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Comment by john-h-k | Hacker News Reader

Presumably they don’t secretly listen in to the user because it would be very inefficient, easily detectable (that’s huuuge network traffic and battery drain), and awful PR.

I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity

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> I thought the whole “your devices are listening to you in order to display ads” myth had fallen out of popularity

You mean the media stopped talking about it - it has no relation to whether it happens or not.

I just want to hear about this audio codec that’s so efficient that nobody has seen a single bit being sent.

Amazon literally invented the class of products that sit in your house and listen to you

Yeah of course they do the looped listening to pick up their wake sound. But extrapolating that to “constantly recording and sending that data to Amazon” without evidence is silly. Again, you’d be very easily able to see this just from network usage

Yeah it's more likely done the way ACR is done! https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1izq2oj/how_to_dis...

But tons of devices do listen. Go read the ToS for any modern hearing aid. They tell you directly that they do constant environment analysis and ship that data home.

If a hearing aid was genuinely sending everything it recorded back then it would run out of battery insanely fast. It would also have insanely high network usage

I do not believe it ships direct audio recording. It is analysis of the audio it processes (at least that is how I read it). Just because it sends lossy compressed data home (analysis output) instead of direct recordings does not mean it isn't listening.

It just seems really far fetched that thousands of Amazon employees are conspiring to commit an insanely obvious and illegal breach of privacy for data that isn’t even all that useful (hard to analyse, computationally expensive, low signal to noise ratio). And that no one has ever noticed this even when security researchers test these devices

Come on, the Alexa devices are designed to do what? They wake up on a keyword, perform some local analysis of the following data, and phone home on an encrypted channel on a regular basis.

You quite literally can't tell by watching one what it is doing. You certainly cannot verify that all Alexas are not doing something.

I don’t think Amazon have a vast conspiracy (that no one has whistleblown on!) of secretly & illegally recording audio for advertising. It would be difficult, require huge amounts of processing, probably not help very much, and be incredibly illegal. It wouldn’t give them much value and would be incredibly risky

> secretly & illegally recording audio for advertising

This is a bizarrely specific thing to attempt to counter argument with.

Seems like a stretch to equivocate hearing aid telemetry with smartphones or TVs secretly eavesdropping?

How would you even tell? - Even if you're some hardcore techie, all you'll see is that the TV periodically sends encrypted packets to some AWS IP address.'

Also 99% of people don't even know how to do this, and of those that do, 99% won't bother.

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