Working from home? switch off Alexa, say lawyers | Hacker News Reader

Working from home? switch off Alexa, say lawyers

zdnet.com

40 pointsspking23 comments

This article is cribbed from one that was discussed 4 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22646300

Is it time to deploy an army of personal chaff dispensers, to reduce the listeners' benefit of any ill-gotten gains from these devices? Regular targeted queries to the assistants would not be affected.

You'd just need an old laptop or phone running text-to-speech on some random phrases, speaking them every few seconds. You'd run it when you left the room, to keep the assistant busy with your bogus data feed.

    "When is the baby due?"
    "I need a lawyer"
    "I like this brand of yacht"
    "anthrax plutonium NSA pepsi marlboro"

I would love to get rid of my Echos and lock down my network, but I can't find a self-hosted & open source smart home voice solution that can match the Alexa ecosystem. I do have my smart home on a separate network that's highly monitored, but I really wish I could completely lock it down so it couldn't talk to the outside world at all. I would be totally willing to pay for a self-hosted solution to Alexa just for smart home automation/control

I don't know how they measure up, but here are some alternatives:

- https://almond.stanford.edu/

- https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/

I'm a bit of a privacy advocate, so I turn all of the voice assistants off when possible. I have found precisely one situation where they make my life better - cleaning out the fridge and asking how long various items last.

Alexa, Google Home, Nest, Ring, Apple iHome, all smart TVs newer than 2016 and all PCs running Windows 10 1903 or later are on my banned devices list because of the privacy risks they present. (iOS and Android devices are admissible as long as their digital assistants are turned off, and I may add stock Android ROMs to the list and only allow Replicant, LineageOS, etc.) I've already notified my girlfriend of the list, so if/when we make a home together, she knows not to bring anything on it into the home. I'm also training her in how to use Ubuntu and KDE for small-scale productivity.

For those curious as I was, Windows 10 1903 or later made it harder to disable Cortana. It's no longer in Settings and now requires a change in the Group Policy Editor (available to Enterprise and Education editions) or adding a registry entry.

The OS also never relinquishes/turns off the microphone.

So you're not welcoming guests with Android phones? Will you be placing their mobile phones in a Faraday cage?

Or will not not be visiting anyone who has a Homepod/Echo at home?

Placing their phones in a Faraday cage sounds like a good idea. But I will probably just have to watch what I say when company is over.

I've always been a little confused about the asymmetric concern (at least from the vocal majority) of Alexa/Google Home vs all of the other devices constantly around us that are capable of recording and transmitting. If I were willing to surreptitiously spy on my users I wouldn't constrain myself to only devices with in-your-face voice recording capabilities. I have an Echo among the dozens of internet connected devices in my home, but the Echo is the only one most people will show concern about.

I am honestly kinda surprised that so many people have these trojan horses in their homes.

Is the value really there?

Yes, it makes animal sounds, reminds me stuff, control the lights and blinds, and listen to me having sex.

Well, when you put it that way..

We use ours many times a day. Maybe it's because I have young kids who don't read yet but can talk. It's insanely useful to me. Thing's we've used it for in the last 24 hours:

1) Drop in (that's where you can set up a two way channel between two Echos). My kids know how to activate it, and it's way better than yelling down the hall.

2) Announcements. Sometimes when one of needs help with something but don't know where the other person is, we use the announcement feature, which covers the whole house between the various echos. The kids know how to use this too.

3) Timers. Hands free timers when cooking are a godsend. During meal prep we often have two or three going at once.

4) Streaming music. The kids know how to make their favorite songs start playing. And so do I. :) I have one in my office connected to my sound bar, and it's streaming the radio from LA all day long (I live in SF but grew up in LA, nostalgia factor). I can also tell it to play music for the whole house while we get ready in the morning.

5) Light control. I just recently upgraded to smart switches. At night I just say "Alexa goodnight" and it turns off all the lights in the house, saving me the effort of walking around (I know first world problem). But more importantly, when I'm reading to the kids and it's time for bed, it's nice to just say "goodnight" without having to get up and disturb them as they are getting sleepy.

Also for the lights, my daughter loves the fact that she can change the color and brightness of her room light with her voice. I doubt she could manage the app, since you need to be able to read.

So yeah, insanely useful for my family.

I have one and unplugged it recently because I'm working form home these days. As useless as these devices are, I miss having a voice assistant around. Being able to ask about the weather and the time of day whenever you want is kind of nice. Consider that people used to wind up clocks every day and check on thermometers and barometers to glean a vague idea of the climate. Having a much better version of all these instruments at hand is pretty nice.

Do people actually find these devices useful or is it just a gimmick? I'm relatively young, but I've never used my voice to control a piece of software before. It doesn't appear to be useful compared to manual entry.

We have a google home but when its not in use its not turned off; it's unplugged.

I am also a big privacy advocate so I set up my Echos so that they only listen when I press the button on the top of the device or say the keyword "Alexa". And just because I am extremely worried about big tech surveillance, I've even configured the device so that whenever it is "listening" it illuminates a blue light.

I know -- I'm getting close to a tinfoil hat level of paranoia here but you can't be too careful these days.

Attorneys of HN: would you be offended / consider it rude if a potential client asked if you had one of these devices and if it was turned off?

Not an attorney, but if a customer or partner asked, I'd happily go unplug Alexa for the remainder of the call. For me, it's a glorified light switch and there's only one lamp in my house that has a hard-to-reach switch (it's on a non-switched outlet behind the sofa).

> Paranoia is one of the three essential skills every lawyer should have. The other two are, of course, an aggressive billing department and a cataclysmic ability to out-lie even a politician.

I can understand the billing department. But could someone please explain the other two to me? Or this hyperbole here that I don't pick up?

But what if you work for amazon?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com