Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

This falls into the category of:

I bugged my house... NOW MY HOUSE IS BUGGED!

Not to dismiss the value of the news here, it is important for folks to know, but the overall situation is both concerning, and amusing.

View on HN

I'm not sure why it's unreasonable for customers to have assumed this is like every other product: they developed it with employees and voluteers before shipping.

After all, the voice recognition in my Prius doesn't send recordings of my "call mom and dad mobile" back to Toyota and it certainly doesn't send random snippets of conversations my wife and I have to low paid contractors around the world.

> After all, the voice recognition in my Prius doesn't send recordings of my "call mom and dad mobile" back to Toyota and it certainly doesn't send random snippets of conversations my wife and I have to low paid contractors around the world.

How do you know? Is it not internet-connected?

I don’t know about the Prius, but there are plenty of non-connected devices that support voice control.

I have a Garmin GPS from like 8 years ago that did voice commands, it had zero transmit functionality.

I mean, I would assume that humans are used to improve the speech recognition capabilities of voice assistants. Accents alone are a big challenge to voice recognition, not to mention regional dialects, and the more complex languages.

People listening to what is said to a voice assistant after the prompt doesn't really alarm me. What would be alarming is if the voice assistant was secretly recording normal conversations.

What is usually shown, time and time again, is that the voice assistants aren't secretly recording. They are triggered because they heard something that sounded like a hotword.

Maybe you were talking about what dog you want you buy. Someone asks if a Greyhound would be alright and you said "No way, Poodle!". Well, the device picked it up as "Ok Google" and begins listening for a command. It makes a bleep, and lights up and you start talking about dogs or whatever.

You maybe didn't notice, so it picks up 15 seconds of a conversation, has no idea what to do, and probably just does an image search for dog pictures or even just the "I don't know how to help with that".

Not to say you shouldn't be annoyed that it picks up unrelated stuff... I just always think "secretly recording" is such a misnomer.

Your phone has more sensors on it than these devices and most people have their phones on them 24/7. And most phones have the same voice-controlled features too. Why people are concerned about narrow scoped voice-devices more than their phone is a curious thing. Is it because it talks back to you that makes it more apparent?

It is just more recent.

Plenty of articles about phones listening too.

No one said we were (_more_ concerned).

Most people assume that the system is entirely automated, and that their commands will be processed by mere computers, not listened to by actual people who might even be their own neighbours.

Most people unfortunately are specialists in at most one field.

Outside of that specialisation they are distinctly average.

We because of who we are entirely expect this stuff but I'm sure I miss all kinds of things that are outside my specialization.

Modern society has become so complex no one person can keep track off all the moving parts to know if they are been taken advantage off for example.

I fear that most people ... don't care, or don't assume the system is automated.

And they do it anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com