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Comment by okmokmz | Hacker News Reader

>There is no evidence of any of these devices recording/sending voice data outside of when a query is going on.

This isn't an example of a google device doing so, but there have been multiple cases of these "smart" home devices recording and/or sending audio when not prompted

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/24/family-claims-their-echo-s...

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It was prompted, it's just that the match for the activation phrase was incorrectly identified.

That's not the same thing as the near-universally believed internet truism that these devices are always listening and sending recordings home.

Mr Google Developer,

See here where you have it react and start phoning home when they say "Hey Google"? Right there, we're going to have you add some more terms; things like "jihad", "bomb", and a few others. We'll send you over the zip file of the full list later; it's only a few meg.

Yours Truly, TLA

Edit: I'm curious why the downvotes. It seems possible to me that the TLAs could have Google add more triggers for recording. If they did, we'd have no way of knowing. Sure, it's not likely, but it certainly seems possible.

Downvotes because the NSA isn't magic. We know how the legal boundaries of their power work from the Snowden leaks. It wouldn't be possible for them to force Google or whoever to do this.

The problem is that the Snowden leaks taught us that they completely ignore their legal boundaries on a regular basis.

That's not true at all. The key element of the Snowden leaks was that the legal boundaries were not where we expected them to be. The telephony metadata collection program, for example, was fully legal but has way wider impact that people considered to be right.

There's some muddy water between - What the written laws allow (or don't disallow) and - What the constitution allows

I would say the various TLAs have been working outside "the law" insofar as what the constitution allows.

>It was prompted, it's just that the match for the activation phrase was incorrectly identified.

Yes, so it recorded and sent audio when the user did not want it to. That's not any better. It'd be like if your gun went off while holstered, and you said that it was prompted to fire because the hammer hit the bullet despite the trigger not being pulled. It's very clearly not the intended functionality, so to trying to argue that that conversation recording/sending was prompted when there was no intent from the user to activate the device is a major stretch

This analogy fails with the holster — as it is an explicitly deactivated state more aptly comparable to the voice assistants being muted/off.

Maybe you would be less surprised if the gun went off because you were waggling your finger inside the trigger guard rather than methodically squeezing it. The solution might be a higher trigger pressure threshold — akin to a more accurate voice trigger.

Worth noting that you still get a visual cue, and you can also enable an audible cue. You can also see exactly what it recorded and delete it in the dashboard for both companies. That's exactly how most of these articles actually find out that an accidental trigger happens, by seeing it on the dashboard.

These are also fairly rare bugs, so it's still very far from "device listening to everything you do", which implies malice. If it was trying to spy on you, it wouldn't light up and make a beep every time it was listening... That sounds like very bad spying to me.

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