People Still Think Their Smart Speakers Are Eavesdropping on Conversations
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
*re the spotify thing, I don't know if this was an experiment or just a reset of settings somehow, but I had specifically connected spotify, and had Alexa revert to playing "previews" (clips of songs I asked for) on amazon music instead of using my paid spotify subscription. I also noticed that it would routinely play a nonstandard version of songs on spotify that did not coincide with the same search using the spotify app. Like if I searched for a common song, I would get an obscure concert version or a cover, when the usual version would be the first hit searching on the spotify app. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity I guess, but it didn't win Amazon any points in my book
to the question as stated, these seem like reasonable answers. to a more specific question that limits this to “periods during which nobody has spoken the keyword that activates the smart speaker”, the answer might be different.
> A snippet further down in the survey–48% of respondents said they cleared their browser history, a meaningless move against ad networks–suggests that many people remain confused about web tracking.
did they do this as part of resetting a larger amount of browser state (e.g. cookies)? and was this action even motivated to protect against the ad industry, or to protect against physical access (theft; keeping secrets from family)? the survey question doesn’t specify.
> Chubb’s survey surfaces comparable confusion about passwords, with 61% of respondents saying they struggle to keep track of them but only 35% reporting they use password managers like Google Password Manager.
is using a password manager provided by an ad company supposed to protect you from that ad company learning more details about your life?
what a motivated and lazy article. you can do better than this, Rob.
Yeah, but I'm certain they'd pass these data along (and potentially much more of it) to some government entity if served with a national security letter or some other secret legal order. The 'customer' may never even find out about it.
So go ahead and install as many commercially controlled mics as you want, citizens. What's the worst that could happen?
In particular, we show that by exploiting the affected accelerometer readings and carefully selecting feature sets along with off-the-shelf machine learning techniques, Spearphone can perform gender classification (accuracy over 90%) and speaker identification (accuracy over 80%) for the audio/video playback on the smartphone for our recorded dataset.
Google has also turned individual phones into miniature earthquake sensors. All smartphones have accelerometers that can pick up signals of an earthquake. If triggered, the phone sends the message to a detection server, along with rough location data, like the city a device is in. The server then pieces together where the earthquake is happening from data collected on multiple phones and beams out the relevant alerts.
[1] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/how-google-alerted-c...
You may be confusing this with the fact that recordings are transcribed to improve accuracy[0]. That's well-known and acknowledged! And for folks who _never_ want anyone else to read what they say to voice assistants, that is indeed a problem. But, again - the overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that the only data that is actually transmitted by these devices is when it believes[1] it has cause to do so. I have never seen one iota of evidence to suggest that smart speakers are designed to listen-and-transmit at times other than when there is a reasonable expectation that customers want them to do so.
[0] https://www.rd.com/article/is-alexa-really-always-listening/, "What are the privacy concerns", for instance
[1] yes, false-wakes happen. That's also an issue. But it doesn't support your claim of intentional ("randomly" - I'm assuming you mean this colloquially for "with no justification", rather than literally "in an unpredictable fashion") transmission.
EDIT: to be clear - I absolutely support people's discomfort with these listening devices. If you don't want companies to gather data about you, that's a sensible position to take! If you don't want to take the risk of false-wakes, good for you! But it's important to make the decision based on _actual fact_ rather than scare-mongering, or claims of "well it might" when weight of evidence _and_ active network monitoring strongly suggest that, no, in fact, it doesn't.
They don't really need to eavesdrop for advertising. They'd certainly end up facing some substantial regulatory scrutiny if they did. They could be required to eavesdrop by a national security warrant (or similar) which wouldn't be subject to regulatory scrutiny in the same way advertising would be.
The speakers are listening. Only for the wake-word of course. But explain that to nontechies.
The ad targeting probably isn't happening. But if you keep a software-controlled microphone near you then it is going to be listening to what you say and at some point that will leak out to the wider world.
Many schools of thought believe that it is impossible to prove the absence of something. Personally, I would like some firm proof that there are no pixies living in my garden, but all I can say is that I've never seen one.
Similarly, you could prove a speaker doesn't eavesdrop by proving it performs a finite set of operations, none of which are eavesdropping.
Asking somebody to prove that a computer won't do X is a fool's errand, outside of some shrinking safety-critical industries.
That said, you could always make your own smart speaker with a hardware button or shell script instead of a wakeword:
https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/alexa-smart-sc...
Now prove it's never going to explode.
Do you notice how a perceived risk of something really bad happening skews people's perception?
There is an obvious risk of turning a smart speaker into a eavesdropping device, because
- It has to listen to your commands.
- It has to send the commands it hears to a computer outside your control for processing.
- It receives firmware updates which you also do not control, and cannot inspect.
A perfect moral hazard.
If I were to use a smart speaker, it must have open-source firmware which I can inspect and flash, and it, or its processing software on my home server / router / NAS, should be firewalled off the internet. That would be a proof.