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None of these capabilities have an existential requirement for a centralized networked infrastructure spanning the globe.

Stop and think how ludicrous it is that your being able to say to the room "pick a random song and play it loud" requires fiber on ocean floors and huge buildings running servers and the rest of it.

We're being socialized into thinking privacy is an impediment to progress.

It is just a very bad idea to create a turn-key surveillance society and hope and cross your fingers it never gets used.

>None of these capabilities have an existential requirement for a centralized networked infrastructure spanning the globe.

Yes, but I don't want to store every single movie, TV show, song, and news story locally and find a way to get them to myself without using the internet.

I'd love if more stuff happened locally on these devices, and I experiment with various other systems every now and then. I even have a fully self-hosted home automation system running on open source software using local-only radio systems (z-wave) to control things like lights, garage doors, and door locks.

There are things that do require some kind of internet access though, and other things that become much more reliable and easy to use when internet connected.

>Stop and think how ludicrous it is that your being able to...

I have, and so has my family. And we have made the decision that the tradeoffs are worth it for us.

Why can't people understand that I'm an adult, everyone in my household is an adult, and we are able to understand and comprehend the situation, and make a conscientious decision to accept the trade offs.

I'm not an idiot, I know there are risks, but the risks are low enough for me and my family to make it worth it. Just like how there are risks simply just getting in a car, and there are risks every time I turn my oven on, but they are all acceptable.

Maybe you should stop and think just how ludicrous it is that you seem to think it's impossible that someone else could find value in these devices, and that some are okay with limited tradeoffs with their privacy in return for devices and services which improve their lives. And maybe you should listen when someone tells you that they've weighed the pros and cons and decided it was worth it, rather than quickly jumping to the conclusion that they are wrong, didn't give it any thought, or are somehow being tricked.

> Maybe you should stop and think just how ludicrous it is that you seem to think it's impossible that someone else could find value in these devices

You are claiming I am saying this.

I am saying (a) we can get these capabilities without damaging society so lets give it try, and (b) your "choices" affect the rest of us.

It is like second hand smoking.

That's fair, and there are absolutely discussions to be had around the "second hand smoke" kind of impacts these technologies can have. (I really like that metaphor)

But I think it's wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. I agree that there absolutely needs to be more regulation around this area. I'd personally like a law that mandates a tone or sound (and lights) when one of these devices is recording. I'd love some laws on the books in the US that gives those who don't want in this ecosystem a quick and easy way of ensuring they won't end up in them.

I also think that there are a LOT of things that all of the big players in this space can do better (like the by-default recording and storing of all the voice data indefinitely). But I also think that there has to be compromises. Saying it's ludicrous that these devices use the internet is the pendulum swinging way too far in the other direction, the internet-connectedness of these is basically the biggest selling point.

But I'd be over the moon if they did all of the simple commands "locally", and I'd love if users were given more control over their information (something like a weekly/monthly/quarterly email asking if Google can use the following list of recordings to train their models would be awesome IMO).

There is so much hyperbole and just straight up wrong information gets thrown about so often with this stuff, and there's a lot of extremism when it comes to privacy, especially on this website (I know this is a loaded word, and I don't mean to include any additional connotations with it, I just don't know how else to describe this). I also don't want to enable turnkey surveillance, but at the same time I don't want to live as a luddite to prevent it. There has to be some middle ground, and if that means it makes dragnet surveillance easier while improving the lives of many people, then I might be okay with it.

> and there's a lot of extremism when it comes to privacy

For very sound and empirical reasons: historically, intrusive surveillance has always gone hand in hand with tyranny.

You are downvoted but I believe you are essentially correct. It is ridiculous to send voice data all over the globe to be interpreted and send back to IOT devices. Unnecessary and certainly not elegant, since mic and device are most often in very close proximity.

Good for learning to analyze voice on the other hand, but your point is still valid. We will get a compressed voice service that easily can be held in a small device at some point, that makes this ridiculous data exchange unnecessary.

At I/O Google announced on-device transcription and NLP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9LQX9cLnZk

Windows has had no-internet-required voice recognition built in since XP. It is available for any programmer to use for any purpose through importing a DLL, and isn't too complicated to use. With an unconstrained grammar defined, it's something like 85% accurate, but depending on how much you constrain the grammar, can get incredibly accurate.

Meanwhile my mother's flip phone in 2003ish also had on device voice control, and it worked pretty damn effectively

>And of course anyone within earshot of any of those devices also deserves to have their privacy obliterated, even if they themselves don't own one?

If you don't warn others about a listening device you may even be running afoul of wiretapping laws, depending on your location.

If the device isn't actively listening, does this even apply?

Good to know since the police in that same state may be carrying their personal cellphones on them at the same time they interact with people...

After a year with several Echos we ended up with listening to Spotify and getting the time of the day. Everything else looked like a gimmick. So we dropped the Echos, the tradeof between people listening into your conversations vs. using a light switch just wasn't worth it.

Yeah, I never understood what problem they were supposed to solve from the get-go.

Besides gathering a huge "spoken language" data-set for machine learning.

Seems to me like you understand perfectly.

>That doesn't mean we forgo all privacy, that doesn't mean we deserve any violations, that doesn't mean we are okay with information being collected against our will

You did forego all privacy and clearly you are okay with information being collected, otherwise you wouldn't have those devices.

That being said, you do not "deserve any violations".

>You did forego all privacy and clearly you are okay with information being collected

Absolutely not! I would not be okay with people being able to listen to the audio they record without my consent, I would not be okay with a transcript being publicly available, I would not be okay with the history of the commands I say to it being publicly available. I'm also not okay with audio being recorded without me triggering it to record.

Making limited tradeoffs with my privacy in specific situations is very different than not caring about privacy in general. And "privacy" isn't just one thing, there are tons of levels in many different areas.

For example, I am not okay with cameras that upload anywhere off site IN my house. That's a line that I'm uncomfortable crossing. Not because I think that there is someone viewing every second of uploaded footage, but because the risk of a security breach is high enough and the information that camera would collect "private" enough that I don't think the tradeoff is worth it. But cameras that record the OUTSIDE of my house and upload it somewhere? I'm fine with that. The expectation of privacy is different on the other side of that wall for me, and i'm more than comfortable with the tradeoffs and risks of that going public.

For you those lines might be different, but neither of us forego all privacy because of those decisions.

>I would not be okay with people being able to listen to the audio they record without my consent, I would not be okay with a transcript being publicly available, I would not be okay with the history of the commands I say to it being publicly available.

Something needn't be public to violate your privacy. Clearly you agreed to google listening to and recording to all sound being made in your house, leading to privacy violations. Also, the risk of security breach pretty much isn't if it happens, but when it happens.

>Making limited tradeoffs with my privacy in specific situations is very different than not caring about privacy in general. And "privacy" isn't just one thing, there are tons of levels in many different areas.

Agreed, however I didn't say you didn't care about privacy. Just that you traded it away for some (stupidly minuscule IMO) benefit.

> Just that you traded it away for some (stupidly minuscule IMO) benefit.

I think this is the disagreement. You are treating privacy as a binary thing. That once you trade any amount of privacy away, it is entirely gone.

That is not how most people approach privacy. Most people view privacy as a spectrum. Someone can choose to sacrifice some (but not all!) of their privacy to get a benefit.

What's key is they should be able to prescribe the limits as the poster above has described. We should be able to severely punish companies that lie about their behaviors, because that would make it impossible to make informed trade-offs about how much privacy we are truly giving up.

>We should be able to severely punish companies that lie about their behaviors

I can't agree with this more, and I really hope we can see some legislation in the US that creates very strict penalties for lying about this stuff, and possibly some regulations that can make storing user data more risky to the company doing it, which would hopefully put pressure on them to reduce or eliminate data storage where possible.

Privacy _is_ a binary thing, either something is private or it is not.

There is of course a difference between _everything_ and _nothing_ being private, but once _something_ ceases being private it ceases being private forever.

If you let some company, which will do who-knows-what, record voice in your house, you no longer can have a private conversation in your house, since the company will record them, possibly listen to them, and ultimately probably leak them. You completely lost that part of privacy, without for example losing privacy regarding visuals.

>What's key is they should be able to prescribe the limits as the poster above has described. We should be able to severely punish companies that lie about their behaviors, because that would make it impossible to make informed trade-offs about how much privacy we are truly giving up.

I do agree there need to be more regulations around this (yay GDPR), although even if you kill the company dead, you cannot un-ring a bell.

> Privacy _is_ a binary thing, either something is private or it is not.

I strongly disagree. If I tell something to my attorney it is still relatively private, but obviously not if I had never told anyone.

If I have a deep secret and I tell my significant other that secret asking for their confidence, it is still relatively private but not as private if I had never told anyone.

I agree that, if you absolutely need total control of information, then the only way to 100% guarantee that privacy is to tell no one ever.

But I think being absolutionist when it comes to privacy expectations means you may have a very hard time convincing others of your opinions.

> If you let some company, which will do who-knows-what, record voice in your house

This is exactly the point we are arguing. We should be able to find out from the company what they will do, and if they deviate from promises they make they should be held accountable.

I should be able to let some company record my voice in my house, with strict conditions on what it will do.

> Clearly you agreed to google listening to and recording to all sound being made in your house, leading to privacy violations.

That's not how these devices work.

This comment brings zero new points to the discussion, and just reiterates the point that parent was responding to. It’s not very constructive or substantial in my opinion, so I downvoted it.