The thing in your pocket is always listening too.
Note: intent and expectations matter. A cellphone by itself (without any type of "voice assistant" app or feature) is only intended to record audio when it's being used to make a call. Yes, malicious actors or buggy software could enable the microphone, but that's not the expected behavior of the device. Kyllo v United States is all about what the public understands and expects about a technology.
[1] https://www.cdw.com/product/att-trimline-210-corded-phone/30...
I think to your point, there is possibly more legal protection around wiretaps than voice assistants. However, how many apps have access to the microphone? Are these apps covered by the same protections as making a phone call using POTS?
Edit: I see you've linked that your phone is an old-school landline, which doesn't really help people understand the legalities around smartphones, which many feel are a requirement to daily life.
The point of the original comment is mostly that devices like echos are expected to always be listening, and this has legal implication.
The biggest profile case where Alexa audio recordings got turned over was during a murder trial after a judge's orders.
I am not entirely clear that the ramifications of Kyllo v. United States are as dire as OP is stating for Alexa-like devices. How exactly do the police freely gain access to a "in general public use" Alexa-like device that is secured through something like an Amazon account and secured WPA password-protected WiFi network? Amazon would have to turn over credentials or the police would have to hack your account or WiFi somehow...
They don't, Kyllo v United States isn't about gaining access to someone's devices. The police used their own thermal camera to search Kyllo's residence:
>> In order to determine whether an amount of heat was emanating from petitioner's home consistent with the use of such lamps, at 3:20 a.m. on January 16, 1992, Agent Elliott and Dan Haas used an Agema Thermovision 210 thermal imager to scan the triplex. [...] The scan of Kyllo's home took only a few minutes and was performed from the passenger seat of Agent Elliott's vehicle across the street from the front of the house and also from the street in back of the house.
That's a neat phone, but we already know pretty much all phone communications are intercepted and recorded. This is why I do all of my communications over IPoAC[1].
Sure, a bit naive, but I digress. Even if it's illegal, it would be better if it was simply not possible in the first place. It's optionally having that functionality, rather than building solutions considering privacy in the first place.
> without any type of "voice assistant" app
I don't think you can uninstall Siri or Google Assistant on neither iPhone or Android, so that point is kind of null. Only with root or custom roms you'll be able to do that.
I wouldn't trust that whatever people who sit in power doesn't have a way of overriding that.
Not defending it, but your smart phone is not quite as bad as Alexa. At least for the moment.
The only additional danger from an Alexa device is that you are trusting amazon as well, but the core functionality of an Alexa device to always listen for the wake word and communicate to a server if it thinks it heard the wake word locally is the same as what most smartphones have.
Source: Mine does, very useful!
Once it is activated, it starts recording and sending audio data to google.
Every such device has a false positive rate on keyphrase activations, and of course the do, there is only limited processing available in those phones (that also try to conserve power), and people tend to mumble sometimes so you have to be a little generous and balance false positives against false negatives - the latter of which people refer to as "shit don't work".
Devices in lawyers' home offices aren't any different. And if the device encounters a false positive and activates, somewhere on some server some recording of your confidential conversation may get stored. Or worse, you buy 100 copies of "The Art of the Deal" off amazon by accident.
Even worse if your client's name, or their wife's or mom's name, is Alexa... or Alexandra/Alexander, which also cause a lot of false positive activations, or so I heard from a friend of a friend with that name.
typing to an alexa device should be an option, just like having an AI chat.
Thank Google / Amazon for creating drama where none existed.
This is possibly the biggest single problem with modern surveillance/privacy culture. The idea of requiring an individual's consent to something that is potentially a risk for them is laudable, but it's also largely a symbolic gesture when some of the largest and most powerful organisations in the world are duping all of their friends into providing much the same information without their consent or even necessarily their knowledge anyway. The whole business model is fundamentally flawed, and privacy laws are a long way from catching up.
That gives me enough information to guess there's people who would make apps that take the private data without asking, whether the option to turn off privacy feature blocks them all or not is the question.
Except Amazon was caught with their hands in the cookie jar listening on 'regular' people's private conversations on more than one occasion.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629513