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Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

Remember when you could buy bluetooth speakers that you could listen to without the speaker listening to you ?

Nowadays everyone of my friends has a alexa or google speakers which sound shitty compared to real speakers and they spy on our conversations. For what ? to turn the fucking lights on or play a tune on demand? those lazy dumbasses cant be bothered to get off their butt to turn the lights on ? If only I had privacy conscious friends.

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So much of the current "home automation" products appear to me to be more parlour tricks than actual automation. Having to ask for something to happen is such a high technological cost for such a tiny change in convenience in the age of already being able to remote control a bunch of stuff with your phone.

There are actual proper home automation products out there, and some of them can interface via these privacy invading microphones masquerading as speakers, but the microphones themselves aren't "home automation" by any useful definition, they're just another alternative remote control.

I wonder if they use the term "smart speaker" because "microphone" just brings up thoughts of Banksy artwork?

The real rub is there's hardly any incentive to make things play nice with eachother for a while. You buy a garage door opener, it works for 30 years. You get one that can interface with your smart speaker, and both are unsupported in a few years.

You end up paying far more, way more often, for something vaguely more convenient than the old method. A clap light.

On the flip side, with the expansion of IoT comes creativity for people willing to tinker. We are pretty lucky to have resources like github, raspberry pi, self hosted services, just options from the mainstream consumer ad spam crap if you are willing to stick your head under the hood.

If you think about it, it is clear that Amazon and Google put a lot more R&D into the microphones than the speakers in these things. Yet they insist on calling them smart speakers, not smart microphones.

It would be like if you took a device with a camera and called it a portal or something.

My dad has his whole house wired up with echo dots in every room, voice-activated lights, voice-control TV, and those shitty $100 security cameras in every room.

I've tried to explain why he doesn't need them. His response (about the security cameras) is always, "If there's ever a break in, I'll be glad I have them." The fact that actually using a light switch sets in motion a 20-minute repair via iPad doesn't seem to bother him. He doesn't view the wiretaps as a problem. He (with my mother's help) recently bought a wifi-enabled fridge and kitchen sink.

I love my parents to death, but it's ridiculous. I'm to the point where I usually leave my phone in the next room over when I'm not using it (and please check me in at a psych ward if I ever buy a smart-watch with a cellular connection and an omni-directional microphone). Its beneficial for clarity of thought / lack of distraction as well as for privacy.

Connectivity for connectivity's sake will be the death of freedom.

It's funny...we've had this conversation with my mother repeatedly but she doesn't see a way technology companies could 'do anything bad with her asking for directions'

My siblings and I have drawn a line at DNA testing. She keeps talking about submitting her DNA to some mail order testing company and it has been made clear that would be the end of our relationship. We will try and help her protect her own privacy but have zero tolerance for her disrespecting ours.

> My siblings and I have drawn a line at DNA testing. She keeps talking about submitting her DNA to some mail order testing company and it has been made clear that would be the end of our relationship. We will try and help her protect her own privacy but have zero tolerance for her disrespecting ours.

It's sad that people don't recognize how DNA collected like that (whether by 23AndMe, Ancestry.com/Quest Diagnostics, or anyone else) is used. Almost 100% of the time, it goes into a database that's readily available for searches by law enforcement, without warrant. They can use the DNA of a close relative to figure out what they want to find in a suspect. It WILL be misused, and it is not in our best interest.

Nor is the surveillance net made by Blink and Ring cameras, and the pervasive network of microphones made by phones, smart-watches, smart TV's, smart faucets and fridges, smart ovens (seriously?), et cetera, ad nauseaum.

It's not only blind trust in the manufacturers of these devices to not misuse the data they collect, but it's blind trust that all of these devices will be properly secured and prevent would-be attackers from listening in to you no matter where you are. People cover up their webcams because they're afraid of hackers, but they put security cameras in their bedrooms, "to catch a thief", without a second thought.

You committing a lot of crimes these days, killer? I could care less about "misuse" for criminal reasons. The US military already has my prints and blood as part of MEPS intake and Tricare.

I'm more worried that DNA companies are going to use my DNA to raise my insurance rates, raise them for all of my family, or use them to predict models that fuck over other people.

I also expect them to NOT release any useful data and to hoard that as long as possible.

How is uncovering serial killers not in your interest>

My sister in law recently told me that she wanted to submit the DNA of her very young baby for logging in someway.

She went further, that everybody should be under observation via CCTV and other methods 24/7 “as I have nothing to hide”. It was a bit of a spit the tea out moment.

All I could do was weakly say something about “in a police state everyone is guilty of something”.

I think this is related to her near total devotion to reality TV. She almost only watch reality TV and seems to be primarily concerned with judging the behaviour of those involved.

I think, sadly, she’s far closer to the mainstream than I’ll ever be. She regards my demands of privacy from tech companies as “weird” :(

And at this point I think my long departed grandmother who would read to me in bed whatever she was reading. she liked to read about history. Which left me at a tender age with the reflexive understanding that those in power are usually utter bastards.

You sister in law doesn't realize the the people who would watch over her and her family's every move aren't considered ruthless criminals only by simple convention.

Yeah scary how naive some people are. Sadly I'm not a good enough communicator to convincer her of this.

I've been rolling this around for a long time. We tend to think of leaders as being good (ours of course) or bad (theirs of course). But I think mostly our leaders are as good or bad as we let them get away with.

What's the fear? You leave DNA everywhere as it is. These companies just genotype you for a variety of variants. Chances are you were genotyped at birth if you aren't so old. This data is legally protected.

My dad didn't even talk about doing it before hand. You're lucky to have got the warning.

Feels gross knowing that my DNA is largely known by so many organisations.

One wonders how hard it would be to create a plausible but fake sample for them to run.

Easy (but very unethical).

Just send them a sample from someone else.

Your DNA is 99.9% known anyway, because you’re a human. Only the remaining 0.1% varies between individuals.

Yeah and its that 0.1% that can be used to identify me, so that's what I care about being in a database.

I don't care if they run a DNA search on a database that has such broad results that it includes bananas...

If you are a millenial you've probably been genotyped at birth already. This data has some pretty good legal protections around it, there's really no reason to worry.

Under what circumstances, apart from where you or a close relative has committed a crime, are you concerned that someone might identify you from your DNA?

I can easily imagine health insurance companies refusing coverage or charging exorbitant rates to people because they know about your DNA and what diseases you might be susceptible to...

That's illegal...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...

And if it wasn't illegal then insurance companies would simply just demand DNA before underwriting your policy.

"Why would you want that? Apart from the very clear and obvious reasons that is."

Why do I always see this sort of question phrasing on this site in particular?

The very clear and obvious reason being to protect yourself from criminal punishment? Yikes.

Do you derive your sense of morality from what's legal/illegal or something? Of course one should want to protect themselves from criminal punishment.

Or would be physically present sometime around the time of a crime... or if the FBI wanted to frame someone they thought of as a subversive....

What does a WiFi kitchen sink do?

It's as useless as it sounds.

This isn't the one they have, but it's similar:

https://www.amazon.com/Trinsic-Pull-Down-Activated-Technolog...

$530 to turn on a faucet with your voice? What?

Does it still work as a tap if the WiFi is down? :D

You won't know because you'll be locked a room somewhere it pitch dark.

I know a number of germophobes who would want something like this to avoid touching the knob/lever while preparing meals etc.

An infra-red sensor, as implemented in many public toilets, seems like a less error-prone solution to that problem.

Or a pedal.

Leak.

The same could be said for everything. "Those lazy dumbasses can't be bothered to order a pizza over the phone?", "those lazy dumbasses can't hail a cab themselves?". No need to insult people for making something easier for themselves. It might be turning off the lights for some, but mine saves me a trip down to and through my basement to open my garage door, which is more convenience than 99% of the crap SV is pushing out.

Well, there's one difference. You're not getting inferior pizza by ordering online. The vast majority of Bluetooth speakers are marketed for convenience to people who don't understand the difference in sound quality that you get from full sized speakers. And this isn't some audiophile voodoo snobbery - it's physics, you simply can't get both good volume and good reproduction without size.

That may be true, but mine were half the price of a similar sized speaker and has good enough quality for my kitchen, plus all of the other things I use it for.

For simple ambient noise it does just fine. If I want better I have a Klipsch home theater system.

But I don't generally listen to a ton of music regardless so its not the primary reason I purchased either of them. If thats the reason someone picked up a smart speaker, then sure, they aren't getting the best for their dollar.

But my echo can make music play on my home stereo.

> "Those lazy dumbasses can't be bothered to order a pizza over the phone?"

To be fair, I'm happy to order a pizza online, and I'd be (a little less) happy to order a pizza through a phone tree, but I don't want to order a pizza over the phone because I don't want to talk to the person on the other end. The amount of work involved in placing the order doesn't really come into it.

I would also note, though, that pizza orders given to a person over the phone are frequently messed up, while orders placed online come out correctly.

Keep in mind, some people literally can't get off their butts to turn the lights on.

And if you have lost your sight, being able to play a tune on demand via an Echo voice command is a miracle. So is being able to listen to a podcast or audio book. Or being able to ask how old Tom Brady is, how many tablespoons in a quarter cup, what's the weather next week and how far it is between Dallas and Austin.

Edge cases which almost definitely don't apply to the people they are talking about.

True.

But also edge cases for which mass-market development would likely be infeasible.

The reality of market-capitalist R&D orientation is that if you want to support legitimate-need edge cases, at reasonable per-unit cost, a mass-market deployment is all but inevitable.

A reality I'm less than gruntled with.

It's surprising how much convenience and novelty trumps everything else.

(I mean this rhetorically, not as an actual insult...)

You're a lazy dumbass who types on a smartphone who can't be bothered to etch it into rock instead.

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