In other words, I don't think Amazon ever receives the "wrongthink" Alexa hears, unless you say it directly to Alexa.
I know lack of evidence doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but if that came up empty then it'd be hiding pretty good.
Although honestly I'd delay transmission until user interaction and then hide in that noise - it'd be the first thing I do.
Eh, look at the traffic anyway
You can do multiple runs of feeding pre-recorded messages into say multiple speakers and do the trial over many days. Then on a series of other speakers you can do a robust sequence of pre-recorded conversations followed by the same pre-recorded messages at the same time and then do statistical analysis on traffic volume.
I just presume these things are listening to everything and recording everything. I think that should be the general assumption if you bring essentially an "internet microphone machine" into your home.
If not by the company who sold it to you then by 3rd party hackers, clever app developers, or some other group. Every marketer wants to know what their customers are saying in the privacy of their own home.
As a tangent I've long wanted to have fun with this ... start a campaign to start collectively talking about a ridiculous product (say a vacuum cleaner with elephant ears that flap in proportion to the amount of dirt it picks up) in private conversations and see if a company releases it by listening in. "There's significant consumer demand for the dumbo-vac!"
Isn't this equivalent to the halting problem? Even with source code, there is a chance the compiler was compromised. In practice, these devices are closed source, so you would need to verify all the possible code paths.
Moreover, we know that NSA coerced phone companies into exposing metadata. What is the probability NSA has not requested backdoors of Amazon, Google, and the like?
This is just the nature of indirect observation. People in the natural sciences deal with this problem all the time.
https://moniotrlab.ccis.neu.edu/smart-speakers-study-pets20/
I think the data stream from uploading compressed audio for an extended period would be difficult to hide.
Yeah, but there are mistriggers as well - I think you should see them in myactivity.google.com with Assistant filter enabled.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
1) There has been various cases of such devices being triggered incorrectly and uploading chunks of recordings
2) It's all implemented in software. It's extremely easy for the vendor to enable more keywords or record for longer times.
3) It's impossible to prove that 2 is not happening already in limited cases
4) There is a proven long history of very effective global surveillance programs targeting every electronic device (phones, cell towers, carrier-grade routers, PCs, servers).
We have a Nest Hub, and saying Google twenty times a day was a deal breaker so we all use some other variation that works 99% of the time, and looking at history it accidentally triggers itself a few dozen more times during the day.
It has a real value for us for now, but privacy issues are real in my opinion.
The Google Mini that Spotify sent me, however, went straight into a pile.
This is the intended behavior.
But - there is a non-zero rate of false positives (when the device detects something that it thinks is the wake word, but is not), in which case, the audio is streamed to the cloud. This audio could (should?) be used for model training to improve the future precision of wake word detection. But, it could also potentially end up being subpoenaed by a law enforcement agency.
Voice recognition is 'on' all the time as it needs to recognise 'keyword'. All you need then is simple transcription into text.
Its certainly possible for Amazon/Google/Whoever to send your device a firmware update that turns it into an always-on microphone, but it doesn't do that by default
Not to say it's not a concern, but that's not really how these devices work – at least in the Alexa case. They're just matching for a specific hotword, rather than constantly performing speech-to-text (which is computationally expensive and done remotely). Think of it more like Shazam or the other audio fingerprinting services – you don't have to actually transcribe the text to understand if a particular word has been heard.
Without it being open source, there's no guarantee though?
Would it really be the first time we were lied to/surveilled?
When will we stop giving the hyper-growth oriented Silicon Valley startup world the benefit of the doubt?
And if one of them is doing it, they all are, they all think the same and have the same incentives. This entire play is about the data.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...