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Comment by WheatMillington | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing to me that people put these cloud connected surveillance devices INSIDE their homes, voluntarily.

I've been rethinking IoT devices lately. All that Alexa has actually been useful for is "Alexa, what's the time?", "Alexa, what day is it?", "Alexa, set a 2 minute timer", and "Alexa what does X mean?".

That's 99% of my uses.

I want a device that does only that and runs purely offline. I'm sure between Whisper.cpp and LLaMA.cpp I could make this a reality with an old spare laptop.

At this point ours just shows pictures.

It also lets amazon and contractors listen to you having sex, so not just the pictures.

It isn't really much of a stretch beyond mobile devices almost everyone uses when I think about it though. And you can't even really turn those off anymore.

Out of sheer curiosity, where are you personally drawing the line ?

No phone ? no computer ? no wi-fi ? no internet ? no electricity ? no neighbours ?

My line is no cloud-connected security cameras, no “always listening” smart speakers without offline processing. I have at least some control over my phone and computers. It helps that I don’t really see or understand the need for these devices, though.

Residential security cameras seem less common where I live (Australia) than in the US though. A couple of my friends have “smart” doorbells but I don’t think any have security cameras.

> I have at least some control over my phone and computers

Don't you also have control over your own security cameras ? (you bought them and set them there, they didn't fall from the sky)

I see it in the perspective of phone and computers to be also cloud-connected, always on, with potential camera and mic activated.

In risk management you have to look at the likelihood as well as the risk. A camera or mic attack are far less probable on my phone as you need many more failures / aligned holes in the Swiss cheese systemic risk model. Which is both by design (syncing your data unencrypted to cloud storage) and proven by the results - we see constant widespread data leaks from security cameras and the occasional one from smart speakers, and nothing comparable for iPhones or Windows PCs.

For the record I have “hey siri” turned off too, though I don’t consider it particularly risky.

I'm not sure Ring sells any devices meant to put INSIDE the home.

Doorbells are notoriously outside... although you can see who comes and goes or walks by.

https://ring.com/collections/indoor-security-cameras

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