistant is disabled, I believe it is indeed disabled.

If there is a listening device in the home, I expect it to be listening all the time.

I don't understand what the confusion is.

The "listening device in the home" is described to only listen to the wake word.

Umm.. how does it know that the wake word was said if it's not listening all the time?

It has a special circuit that can literally only recognize the wake word. You have to trust that the circuit does that. Same as the "disable Siri" button on your phone.

Phone battery life creates a constraint on the phone's ability to perform constant surveillance. An assistant that plugs into the wall lacks this constraint.

To me, this is a big difference.

Apple isn’t making the smart thermostats, google is. I had a lecture at school where nests business model was in part to monetize home owners electrical and heating use data (eg, to optimize electrical grids).

It's massively more likely to hit some bug and record a bunch of me when the listening feature is enabled than when it's not.

So how do you apply the zapper? At the plug or directly on the chip or what?

I got asked this question by someone at work just yesterday. In the end, it is as simple as do you trust Apple, Google and Amazon? Do you trust that there are enough good people working on these projects to prevent abuse?

I have an Alexa in my bathroom. It is convenient to use to listen to music and check the weather while I get ready. If someone at Amazon (or the NSA) wants to listen in on the things that happen in my bathroom, go right ahead. Very little of my life happens within listening of my bathroom.

More importantly, I carry a mobile device with listening capabilities and internet connection in my pocket basically at all times. I can turn off Siri or Hey Google but again I have to trust that it really is off. I have to trust that apps like FB or Twitter aren't recording while I use their apps. Additionally, I can't stop all the people around me from having Siri or Hey Google turned on. This doesn't even cover the ability for a 0-day to be exploitable on all handsets and used by a state level actor.

I unfortunately think the ship has sailed on complete privacy in today's online world. Everyone is being tracked, today to sell ads but a dystopian future is largely inevitable. Our mobile phones are tracked but also our digital payments and our cars as we go through tolls (or completely if you have on-star or wi-fi cars) and our movements as we use ride-share and even our walking as traffic cameras are extended with facial recognition. The only way out is to be completely off grid in a self-sustaining farm.

> I carry a mobile device with listening capabilities and internet connection in my pocket basically at all times. I can turn off Siri or Hey Google but again I have to trust that it really is off.

Every time I hear complaints about Google Home/HomePod I bring this up. Most people just shrug and hand-wave it away, saying something like "yeah, but it's just creepy", even when they acknowledge that their phone has even greater spying capabilities. People are terrible at risk assessment.

Having capability =/= using those capabilities.

Google Home/HomePod/Alexa have spying as their primary purpose. It's literally everything they're good for. Take that away and they're useless.

Phones can spy on you if you keep everything turned on, which I don't. As it's in their interest in it to make as much profit off of me as possible, it's also in their interest to oblige by my preferences. If I found out that they don't respect my choices, they'd lose me as a customer for life. 30% they earn from all of my app store purchases isn't a lot, but it's bigger than zero.

Some significant wide spread hacks / ransoms could bring that ship back to port real quick.

> I have an Alexa in my bathroom. It is convenient to use to listen to music and check the weather while I get ready.

Get ready for your mind to be blown, but I actually managed to do that as early as 1983 with a clock radio plugged into the wall. Plus it didn’t listen to my conversations or send analytics about me to a company either. I think this technology was around even earlier but not sure since I was a kid. We were truly ahead of times back then!

Same. These days, I just set my phone on the counter and let it play the news, or a good podcast.

All I could think of, given the part you quoted was the precommand recording.

[Bio sound] "Music please Alexa."

You know someone is checking those for research, improvement.

Maybe somewhere in the bowels, pun intended, of Amazon there is a literal squeak of the week leader board.

Amazon has been working very hard to make this seem normal. Their ads make the device seem super innocuous, the industrial design makes it so you'll probably forget it's there most of the time, the website pushes them really hard right at the top, and now this. They try to make sure that the conversations people have about these devices start on a topic other than privacy, and they mostly succeed.

Well...yeah. This is basic 101 marketing. You emphasize the good points of your product, like its convenience, and de-emphasize possible concerns and weaknesses. They'd be doing the same whether or not they were trying to become the Panopticon.

I just think it's important not to blame users for being super irresponsible or gullible or plain thoughtless when they're up against a (nearly) trillion-dollar corporation.

Yeah, this would be a hard no for me, along with smart locks, Chatroulette-cams preinstalled in the shower, windows that can't be covered, and pre-chosen pets.

Although the in-apartment "sentiment analysis" that reports back to your landlord is a lovely touch.

I don't know what's wrong with people, either.

> […] and pre-chosen pets.

How does that work? You get a complimentary pair of guinea pigs upon signing the lease?

> complimentary pair of guinea pigs

Yes, as long as you're not in Peru.

Then you get a complimentary (to the wine) pair per day

I like being able to control the lights and temp in my house from anywhere. I like being able to play music with my voice. I use those features pretty regularly.

But... I have a phone for these things, and real speakers for the music.

So even though I'm not quite as much a privacy hawk, smart speakers still mystify me. They seem like a phone that you can't watch anything on or take anywhere.

I’m in the same boat as you, but a bunch of my friends have smart speakers. For them it’s a convenience thing + not caring overly much about privacy. The ability to query google, set timers, and play music hands free outweighs the creepy factor.

This reminds me a bit of the environmental issues. Most of my friends are aware of the impacts of flying (CO2) and buying stuff (waste), but the negative end results of these things are just too distant and abstract for them to voluntarily strip themselves of the convenience they provide. The difference of course being that the privacy issues impact mostly just the individual, while the environmental issues impact all. But the psychology of it seems similar.

I think it may be too abstract for humans to understand intuitively, at least until there is some sort of serious concrete consequence that befalls them.

we are finally getting to the point where non-tech people understand the importance of strong passwords. they might fail to actually implement strong passwords, but they can easily understand that it would be really bad if a malicious actor gained access to their banking or email account.

it's harder to understand how large-scale data collection is bad for you as an individual. privacy-minded people oppose it on principle, but for most it's hard to imagine a severe consequence in the short term. targeted ads can be kind of unnerving, but it doesn't exactly get people quaking in their boots.

The big companies and government know this. So long as they don't publicly abuse everyone's data, people won't see a problem. They're building everyone's trust, and making data collection normal.

> The difference of course being that the privacy issues impact mostly just the individual

That misconception is a huge part of the problem. Lack of privacy of society as a whole is way more dangerous than lack of privacy of individuals, because it completely changes the power landscape.

I agree, but these are second-order effects, so that's even more complex than what I wrote about.

I think I want the services, IF they were useful.

Currently they're invasive and not useful. I would love to tinker with an fully offline smart home but it's not something I've invested time into. For me to give up my privacy though I'd need a ton of hugely useful features. Something none of them has.

The pointlessness of all the features is why I entirely left Googles ecosystem. I gave up a lot for a really, really dumb interface. If I have to specially craft my conversation with the AI, I don't want to give up my privacy for it.

I personally get a lot of use out of the devices.

“Alexa set a timer for 7 minutes” when your hands are full in the kitchen is really great.

Music in the shower without having to fiddle around with my phone is nice too.

Turning off alarms from bed without having to fumble around in the mornings is a bit dangerous, but also a real pleasure.

With all that said, I still understand why people are concerned about their privacy, but even without other smart devices, the Echo is really quite useful.

I suppose it's just me, but I find this "music in the shower" use-case a bit mystifying. Do you take such long showers that whatever you started playing before you got in will finish and you'll need to manually start something else? Or are you unable to just relax for a few minutes in relative quiet, with nothing but the noise of the hot water cascading over you?

I mean, I'd love that if I could do it. I don't always have music in the shower but when I do I quite enjoy it.

Unfortunately those verbal AIs do a terrible job at understanding artist names and song names in my experience. Plus I have difficulty remembering exactly what the songs are called lol. Not a great interface for me.

You can get an open-source version and run it on your own hardware if you really want it.

Some examples are here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19806081

When majority of the public cannot perceive any real benefits from a product and yet it's still being pushed and marketed heavily, it just does not make a lot of sense and really goes against all business principles as the goals are obviously misaligned here. You just sort of know there's something behind the product they are not telling you.

I think you are forgetting that with rental properties, the customers are typically the landlords not the tenants. And we know from history that landlords will often install things that their tenants would much rather they didn't.

Airbnb hosts are a very large segment of smart home early adopters.

They're selling it to landlords as a means of social control dressed up as a feature for tenants. There have already been legal scuffles around landlords using facial recognition to control their buildings more tightly against poor people. Only organizing can help us here.

For what it's worth, I feel the same way as you - so you're not alone.

I keep talking about the privacy issue to whoever will listen, but you're right that it seems most people don't care, even the people who work in the tech industry in the Bay Area. So, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No. It's supply-driven demand, propped up by advertising.

Virtually every product is supply-driven demand, propped up by advertising.

Beyond food, clothing and shelter, everything else is possibly supply-driven demand.

I use the voice activated services a lot. It helps turn off the lights in the house while I am watching my kid so I don’t have to drag her up and down the stairs. It helps maintain lots of timers, and grocery lists, and play music when I’ve got my hands full with my kids. I’ve set up some things to only work when I say “please” and make sure I say thank you to the device every time it does something, to teach manners.

My life is pretty pedestrian and my indulgences are simple. I frankly wouldn’t really mind a 24/7 video feed of my house excluding my bedroom and bathroom broadcast publicly.

It is an ROI decision. Almost everyone on the planet now carries around an echo-equivalent in their pocket all day, that also happens to have video, GPS, text and call data, and as such is a far more significant personal privacy concern than a smart speaker in a kitchen. However, most people do so because the benefit outweighs the concern. Same with smart speakers. Whats the difference from having an Alexa and having your phone on the same counter from a privacy concern perspective? It is effectively 0.

The difference is I trust Apple to keep my data secure a fuckload more than I trust Amazon.

Not to mention Siri can be completely disabled and the iPhone will warn you when the mic is hot

Anecdotally I’ve noticed that it’s mostly people aged 35+ buying these things whereas millennials and younger people think it’s creepy.

I haven’t come across many if any Normal every day 21+ people finding it creepy. Useless perhaps, but not creepy to point of that’s the reason they won’t buy or use it.

For what it's worth, I'm at university and this is a topic i've discussed with friends several times - as far as we are concerned, this feels a product for older people, who have a family.

Those "time saving" smart home devices are such garbage. We end up wasting more time on technical support and system administration than we save.

I guess I’ll be the dissenter. This all seems really cool to me. There’s actually an amazon owned apartment complex being built almost across the street from my house (in Tempe, Az), and I had been wondering if they’d do stuff like this.

We have an Alexa in our house, and use it all the time. For the kids moving into these apartments they’re building, I’m sure the high-endiness of having voice controlled lights and music everywhere is a big selling point.

Nobody outside of our little tech bubble ever thinks about how this stuff works, and they likely don’t care. If they do (like my wife and I) we just treat it appropriately.

I guess it’s kindof like the way we all used to look at “work networks” — it was WAY faster than your home connection, but the IT guy could probably spy on you. So use it for fun stuff and think it’s cool, but if you ever didn’t want the IT guy to have the option of seeing what you were doing, use something else (or in our case at our house: turn it off)

> There’s actually an amazon owned apartment complex being built almost across the street from my house (in Tempe, Az), and I had been wondering if they’d do stuff like this.

What? Are you serious? It's one thing for Amazon to partner with builders & landlords, but another for them to actually start building themselves. I tried to research this, but came up with nothing except that Tempe does have an Amazon research center. Do you have any other links that would be helpful?

It’s this complex: https://www.thelocaltempe.com/

There were some local news articles about how this was owner by Whole Foods, and the apartments above it were supposed to have some tight tie-in to the store. I can’t find those articles anymore though, so it’s possible I am wrong, or misunderstood this when it was being written about.

I did a little research, and it doesn't appear that the complex is owned by either Whole Foods or Amazon, but rather a Colorado-based developer (non-local, haha).

https://www.statepress.com/article/2019/02/newwholefoodscomi...

Your neighbors are apparently upset enough to spend the time creating an entire faux-site critical of the project! I'm impressed.

http://thelocaltempe.co

Hahaha that’s actually very funny. Yeah my neighborhood has a very vocal group of anti-gentrification folks.

Choice quotes:

> SHOP LOCAL!The Local Tempe

Until We Shut That Shit Down

Along with the transportation woes we plan on inflicting on your community, we will also be building a massive health food store caddy corner from a local farmer’s market, certainly giving them a run for their money and more than likely shutting them down. Premium residents will enjoy balcony views of the dirt lot that used to be a small business....

And at $15 per hour, you and 6 co-workers might meet the income limitations we ask for our modest (but intimate) west facing first floor studio size accommodations, with breathtaking vistas of the railroad tracks and a newly remodeled Chili’s!

Proper good comedy writing was found in that URL. One for the bookmarks.

Late edit: turns out I was wrong about amazon owning it.

So Amazon will become to the USA what Samsung is to South Korea.

I’m fairly confident there will be lawsuits about this... adding listening devices to your tenants apartments has always been a bad call

I was gifted a few of these devices and had to return them. For the bulk of society, they're not seen as invasive listening devices and many willingly pay hefty fees for them and install them.

Unless you're doing your own NLP locally and designed it, I don't really trust it. To be fair, most already have cell phones that can be tapped in similar ways (with additional sensors--it's amazing what you can derive from MEMs alone) but active assistant listening is usually one of the first "features" I disable.

The basic devices are like $40. Hopefully most people that pay more than that are doing so for reasons like a better speaker.

I have a friend who has around 20 of these scattered around his house, on the side porch, etc. He uses them as speakers to play music in different sections of the house and likes the added feature of having the Google assistant.

If you only get one or a couple I suppose it isn't too expensive. My parents aren't tech savvy and are quite old and they have 3 themselves in a very small house.

I used to use Airbnb a lot. Now I don't so much because I have to write the host beforehand and verify there are no cameras or listening devices in the space. This is where we are now.

Did you ever get a negative answer? (=Yes, there are.)

This is the immediate problem. Ignore the FAANG issues for a second, and imagine considering a rental with locks, lights, and thermostats that write to a database your landlord controls. With a baby monitor in the living room that the landlord controls.

Getting back to the "smart home" features, allowing your landlord the ability to apply parental controls to restrict your use of features, purchases, requests; and to record them. The privacy issues go well beyond simply installing listening devices which can eavesdrop on tenants.

The features of an offline smart home could still support monitoring by the owner/landlord. The smart home's features could be independent islands of automation. Renter says, "Set temperature to at least 78." Landlord says, "Why is my utility bill so high?" Assume the voice recognition is good enough without access to an off-site server.

[Edit for grammar]

you are badly incorrect -- adversarial listening devices are increasing, especially where there is a power imbalance

Honestly, this makes a lot of sense. Key sentence:

> It also means being able to add other Alexa-controlled devices, like speakers, smart plugs and lights, more easily.

A lot of my friends who live in newly constructed buildings have speakers built-in to their apartments. In small NYC apartments, honestly it makes sense to speakers built into walls/ceilings to save space and control from your phone with Bluetooth. It's a genuinely nice amenity.

I know so many people with Alexa anyways that it makes sense for them to have it integrated. And if it's an extra option to control the lighting, even better.

Obviously if you have privacy concerns you can just keep it turned off or ask maintenance to unplug its ethernet. (You still have physical lightswitches, nothing essential will break.) And nothing's preventing you from using your own speaker/Google Home/etc. instead on your counter.

But from an apartment amenities standpoint... this is pretty convenient. And like I said, you can always unplug its internet. It's an option, not something being forced on you.

>Obviously if you have privacy concerns you can just keep it turned off or ask maintenance to unplug its ethernet.

*For now:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/bpr6xs/if_you_choo...

>built into walls/ceilings to save space

Ow, my pet peeve. Does this ever actually save space? Recessed lights and built in closets just waste a ton of it.

you can have built in speakers without alexa

The point is using Alexa to control your lights is an amenity like built-in speakers... and also makes obviously sense to integrate with built-in speakers.

Nobody's saying speakers require Alexa... I think that's pretty obvious.

"For Amazon, the appeal is obvious: Adding millions of new users to its services and gaining access to data like their voice-based wish lists and Alexa-powered shopping habits..."

It's okay folks. There are no privacy concerns here as they only want your voice-based wish lists and shopping habits data. Once again people just love exaggerating on these topics. /s

There isn't though. This is just voice control of existing things people are already doing through Amazon. This is data they already have. Is data inherently evil? I don't understand how there is some significantly different privacy concern of using Amazon services (wish lists and purchasing things) via voice control than via their website or app.

There are many legitimate privacy concerns with ever-listening devices in your house, but having "data" from people directly using existing features of a company via voice instead of mouse clicks isn't really one of them.

I remember when we didn't need a /s we assumed everyone got the joke. I took it seriously until I hit the /s but never would have years ago.

When did sarcasm stop registering? I was watching a webseries from the early 2000s and everything had that tone.

> When did sarcasm stop registering?

[In 1983][0]:

> 8. Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks.

> Without the voice inflection and body language of personal communication these are easily misinterpreted. A sideways smile, :-), has become widely accepted on the net as an indication that "I'm only kidding". If you submit a satiric item without this symbol, no matter how obvious the satire is to you, do not be surprised if people take it seriously.

[0]:https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/net.announ...

I'm one of the fools who uses one of these spying devices. I know and accept the risks.

I'm in the Google camp. They are a less trustworthy company, but difference in reliability and interoperability is anything but subtle.

I'd be pretty pissed if I found out that my place was hard-wired to the inferior product on move-in day. My Google Play Movies account is pretty extensive, I use other things that don't work with Amazon (because they emulate Apple's walled garden). This needs to be disclosed up-front, not only for people who wisely avoid these devices, but also those who prefer the competition.

You could leave a computer playing synthesized speech at Alexa all day just to fuck with it.

This is probably the best strategy. One obviously cannot stop them monitoring you since there are just so many different surveillance techniques nowadays. Therefore the best way to deal with it is by constantly throwing garbage and useless data into the pipeline so that it may confuse their algorithms and stop them from profiling the individual.

So they profile you as a person that messes with Alexa.

poisoning the well is my usual strategy with data hungry companies as well.

This was an interesting project from earlier this year:

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/1/15/18182214/a...

"When the Alias hears its own wake word, it’ll stop broadcasting white noise and wake up Alexa or Google Assistant so you can use them as normal."

I use Alexa nearly every day to tell me the weather while I'm getting dressed and to play music on spotify. I ask it the occasional math problem, trivia question, etc.

Paranoia aside, what's my exposure level?

Counterpoint: I use my iPhone to do the same, it takes an extra few seconds to tap to look at the weather and queue up a couple podcasts. Why raise my exposure to save 5 seconds?

Semi-OT: I suspect that Amazon is going to end up with the lion's share of the smart home assistant market.

I see a lot of Amazon advertising on television for Alexa and their devices. I don't see much for Google, and I don't think I've ever seen a TV for Apple's device.

Furthermore, I'm now seeing Alexa being mentioned outside of Amazon ads. For example, Frito Lay has a TV ad that is a variant on one of their earlier ads for their variety pack of snack sizes bags of potato chip. In the variant as the mom in the ad leaves for her daughter's soccer game, taking the variety pack with her to provide snacks for the kids, she calls out to Alexa to order another pack, and a text overlay shows the exact phrasing for this order.

I don't know if Frito Lay added the Alexa bit on their own, or Amazon paid them to do so [1], but either way if this starts happening with other products I think it will really give Amazon a boost.

[1] I can see it going either way. I can see Amazon paying to be included as a way to promote Alexa. But maybe Frito Lay makes more on the sale if you buy via Amazon than if you buy from your local store, and so they did it on their own.

Aside from the privacy issue, all these cloud-connected devices become bricks when the manufacturer goes bust, discontinues the "service", or decides you need to buy a new one because they've deemed yours obsolete.

Yes and no. Yes for the smaller manufacturers, which is why I never buy cloud-anything from them. For the larger ones, they never go bust, but they do cancel. They have enough of a user base that things get rooted and custom solutions are available after death.

What surprised me was that the article didn't mention anything about the ability to deactivate the use of the system. Why wouldn't the reporter have asked about that detail?

For a second I thought they were moving into real estate/housing as the next market to disrupt. That would've been fun.

Same! Another industry they could play monopoly with

What's that noir short story where the guy is trying to bargain with his smart pay-per-use door to open up?

http://archive.is/lar6t

Link without paywall: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazons-plan-to-move-in-to-your...

Can you share how you got that non-paywall link?

The link is the same but with ?mod=rsswn added. Adding that also appears to work for other WSJ articles for me. No idea how OP found out about it though.

Append

       ?mod=rsswn

at the end

You can append ?mod=rsswn at the end of WSJ urls to get non-paywall links. I submitted the story with this param but for some reason it's missing. Maybe I made some mistake in copy/pasting. I learnt about this trick from a HN comment in the past.

Any similar tricks you wanna share for other soft paywall-heavy websites?

I'd love to read this but their paywall is effective. Could someone sum it up?

I think this snippet sums it up:

> Amazon’s Alexa Smart Properties team, a little known part of its Alexa division, is working on partnerships with homebuilders, property managers and hoteliers to push millions of Alexa smart speakers into domiciles all across the U.S. Amazon is hoping to find a new way to build market share by offering discounted hardware, customized software and new ways for property managers to harvest and use data.

Link without paywall: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazons-plan-to-move-in-to-your...

Thanks! So the same link with "?mod=rsswn" appended? Does that work for any article, or is there a method to find the link for a given article?

It seems to work for at least some other articles! Today I learned something useful

Try Googling the article title and then clicking on the article from there. The Google Referer header should disable the paywall.

That never works for me for WSJ, I think they disabled that.

Click on the "web" link, which is a link to the Google search already filled in for you.

What is up with all these links to paywalled websites? Can't read any of this garbage.

If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

If you are using Firefox On desktop (dunno about Firefox on Android) there is an extension that will bypass a fair few paywalls - https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

Subscribe?

I do subscribe to one major newspaper. I'm not going to subscribe to twenty.

Subscriptions are a very inefficient payment mechanism, when we're reading just a few articles each from lots of different publishers. If I could click a button and pay a little bit per article, I would. It'd be less work than getting around the paywall.

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