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Comment by programmertote | Hacker News Reader

I have both Home and Alexa in my house. If I give Google the full benefit of the doubt and believe that they only record when I say 'Hey/OK Google', what about Alexa? Does it send the recording to its server all the time or only transfer them when I invoke its service?

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Amazon claims to only send speech data home when you invoke it with a 'hey alexa'. Whether they're sending home just your query, or everything the echo has heard since the last invocation, they are very careful not to say.

In both cases they only send what they heard after you used the wake word.

Can you provide a reference for where Amazon &/or google say that, specifically? Bc another comment mentinos that they sort weasel around that claim and dont actually clearly state it.

From my own perspective (and certainly dont mean this in a way that's dismissive towards you/your comment), given that those companies lie constantly, I'm not sure why I would trust their own PR about their products as a reliable source of information.

> Can you provide a reference for where Amazon &/or google say that, specifically?

This very article. But since you said you don't believe them ("those companies lie constantly") why would referencing them help here? Either you believe them, and it is settled, or you don't and it is worthless.

Hook up wireshark, you can quite clearly see when Google Mini or an Echo are sending an audio stream since it is a substantial packet-load relative to normal "keep-alive" comms. The only exceptions to that, from what I've seen, are automatic software updates (but traffic is moving down, rather than up).

You could also look at the device teardowns, for example this article has a good overview of the underlying workings (inc. Wake Word detection):

https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/2a32d792-d471-...

> given that those companies lie constantly, I'm not sure why I would trust their own PR

The only reference that would be credible would be something from the company, so if you don't believe them, then it wouldn't really matter, would it?

I would hope that it's more like "after and including the wake word" so that they are capturing the audio needed to better train their algorithms on false wakes. I would much rather they analyze "a stray noodle on the floor" and eventually figure out that it shouldn't have woken, than analyze "on the floor" by itself and not be learning about the nuances of noodles.

A hobby of mine is seeing how far away from "Hey Google" I can stray. The accessibility feature to beep on wake helps with this.

I don't understand how this is a controversial claim that people refute when it's so easy to test with something like Wireshark. If someone is paranoid enough spread FUD on the Internet, they should be paranoid enough to actually check with freely available tools.

If conspiracy theorists looked at facts, they wouldn't be conspiracy theorists. The common denominator of people who claim that these devices are always sending voice data, is that they have zero interest in learning how they actually work, the information is widely and easily available.

When people get to know things like this way after they bought and used this devices... Google should made this very clear before people bought it

if by 'conspiracy theorist' you mean the literal definition, then you're talking about anyone who theorizes regarding the existence of a conspiracy. There's nothing wrong with that.

If by 'conspiracy theorist' you mean someone who suspects the government or corporations of foul play, then don't forget about 'government surveilance', one of the biggest conspiracy theories of the last several decades - until it turned out to be true. (did you dismiss them as well, before snowden put hard evidence behind the reasonable speculation?)

Either way, you shouldn't talk down to people who find minimal, available evidence worthy of speculation. It's not conducive to reasonable discussion.

The common retort is "they record everything and then upload it all when you use the wake word". The people who say that clearly don't understand audio file sizes (unless Amazon has invented a new, secret, super compressed audio format).

If Google don't clearly states what it collect, people must assume its everything

When it's within your power to verify but you don't take the time to do so, you lose the authority to go online and claim your conspiracy theory has any merit at all.

No. You don't lose authority, you lose credibility. Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists tend to believe and repeat information that sparks an emotional reaction in them or agrees with their paranoid worldview, regardless of the credibility of that information. However, because of Google's track record with user data, paranoid assumptions of them tend to be correct.

You can make fun of people who don't read tiny little words hidden in a contract. But you also can say tiny words are dark patterns.

Assuming (pretty safely) that the connection to google is TLS encrypted, how exactly would someone be able to examine the data with wireshark? The times I've had to look at an HTTPS session, I ended up having to set up a TLS decrypting proxy with a custom root certificate. It doesn't seem likely you'd be able to do that with a closed IoT device.

You shouldn't need to actually view the data. Just check the payload size. Compare the traffic at idle to the traffic that's sent when you speak to it. If it's comparable, now it's time to be suspicious. If there is a noticeable spike after saying the wake word, then you can be fairly certain it's actually waiting for the wake word.

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