• 4am@lemm.ee
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    10 hours ago

    With on-device processing, they don’t need to send audio. They can just send the text, which is infinitely smaller and easier to encrypt as “telemetry”. They’ve probably got logs of conversations in every Alexa household.

    • b1t@lemm.ee
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      10 hours ago

      This has always blown my mind. Watching people willingly allow Big Brother-esque devices into their home for very, very minor conveniences like turning on some gimmicky multi-colored light bulbs. Now they’re literally using home “security” cameras that store everything on some random cloud server. I’ll truly never understand.

      • deranger@sh.itjust.works
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        9 hours ago

        Why has no security researcher published evidence of these devices with microphones uploading random conversations? Nobody working on the inside has ever leaked anything regarding this potentially massive breach of privacy? A perfectly secret conspiracy by everyone involved?

        We know more about top secret NSA programs than we do about this proposed Alexa spy mechanism. None of the people working on this at Amazon have wanted to leak anything?

        I’m not saying it’s not possible, but it seems extremely improbable to me that everyone’s microphones are listening to their conversations, they’re being uploaded somewhere to serve them better ads, and absolutely nobody has leaked anything or found any evidence.

          • deranger@sh.itjust.works
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            7 hours ago

            Sure, but that’s not the commonly repeated conspiracy, even by non technical normal people, that everyone’s mics are listening all the time and they’re being used to serve you ads or whatever. The scale of this is not at all comparable to what I’m talking about. Yeah, I’m sure sometimes devices are inactivated inadvertently, those responses are uploaded, and people have listened to those recordings when they didn’t have permission. That is a far cry from all devices listening nearly all the time, using some surreptitious method to upload the data, and what was being recorded being used for some nefarious purpose.

            Again, I’m not excusing these devices for being a privacy nightmare, but I just think it’s extremely implausible that Alexa, Siri, Google, etc. are always listening and nobody has discovered a device uploading.

            The real privacy nightmare is that recording your conversations is completely unnecessary to build a richly detailed profile of you and your contacts. Regular old device / browser fingerprinting and a few people in your group sharing contacts with apps is enough for that, and it’s not a top secret conspiracy.

          • catloaf@lemm.ee
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            9 hours ago

            Per that article, it only happens when it thinks it’s been activated, and only when you opt in. Not much of a bombshell.

            • hungprocess@lemmy.sdf.org
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              8 hours ago

              Emphasis on “when it thinks”. Not much point to a privacy control that the device can just ignore for unspecified reasons, and they had 150+ instances of that occurring in this data set.

              • catloaf@lemm.ee
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                7 hours ago

                ~150 inadvertent activations is pretty low for the number of devices times however many years it spans.

                • Chulk@lemmy.ml
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                  6 hours ago

                  From the linked article

                  But VRT NWS said that 153 of the 1,000 recordings it listened to “were conversations that should never have been recorded and during which the command ‘OK Google’ was clearly not given.”

                  15% of the recordings these reporters listened to were “inadvertant.” I’d say that’s pretty high.

        • takeda@lemm.ee
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          9 hours ago

          Because if they would publish it, the other security experts would say “well, duh, that’s how it works”.

          It is just the average people that are unaware of it, or don’t seem to care.

          • deranger@sh.itjust.works
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            7 hours ago

            I’m not saying it’s not possible

            There is no argument from ignorance fallacy in what I said. I am not claiming these devices never send audio without you wanting because there’s no evidence to the contrary.

            However, the idea that everyone’s microphones are always listening, and that’s why you saw an ad for whatever after talking to your friend, yet not a single person has observed a device uploading this kind of data, nor has anyone ever leaked any kind of information on this supposed system, is extremely unlikely to be true in my opinion.

            They don’t need microphones to do this. Regular tracking is plenty to do a good job at suggesting you a highly relevant ad, and frequency illusion does the rest. You’re not noticing the thousand times you see ads that are irrelevant to whatever you were talking about, but the one time you do notice really sticks out.

            Frankly there are plenty of more concerning ways of violating our privacy that are out in the open that I believe are a much higher priority than mics always recording, of which there is no evidence for.

            • b1t@lemm.ee
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              7 hours ago

              If no proof is offered (in either direction), then the proposition can be called unproven, undecided, inconclusive, an open problem or a conjecture.

              Stating that you don’t think that it’s possible is irrelevant. It’s either happening or it isn’t. True or false. P or ¬P.

              is extremely unlikely to be true in my opinion.

              Is an argument from ignorance. Not trying to be rude, but this is basic logic.

            • b1t@lemm.ee
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              9 hours ago

              Yeah, but it’s rooted and running a custom ROM ;)

      • loie@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        I mean… I 100% agree, and yet you and I and everyone reading this are carrying around a phone that can do the exact same shit

        • Ulrich@feddit.org
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          5 hours ago

          I am not, thank you very much. Even if I wasn’t, you can simply disable the wake word. And you can go into your account and see/listen to any recordings it has made to verify that it has stopped listening.

        • b1t@lemm.ee
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          9 hours ago

          This is why jailbreaking/rooting your phone is so important.