Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

> In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.

There's a risk here that we will talk-past one another while using different meanings of the same words, so let me offer a scenario:

AcmeTV has an isolated component which taps microphone input, records to a 5-second ring buffer, and on "Wakey-Wakey" triggers an alert flag. Assume it works perfectly accurately.

Would you accuse AcmeTV of "recording or collecting ambient conversations" on the basis of that component constantly reading microphone data?

Personally I wouldn't, because it's not the same kind of "recording" we consumers are concerned about.

View on HN

Later, AcmeTV has a 1MB lookup table of wake words that can be updated OTA. Whenever a wake word is detected, it triggers an alert flag with the device id, word id, and timestamp, and then broadcasts it out as high-frequency sound through the speakers.

Nearby, another AcmeTV or business partner device picks up the sound and sends it to AcmeHQ.

The former device "never transmits your viewing behavior to Acme". The latter device "never records your viewing behavior".

I endorse the cynicism, but I feel that's moving the goalposts a tad, from "good is impossible" to "good is improbable".

Or, in a heavily-paraphrased nutshell:

    Politician: "Watch-words are ALWAYS evil-mode. They have to be lying."
    Terr:       "No. Here's a watch-word which would be good-mode."
    Politician: "Well, it'll still *become* evil-mode, eventually."

Plus, if you keep expanding the scope for definitions of objectionable behavior like "recording", you'll quickly reach a point where it would basically apply to any SoC made in the last decade attached to a microphone/speaker. Thus watering down labels to the point of meaninglessness.

Which actually makes it easier for a future EvilTVCorp to get away with recording your conversations 24/7 in MP3 files sent to their server if cynical consumers assume every TV records you anyway, so what's the difference?

Hmm, I see your point but I wasn't actually disagreeing with your post. I was just pointing out how something that starts innocuous and defensible can quickly spiral into dark patterns when the lawyers are properly incentivized to cover things up.

I'd say the bigger issue is not the way it listens for the wake word, it's the recording and processing it does afterwards for a significantly long period of time, recording for much longer than people anticipated, and with a microphone that can pick up conversations from much further away or even behind walls.

This combines with two other dangers, one of unintended recordings when the wake word is triggered unintentionally, and one of intended recordings by third parties based on various other wake/watch words. They already have it in the T&C that they will share this data with law enforcement, so it's not that far fetched that these TVs and other appliances will spy on people in the home far more effectively than even the East German Stasi could have ever imagined.

> Assume it works perfectly accurately.

Well this is a silly assumption. Wake word false positives happen all the time. (“No Siri, I wasn’t talking to you…”)

Human wake word recognition isn't infallible, either. How often in your life did you respond because you thought somebody called your name and it wasn't actually the case?

I wrote that in to deter kinda-bad-faith responses, where someone tries to play at being an evil-genie, inserting unreasonable flaws into the gaps, like: "But what if it triggered all the time? On purpose!?"

The point is that ethical implementations do exist, and them working does not rely on anything close to perfection--so nitpicking that word isn't helpful.

Point taken. Let’s focus on the “ethical implementations do exist” part though. Let’s say a best possible implementation has 99% specificity. Then if it detects audio that has nothing to do with “LG” it mistakenly treats it as LG relevant 1% of the time. So if audio in my living room is 100x more likely to not be relevant for LG, then half of the audio data LG is receiving is not relevant. So what would an ethical specificity be? And what is actual state of the art?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com