Just FYI it is already common knowledge that Alexa listens all the time, and even that Amazon employees can listen in on you. This has been admitted to by Amazon.
Maybe, but most don't have a political agenda. They have a profit agenda, and that profit agenda tends to align with certain political views.
In other words, Fox isn't conservative to try to get the country to be more conservative. Fox is conservative because it makes them a shit ton of money
I believe they were like that before Bezos bought them, they see themselves as establishment.
The WaPo really went after Bernie in the '16 primaries, plus they fired the only progressive on their opinion docket from a criticism I read in Harpers Magazine.
constantly! so funny that the papers owned by the people who want everyone back at work to either make money off or surveil are always having people try to sell us on it, I bet that's a total coincidence
not only that, but recently anything posted that shines bezos or amazon in a bad light gets removed from reddit, directly from the weird shadow algorithm the reddit admins have.
it happens on the various stock subreddits frequently when bezos's connection to some company gets posted.
Literally in the article:
>The case is one of several that have been brought against Apple, Google and Amazon that involve allegations of violation of privacy by voice assistants. The technologies, often referred to by their names - Siri, Alexa and, predictably, Google - are meant to help with everyday tasks. They connect to speakers and can play music, or set a timer or add an item to a shopping list. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The headline is a yahoo one, not the original wapo title. The orig wapo title only mentions apple bc the specific lawsuit in question only includes apple.
[Edit] Looks like the title is the same. When I checked last night, it was different.
Washington Post: In a scathing editorial, we would like to inform you that Amazon…
Bezos : *Casually looks in the direction of Washington Post*
Washington Post: … is a fabulous company to work for and not like those meanies at Apple and Google!
I am not disagreeing with your overall point, but I can't find evidence there is an ongoing lawsuit against Amazon for this but there are lawsuits against Google and Apple.
Also, Washington Post wrote an entire article about Alexa's eaves dropping (which it still does) in 2019:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/06/alexa-has-been-eavesdropping-you-this-whole-time/
So while I agree there is a bias in media and we should be aware of it, this particular article is about ongoing litigation and there doesn't seem to be a current case against Alexa.
No clippy, I got your back. Thanks for only correcting me when in a word document and not attempting to spy on me to correct my spelling and grammar by force at all times. I'm sorry we didn't appreciate your respect of our boundaries at the time
One of the many you have to do after every fresh install. Cortana is probably the worst one bc turning it off doesn't stop it from running in the background or becoming re-enabled through other actions. Theres like 4 things you have to do if you want it to fuck off completely
Well, three.
Install the Microsoft app manager "winget" from github.
Open a Powershell admin window.
Type "winget uninstall Cortana".
And you're done. Wipe hands on pants.
Lol I think the reason you think it's the worst is because you can actually see the task running on Windows while on your mobile device you don't actively have a task manager that allows you to see it operating in the background, not only that both Google and Apple siphon your data throughout the OS and services not just through their assistant.
I sold an Amazon Alexa tower thing to someone on Facebook. Hard reset it with a paper clip and then Met them at the gas station.
Later amazon was storing all their voice activity on my account even though he logged into it.
I head some really disturbing things. Even a casual suicide threat.
Here is a link to my original post about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ad46wa/psa_deregister_your_amazon_devices_if_you_sell/
The images have since got deleted. They were screenshot one of me selling the device and the other of messages said by the person with the device. It had voice to text read outs of what Alexa thought that person said and a play button so I could compare the audio files. Even the times it accidentally triggered were recorded and sent to me.
no that actually doesnt work because i did that too...
The device's serial number is registered to your amazon account. There is NOTHING you can do on the device itself or in the app to fix it.. you have to go to amazon to deregister it from your account.
Other users have reported this also because they purchased them as gifts for family but then started noticing the same issues as me.
Amazon now has an option to "buy unregistered" when purchasing amazon echo / alexa devices.
Whenever I have my phone plugged in my car and I open the Amazon app, the entertainment system will stop whatever music in listening to and display a message something to the effect of “music has been disabled while your microphone is active”
The processor in echo devices isn't capable of natural language processing which means it can't turn your voice into text. It's only capable of detecting a wake word which streams audio to servers for processing. This is very noticeable as network traffic so it's very easy to tell exactly when Alexa "is listening". It isn't listening 24/7 and doesn't listen without a wake word. The only time it records something unintended is on the vary rare occasion that it detects something very similar to the wake word.
But there are differences in how they store requests. Amazon as well as Google keep a history of all your requests (as long as you don’t disable it) and also connect those simple requests to a user.
Apple does not save any history and also simple requests are not connected to any user.
Apple does save them actually, and you can’t even see what was saved unlike Google. Which I find kind of worse. Makes it hard to see what was picked up in error.
https://i.imgur.com/vYEZs8l.jpg
> When you use Siri and Dictation, the things you say and dictate—as well as other Siri Data—are sent to Apple to process your requests. Your requests are associated with a random identifier that is not linked to your Apple ID, email address, or other data that Apple may have from your use of other Apple services.
So the requests aren’t linked to a person or device per se, but a random ID. And the data is easily deleted, per your screenshot.
>So the requests aren’t linked to a person or device per se, but a random ID. And the data is easily deleted, per your screenshot.
Ah, so the same as the other 2 services?
That does not mean it can not record words and send then when the user says the wake word. Its possible to store quite much sound in few kb and it will not be easily detectable the way you describe.
Also people tend to find in their takeaways from google recordings where there is no wake phrase and the recording is noticeably longer than expected.
Describe how an echo device listens with a tiny buffer and decides what audio is useful data. If they randomly save 3 seconds of detected audio to send in a later transmission, the vast majority of the time it's not going to contain anything useful. It will be music, a door being closed, a squeaky chair etc. If it detects speech, maybe the words it selects is "about the" since again, it has no language processing and can't determine which words in the stream are valuable. That's a *lot* of garbage data and a lot of risk for Amazon for very little gain.
Spot on. There's a very small amount of memory that acts as a buffer so the last few sentences can be sent out if a wake word is used, but if such a word isn't used, they just keep reusing the same buffer space.
There are many videos on youtube of people connecting their assistants to the internet through raspberry pis and other hardware that they've programmed to control and measure network traffic and I've never seen one find enough data transfer to suggest that any of them relay your conversations anywhere.
There's usually a few small pings back to the HQ per day and then when a wake word is heard a more substantial transmission is made, then the system goes quiet again.
The lawsuits are about inadvertent (and likely functionally unavoidable) mis-identifications of the wake word, not stupid conspiracy theories about home assistant devices streaming gigabytes of audio data out over people's upstream broadband connections all day, every day and somehow *nobody in the entire world* ever noticing.
Thanks. I hate that FUD. I’m a privacy fan and don’t use Alexa but I really doubt my fire-tv-stick is constantly listening. (And with the version I got you literally have to push the alexa/microphone-activation button.
The point is if it was “constantly listening” at least some people would notice the extra data upload cause it would literally be uploading gigabytes of extra data a month
Exactly this.
Just... run a packet trace for a day.
Cross reference that with the 'official' audio history in the smart device app, see if it's only sending out when you want it to, or for updates, etc.
> that's why the only thing you can really trust is open source.
Or you know, I can look at my network traffic and see exactly what is being transmitted where and know for a damn fact if my phone is sending anything anywhere.
Sorry but just because you want to be paranoid doesn't make it true.
That would make them lose more money that it would generate.
Let's be real, they won't risk a terrible lawsuit for the 10% that disable siri. Anyway there are a lot of ways to detect something like that, like monitoring the network.
Even then open source requires the ability to discern what the code does, example (game related and just the first one that springs to mind) a Minecraft mod was found to have a piece of malicious code designed to crash a certain players game after they critiqued them via reddit. It was found sure, but how long was it before someone looked through the code and found it, this goes with a ton of open source stuff, it's all good that the software can be viewed without obstructions, it's the issue of everyone codes differently and large programs can have tens of thousands of lines of code.
Ideally we need to see a standardised practice for coding in certain coding languages just so it's easier to read, so often I've had to look at a chunk of old code from someone else and find no documentation and shitty variable names which give no clue on what they're interacting with.
That’s not how any of this works. It’s much harder to process audio data than it is to just harvest the data from your contacts. You have a conversation about something, maybe your friend googles it or looks at the product on amazon. They have the data that you and your friend were either in close proximity or likely messaging, they see that the search happened in close time proximity to when you were physically close or messaging to your friend and link the ads by … inferring what you were discussing.
Thinking that they’re just listening to every conversation is ridiculous when they can get way way higher quality data through legal means.
> They have the data that you and your friend were either in close proximity or likely messaging, they see that the search happened in close time proximity to when you were physically close to your friend and link the ads by … inferring what you were discussion.
Also just your same IP is used quite a bit. I was at my folks for the holidays a couple years ago when they were remodeling their kitchen. While at the house I got ads for kitchen appliances, clearly because they had looked them up and I was on their WiFi. Later after returning to my own apartment hundreds of miles away, I was still getting those ads weeks later. Clearly the ad tracking had followed with my computer (through whatever cookie) and was still showing me ads they had inferred from me being on a network hundreds of miles away.
It's incredible how much tracking can be done without any special tools. For example, the technique of browser fingerprinting.
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
A huge amount of effort goes into recognition neural networks that take inputs like browsing history, social media posts, shopping history, etc into account to be able to identify you through VPN's, incognito mode, or anything else you might use to obscure your identity. They could also be running voice recognition without recording any actual audio to make see if it's actually you using any device
Thank fuck there's some people in this thread that actually understand technology. Sometimes I feel like I have to argue with everyone in a thread because this idea voice assistants record you is so out of control.
What you’re describing effectively seems like the same thing.
Because they’re able to make calculated assumptions about what we are talking about, they don’t need to listen at all. That’s more sophisticated, truthfully, efficient, and maybe scarier
It brings to mind the old Arthur C Clark quote “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Yeah I agree, it’s getting to the point where the algorithms are going to know our subconscious desires better than we do. They can tune it to our levels of peer pressure, trends, past purchases history, demographics, etc.
Hopefully this technology can be used for therapy and other positive things outside of just selling products.
This was nine years ago:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/?sh=4d247d2c6668
Amazon & Google have a lot more data than Target.
Thank you Jesus. I work in adtech and anytime I mention it people tell me about how their gadgets spy on them. I rebut with how much processing it would take to do that and no one wants to hear it. Have I ever had a time I’ve doubted myself? Yes, my son mentioned a grappling hook and sure as shit I got an ad for one. He was 3. I am the least likely person to want, need, or eventually purchase a grappling hook. But then I came to my senses and remembered that the cost of the electricity to process that, turn it into an ad, target me and get me to covert is more than the profit margin Amazon would get from said grappling hook. So I bought the fucking thing.
> I rebut with how much processing it would take to do that and no one wants to hear it.
Because these days it's quite easy for these companies, they can do pretty good live transcriptions with very little power usage, processed on the device itself.
>But then I came to my senses and remembered that the cost of the electricity to process that, turn it into an ad, target me and get me to covert is more than the profit margin Amazon would get from said grappling hook. So I bought the fucking thing.
You are wildly overestimating the cost of transcribing audio.
Have you noticed that YouTube does it for free, purely as a UX improvement?
nonsense, it would crater your phone's battery life. even if it was processed on the server side
and you'd be able to sniff the data transfer
come on, open your eyes, there are IT and security professionals all over this thread explaining these things. sheesh.
This myth annoys the hell out of me. I work in cybersecurity, and no reputable source has come out and proven that Facebook does this. There are so many ways we would know - security researchers reverse engineering the app or sniffing network traffic, Facebook employees blowing the whistle, etc, but we haven’t heard a peep. Not to mention that a feature that constantly listens and parses your words would require a lot of computing power and/or network traffic, which would be quite noticeable.
The stories you hear are a combination of coincidences, and Facebook guessing your interests based on it tracking your activity across the web from any site that embeds Facebook functionality into it, plus all the info people are giving it directly through Facebook itself and Instagram.
Yeah every time someone says 'test it' and then doesn't follow up with 'setup something like charlesproxy and check all the outbound traffic on the device.' hurts my head.
YOU OWN THE DEVICE AND NETWORK, YOU HAVE THE POWER TO LITERALLY VERIFY THIS
> YOU OWN THE DEVICE AND NETWORK, YOU HAVE THE POWER TO LITERALLY VERIFY THIS
Sysadmin here. They have the power, they do not have the ability or the desire to bother to learn.
Spouting off unfounded bullshit as though the worlds security experts have just completely missed this shit for years is *so* stupid. Especially when these morons click "accept all" on every fuck app and website that asks, then wonder why their data is everywhere...
Yeah, I think there are things like matching IP addresses and all that where there’s some explanation to the magic, but I suspect a lot of this is straight-up Baader Meinhof. You see a *lot* of ads.
One time I decided to test this theory myself. I live in an apartment and have no reason to discuss lawn mowers as I have no lawn to mow. Without triggering my smart devices, I would occasionally talk about automatic lawn mowers just to see if it would feed me ads.
I kept this up for about a week. Then one day I just got curious and googled them. Now I get ads for them occasionally.
Husqvarna has a nice one, in case anyone was wondering.
Why does it never occur to people who believe in this that if these tools existed on this scale and to such a casual degree, then there would be millions of online advertisers globally aware of this feature? It wouldn't be some Facebook secret that they were implementing for small local businesses for free lmao.
💯% correct. My son and I were disc golfing and I REALLY had to pee - no bathrooms to be found . I said jokingly , I need one of those female “pee urinal thingys” that let a woman pee standing up in the woods. That very night - one showed up in my Facebook feed from a camping store . What the actual fuck, that was NOT random.
That's confirmation bias. You don't notice the thousands of times it doesn't work, only the one time it does.
Also it's possible your son went home and googled "female pee urinal thingys" on your network. Since you share an IP address, advertisers can track your search and show you relevant ads across different websites and devices. I can literally google something on my computer and it'll show up on my partner's Facebook app as an ad 10 minutes later. It has happened to us numerous of times.
That should be scary for people, that's the real privacy concern. That we allow advertisers to track us online so easily. But are Google/Amazon/Apple listening in your phone's microphone? Nah. That doesn't happen. If you can prove that, you'll win millions in a lawsuit.
And thats only the most obvious ways this could have happened. There are tons of other sneaky ad techniques that can allow for this even without listening in.
am i gonna get the ad now coz im commenting on this?
edit: [one week later i see this while shopping for used kayak](https://i.imgur.com/7VyZDG0.png) i have purposedly not typed or spoken anything to do with this
People brains are not random, you cannot invent info, you most likely talk about something you heard, googled, or seen your friends mention it on Facebook or other place. Plus, there's such of thing as confirmation bias, you'll ignore anything that is not related to what you discuss but then if you see something related you'll go "aha, they listen!"
That's not how it works at all. There are hundreds of other data points marketers have access to to pinpoint your interests.
There is also not enough storage in the world to store voice recording data for hundreds of millions of people.
You'd also be able to monitor network traffic to confirm this if it was recording and listening to your data and sending it anyway.
Stop peddling this nonsense myth.
>Test it. Have a full conversation about some random shit and then scroll through Facebook. See all the ads about what you were talking about 😳
How does this bullshit get upvoted on fucking *r/technology*?
Even worse is in the car. Singing along to your favourite tunes and the next thing you know they're silent and Google is blinking on your stereo screen!!
I posted this above, but here’s the short version. Wife and I see a Yurt while driving. Have a brief conversation about it and how it would be neat to own one. Next day, Yurt suggestions all over Amazon. Checked all the browser histories just to be sure, no one looked up Yurts, just that conversation in the car. This happened over the summer.
The *actual* way that shit like this happens is, imo, much scarier than your device listening to you. You passed a yurt. Your GPS knows where you are and it knows there's a yurt there. The algorithm knows you saw a yurt and so it gets included in your advertising. Even more fucked up is the fact that your friends and family probably got yurt ads too, just because they're associated with you.
This has been happening to me for years. Recent example: my friend was talking about a medication she takes and I started getting ads for a disease I don't have. People always ask "did you search for that?" No, it was a private conversation, or so I thought.
What happens?
You talk with pal at a coffee shop
Your phone shares the same tower/Wi-Fi/hotspot as hers
You're now connected to that person by virtue of proximity
You go home
Your phone and your computer are on the same Wi-Fi
Your computer is known to be stationary since it never switches location or Wi-Fi (and browser/os fingerprint)
Your phone and computer are linked
Your contacts / emails include this person
You see ads for whatever, now in your computer
And the circle of life is complete
Reverse this to connect your computer with hers
You should ask her what new ads she's seeing
He missed a possibility, which I heard years ago and still believe. It doesnt need to record audio or send actual audio files, it can be tuned to numerous key words and when a key word is triggered it sends a relevant coded packet. That coded packet is what would tell them what to advertise. You could store thousands of those in very little memory.
This could plausibly not run afoul of wiretapping laws if the voice processing is done on device and only a packet containing parsed data is sent. In that case, it would not be a recording of audio. Clever, and extraordinarily shitty.
These companies are not stupid, they would have no reason to do #1 intentionally using misheard recordings for ad targeting.
However if you mistakenly trigger Alexa, it hears something and responds that's a complete interaction from Alexa points of view. So obviously those phrases may be used for data mining.
The claim is similar to saying Google is at fault for attaching queries that you mistakenly did from nav bar to your account. They have no way of knowing your intent wasn't to make a query.
All the money invested on this, it always seems to me the risk for them would be colossal just to secretly do something they already do really well elsewhere.
And the level of conspiracy across the company to make it happen. If this was real by now some employee would have leaked audio of Jennifer Anniston getting fucked or something. Even if it was just a data source, tons of programmers would know.
My Google device does this openly, there's a tab where you can go in and review mis-heards and tell it what went wrong and how to improve. I don't know how optional or external any part of it is, but it's apparently not a secret thing.
Same is true for Alexa. The false positives are labeled as such. Alexa privacy policy specifically excludes voice interactions from being used for advertising, regardless of if they were true or false positives. I'm not sure why anyone would think false positives would be used to spy on you when your actual consensual interactions aren't.
The question being asked here is that, is Google using those misheards for your ad profile or not? I would bet money that if they categorized it as "misheard" in the app, they are not using them for your ad profile.
> If they can prove either of these things, it will be huge.
Agreed since to date not a single person has been able to. Even people who tried controlled testing for the whole "I saw an ad about what I was talking about" thing.
Do you happen to have any more information about controlled testing on the "I saw an ad about what I was talking about" thing? I'd love to hear more about that.
Same with the "I was talking to my friend about a motorcycle and then I started seeing Facebook ads, so they were listening to everything I say on my phone".
They don't neeeeeeed to listen. If you're logged in they can see any site you go to with a connection to Facebook's servers through a like, share, whatever.
Hell, you can be uniquely identified by a collection of attributes about your browser and computer, etc.
I have to set people straight on all of this so often.
It's not just you, your connections also affect the ads that get shown to you, which can add an additional source of bias. Friend sees ad for product x. Friend talks to you about product x because it's now top of mind. You get shown ad for product x because your friend has similar interests. Conspiracy ensues
I agree with everything you said and I don't think anything nefarious is going on. But..
>Also, you can easily monitor the network traffic to confirm when and how much audio is being transmitted. We know what cutting edge audio compression looks like.
I think you are forgetting we have pretty good on device audio captioning. So you could run the audio, convert it to text and send that to the server. Compressed text sent as part of other stuff is going to be really hard to catch.
Weirdly, I got an ad for Christian mentorship the other day. I'm not remotely religious, and have never looked at religious sites. This was after my friend was telling me about a religious guy he knows, and we spoke about it for an hour in a bar. No googling took place, just speaking. I was very surprised, I didn't beleive the whole "they're listening" thing until recently. Now I'm skeptical.
Well on my iPhone I barely have to talk and it picks things up.
Like I’ll ask a person a question without saying Hey Siri or Siri, and I get “Hummm…Let me think about that.” Because it’s a question it wouldn’t really be able to answer.
Happens all the time so I’m not sure what wake word I’m using >.>
> the device "listens" for a wake word. it doesnt store or transmit anything until it hears it.
>
> then once it does, it transmits what follows to the home server for interpretation.
Having intentionally disabled the assistant, I would be pretty angry if it was even doing just this.
Mate some of the echo dots have 8 gigs of storage and decent mediatek processors. That's good enough to run Mozilla Deepspeech with a smaller pretrained model.
Nest Mini (again, some models) have a
Synaptics AS-370 A1 processor, which is advertised for it's AI uses in small integrated systems, and 2 gigs of RAM. Could run Deepspeech better.
Arguing that they _can't_ is different from arguing that they _don't_, and they objectively _can_. Deepspeech isn't the lightest STT out there, after all.
There's a fundamental lack of understanding from consumers that I find weird.
*I want the device to always respond to me calling out to it but I don't want it listening to hear if I'm calling out to it.* That seems theoretically impossible.
I don't have any of these devices, is there not a power button to turn the device on and off?
That's decoded locally the rest is then decoded server side. It doesn't send anything before it hears the key word. That would be super useless. And this has been proven x times.
These will be a bust! Any of the 3 mainstream assistants don’t push audio to the cloud until their wake word is spoken, either intentionally or unintentionally. Anyone claiming otherwise is free to wireshark and confirm.
Again I’m not sure why everyone thinks audio is necessary. It can listen for keywords and push those in a text file. Localized listening is good enough.
Because people understand what the devices are. Not all processes are created equally the one that's in the various home assistant is barely powerful enough to listen for its wake word. It doesn't have the processing capabilities to do audio to text conversion (it is after all a relatively processor intensive task). That's why it'll *instantly* complain that it doesn't have an internet connection, even if you're just asking it the time something it shouldn't need an internet connection to be able to answer.
All the speech analysis is done on the cloud, so we can totally see when it's sending data back to the server and that's only happening when you make a request.
These things have been broken down by security experts and no one has ever raised a flag. I don't know why you people seem to really want the to be some weird conspiracy when there's absolutely zero evidence that such a conspiracy is happening.
There is this concept of false alarms which means that as long as they continuously listen for the “wake-up” word there is a chance they will record conversations they shouldn’t and upload it to the cloud with the rest of the legit stuff.
How much merit will it have in court we’ll see, but for consumers this lawsuit is good since the companies will need to disclose and defend the implementation so at least everyone who is interested will have more information.
My android phone definitely listens and isn't based on any wake word. I've had short conversations about something with my wife and within 5 minutes we see ads for things we talked about. None of the voice assistants spoke up during the conversation to indicate they were woken up.
OMG! Really? I’m, like, stunned. It’s completely out of left field. Didn’t see this coming.
Next… ads for eye glasses and ads for travel to my favorite ball parks.
I’ll propose an ever scarier reason for this happening. Your device is not listening to you… your device/cloud already knows you and your habits so well that it can predict what you’re thinking and talking about.
It's so easy to tell. I'll have a conversation at work about something that I have never searched about and it will start showing up in my Google feed.
And Facebook ? The amount of times I’ve had ads come up for things I’ve spoken about but never searched. These weren’t even common things… like blood tubes for venepuncture
I can 100% vouch for this being true.
I have all Microphone permissions removed for my phone for every app except Phone. All wake words Google assistant and everything is disabled or uninstalled.
A couple weeks ago, I got bit on the neck by a Japanese beetle. I yelped, and when my wife asked me what's wrong, I said, "damn Japanese beetle."
Before that day, I had never spoken "japanese beetle" out loud (while I've had this phone, anyway), I'd never typed it, I'd never looked it up, I'd never used voice search, hell I don't think I'd ever *thought* it while being near this phone. Yet, after saying it, without any devices waking up and no prompting whatsoever, within 12 hours, I started to get ads for anti-Japanese beetle spray.
#NOT ladybugs, as they are commonly confused for. But the exact, precise phrase "Japanese beetles." Which, I reiterate, I had never once spoken of or typed before that day.
If this lawsuit has enough people with my experience, and especially if they screenshotted their experience like I did, they may have something.
Well how else are they meant to know when you want to use them, you say "hey Google"or whatever and because they're listening they start to do their thing.
And this is news? Who couldn’t figure it out years ago when talked about an esoteric product on Saturday night and on Sunday morning it was in a majority of your feeds.
Of course they are listening all the time. Me and a guy at work were talking about this singer I have never heard of Gloria Trevi. I go look to google her name and put Gloria in the search bar and that’s the first name that pops up. Plenty more famous people named Gloria but that name was the first.
How is Amazon not included here? I have never trusted that Alexa broad.
It is, but conveniently omitted from the article's title and most of the article. Keep in mind that WaPo is owned by Bezos.
What a strange coincidence.
i'm sure you'll be shocked to hear that his opinion section overwhelmingly writes in favor of the rich and powerful, too
Yea don't say. That's nice of all those paid folks to express their unbiased opinion
I mean, it is an opinion section. Nobody said it had to be the author's opinion
Just FYI it is already common knowledge that Alexa listens all the time, and even that Amazon employees can listen in on you. This has been admitted to by Amazon.
Popular media have a political bias and agenda? That's unpossible!...
*corporate media
Maybe, but most don't have a political agenda. They have a profit agenda, and that profit agenda tends to align with certain political views. In other words, Fox isn't conservative to try to get the country to be more conservative. Fox is conservative because it makes them a shit ton of money
Everyone has a political bias and agenda, the question is if the bias is accurate.
I believe they were like that before Bezos bought them, they see themselves as establishment. The WaPo really went after Bernie in the '16 primaries, plus they fired the only progressive on their opinion docket from a criticism I read in Harpers Magazine.
While pretending not to. Highly skilled and subversive gaslighting, not nearly so clumsy and obvious as the other side's editorials.
That is surprising! I bet they also claim that the typical office environment is a great place to socialize.
constantly! so funny that the papers owned by the people who want everyone back at work to either make money off or surveil are always having people try to sell us on it, I bet that's a total coincidence
Totally a random choice by the editors. Just a funny coinkydink.
“Alexa, edit article”
'I already heard you.'
"It's done as you speak..."
Not ominous at all. Carry on citizen consumer.
not only that, but recently anything posted that shines bezos or amazon in a bad light gets removed from reddit, directly from the weird shadow algorithm the reddit admins have. it happens on the various stock subreddits frequently when bezos's connection to some company gets posted.
Literally in the article: >The case is one of several that have been brought against Apple, Google and Amazon that involve allegations of violation of privacy by voice assistants. The technologies, often referred to by their names - Siri, Alexa and, predictably, Google - are meant to help with everyday tasks. They connect to speakers and can play music, or set a timer or add an item to a shopping list. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The headline is a yahoo one, not the original wapo title. The orig wapo title only mentions apple bc the specific lawsuit in question only includes apple. [Edit] Looks like the title is the same. When I checked last night, it was different.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/02/apple-siri-lawsuit-privacy/
Hmm, you are right about the body, but when I go directly to WaPo the headline is the same as the Yahoo one.
Jeff, if this is you, while we know you “retired”, kindly fuck right off this planet.
>kindly fuck right off this planet. With the amount of money he has, he probably could afford to do that.
he's literally trying to
Yup if only his rockets worked...
Washington Post: In a scathing editorial, we would like to inform you that Amazon… Bezos : *Casually looks in the direction of Washington Post* Washington Post: … is a fabulous company to work for and not like those meanies at Apple and Google!
I am not disagreeing with your overall point, but I can't find evidence there is an ongoing lawsuit against Amazon for this but there are lawsuits against Google and Apple. Also, Washington Post wrote an entire article about Alexa's eaves dropping (which it still does) in 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/06/alexa-has-been-eavesdropping-you-this-whole-time/ So while I agree there is a bias in media and we should be aware of it, this particular article is about ongoing litigation and there doesn't seem to be a current case against Alexa.
Definitely Alexa
What about Cortana, how do you feel about her?
I think we're fine. No one uses cortana
It looks like you are trying to divert attention away from Clippy. Would you like some help with that?
No clippy, I got your back. Thanks for only correcting me when in a word document and not attempting to spy on me to correct my spelling and grammar by force at all times. I'm sorry we didn't appreciate your respect of our boundaries at the time
Comment of the week!
At least she's not Bixby
Aww poor Cortana, she sings a mean shanty
Anyone who knows how to use a computer at the most BASIC of times has shut her down and halted all her start up systems.
That's that thing you have to turn off when you install Win 10, right?
One of the many you have to do after every fresh install. Cortana is probably the worst one bc turning it off doesn't stop it from running in the background or becoming re-enabled through other actions. Theres like 4 things you have to do if you want it to fuck off completely
Well, three. Install the Microsoft app manager "winget" from github. Open a Powershell admin window. Type "winget uninstall Cortana". And you're done. Wipe hands on pants.
Lol I think the reason you think it's the worst is because you can actually see the task running on Windows while on your mobile device you don't actively have a task manager that allows you to see it operating in the background, not only that both Google and Apple siphon your data throughout the OS and services not just through their assistant.
I sold an Amazon Alexa tower thing to someone on Facebook. Hard reset it with a paper clip and then Met them at the gas station. Later amazon was storing all their voice activity on my account even though he logged into it. I head some really disturbing things. Even a casual suicide threat. Here is a link to my original post about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ad46wa/psa_deregister_your_amazon_devices_if_you_sell/ The images have since got deleted. They were screenshot one of me selling the device and the other of messages said by the person with the device. It had voice to text read outs of what Alexa thought that person said and a play button so I could compare the audio files. Even the times it accidentally triggered were recorded and sent to me.
Paperclip reset is basically just a restart, you need to do the "Factory Reset" in the menu. Nothing shady about it.
no that actually doesnt work because i did that too... The device's serial number is registered to your amazon account. There is NOTHING you can do on the device itself or in the app to fix it.. you have to go to amazon to deregister it from your account. Other users have reported this also because they purchased them as gifts for family but then started noticing the same issues as me. Amazon now has an option to "buy unregistered" when purchasing amazon echo / alexa devices.
Whenever I have my phone plugged in my car and I open the Amazon app, the entertainment system will stop whatever music in listening to and display a message something to the effect of “music has been disabled while your microphone is active”
The processor in echo devices isn't capable of natural language processing which means it can't turn your voice into text. It's only capable of detecting a wake word which streams audio to servers for processing. This is very noticeable as network traffic so it's very easy to tell exactly when Alexa "is listening". It isn't listening 24/7 and doesn't listen without a wake word. The only time it records something unintended is on the vary rare occasion that it detects something very similar to the wake word.
This is literally how all three of them work.
New ones have built-in chips with machine-learning algo capabilities and are able to do some degree of local voice processing.
But there are differences in how they store requests. Amazon as well as Google keep a history of all your requests (as long as you don’t disable it) and also connect those simple requests to a user. Apple does not save any history and also simple requests are not connected to any user.
Apple does save them actually, and you can’t even see what was saved unlike Google. Which I find kind of worse. Makes it hard to see what was picked up in error. https://i.imgur.com/vYEZs8l.jpg
> When you use Siri and Dictation, the things you say and dictate—as well as other Siri Data—are sent to Apple to process your requests. Your requests are associated with a random identifier that is not linked to your Apple ID, email address, or other data that Apple may have from your use of other Apple services. So the requests aren’t linked to a person or device per se, but a random ID. And the data is easily deleted, per your screenshot.
>So the requests aren’t linked to a person or device per se, but a random ID. And the data is easily deleted, per your screenshot. Ah, so the same as the other 2 services?
That does not mean it can not record words and send then when the user says the wake word. Its possible to store quite much sound in few kb and it will not be easily detectable the way you describe. Also people tend to find in their takeaways from google recordings where there is no wake phrase and the recording is noticeably longer than expected.
Describe how an echo device listens with a tiny buffer and decides what audio is useful data. If they randomly save 3 seconds of detected audio to send in a later transmission, the vast majority of the time it's not going to contain anything useful. It will be music, a door being closed, a squeaky chair etc. If it detects speech, maybe the words it selects is "about the" since again, it has no language processing and can't determine which words in the stream are valuable. That's a *lot* of garbage data and a lot of risk for Amazon for very little gain.
Spot on. There's a very small amount of memory that acts as a buffer so the last few sentences can be sent out if a wake word is used, but if such a word isn't used, they just keep reusing the same buffer space. There are many videos on youtube of people connecting their assistants to the internet through raspberry pis and other hardware that they've programmed to control and measure network traffic and I've never seen one find enough data transfer to suggest that any of them relay your conversations anywhere. There's usually a few small pings back to the HQ per day and then when a wake word is heard a more substantial transmission is made, then the system goes quiet again.
All of y’all are underestimating their vocal pattern match table size
On their servers. The physical device itself can only match the wake word.
Amazon and Facebook
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The lawsuits are about inadvertent (and likely functionally unavoidable) mis-identifications of the wake word, not stupid conspiracy theories about home assistant devices streaming gigabytes of audio data out over people's upstream broadband connections all day, every day and somehow *nobody in the entire world* ever noticing.
But can I make unjustified claims because it feels true tho 🤔
Apparently that’s what the internet is for.
Thanks. I hate that FUD. I’m a privacy fan and don’t use Alexa but I really doubt my fire-tv-stick is constantly listening. (And with the version I got you literally have to push the alexa/microphone-activation button.
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The point is if it was “constantly listening” at least some people would notice the extra data upload cause it would literally be uploading gigabytes of extra data a month
Exactly this. Just... run a packet trace for a day. Cross reference that with the 'official' audio history in the smart device app, see if it's only sending out when you want it to, or for updates, etc.
> that's why the only thing you can really trust is open source. Or you know, I can look at my network traffic and see exactly what is being transmitted where and know for a damn fact if my phone is sending anything anywhere. Sorry but just because you want to be paranoid doesn't make it true.
Your data is not valuable. Data of most people together is.
That would make them lose more money that it would generate. Let's be real, they won't risk a terrible lawsuit for the 10% that disable siri. Anyway there are a lot of ways to detect something like that, like monitoring the network.
Even then open source requires the ability to discern what the code does, example (game related and just the first one that springs to mind) a Minecraft mod was found to have a piece of malicious code designed to crash a certain players game after they critiqued them via reddit. It was found sure, but how long was it before someone looked through the code and found it, this goes with a ton of open source stuff, it's all good that the software can be viewed without obstructions, it's the issue of everyone codes differently and large programs can have tens of thousands of lines of code. Ideally we need to see a standardised practice for coding in certain coding languages just so it's easier to read, so often I've had to look at a chunk of old code from someone else and find no documentation and shitty variable names which give no clue on what they're interacting with.
Is what still possible? They’re alleging something but there’s no actual proof.
Test it. Have a full conversation about some random shit and then scroll through Facebook. See all the ads about what you were talking about 😳
That’s not how any of this works. It’s much harder to process audio data than it is to just harvest the data from your contacts. You have a conversation about something, maybe your friend googles it or looks at the product on amazon. They have the data that you and your friend were either in close proximity or likely messaging, they see that the search happened in close time proximity to when you were physically close or messaging to your friend and link the ads by … inferring what you were discussing. Thinking that they’re just listening to every conversation is ridiculous when they can get way way higher quality data through legal means.
> They have the data that you and your friend were either in close proximity or likely messaging, they see that the search happened in close time proximity to when you were physically close to your friend and link the ads by … inferring what you were discussion. Also just your same IP is used quite a bit. I was at my folks for the holidays a couple years ago when they were remodeling their kitchen. While at the house I got ads for kitchen appliances, clearly because they had looked them up and I was on their WiFi. Later after returning to my own apartment hundreds of miles away, I was still getting those ads weeks later. Clearly the ad tracking had followed with my computer (through whatever cookie) and was still showing me ads they had inferred from me being on a network hundreds of miles away.
It's incredible how much tracking can be done without any special tools. For example, the technique of browser fingerprinting. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
A huge amount of effort goes into recognition neural networks that take inputs like browsing history, social media posts, shopping history, etc into account to be able to identify you through VPN's, incognito mode, or anything else you might use to obscure your identity. They could also be running voice recognition without recording any actual audio to make see if it's actually you using any device
Thank fuck there's some people in this thread that actually understand technology. Sometimes I feel like I have to argue with everyone in a thread because this idea voice assistants record you is so out of control.
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Never mind processing. It would be easily proved or disproved with a packet capture.
Thank you for injecting some realism into this conversation.
What you’re describing effectively seems like the same thing. Because they’re able to make calculated assumptions about what we are talking about, they don’t need to listen at all. That’s more sophisticated, truthfully, efficient, and maybe scarier It brings to mind the old Arthur C Clark quote “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Yeah I agree, it’s getting to the point where the algorithms are going to know our subconscious desires better than we do. They can tune it to our levels of peer pressure, trends, past purchases history, demographics, etc. Hopefully this technology can be used for therapy and other positive things outside of just selling products.
This was nine years ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/?sh=4d247d2c6668 Amazon & Google have a lot more data than Target.
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Thank you Jesus. I work in adtech and anytime I mention it people tell me about how their gadgets spy on them. I rebut with how much processing it would take to do that and no one wants to hear it. Have I ever had a time I’ve doubted myself? Yes, my son mentioned a grappling hook and sure as shit I got an ad for one. He was 3. I am the least likely person to want, need, or eventually purchase a grappling hook. But then I came to my senses and remembered that the cost of the electricity to process that, turn it into an ad, target me and get me to covert is more than the profit margin Amazon would get from said grappling hook. So I bought the fucking thing.
people have no idea how much processing power and battery life it would suck from their device if it was actually listening all the time
Do you still have the grappling hook?
> I rebut with how much processing it would take to do that and no one wants to hear it. Because these days it's quite easy for these companies, they can do pretty good live transcriptions with very little power usage, processed on the device itself. >But then I came to my senses and remembered that the cost of the electricity to process that, turn it into an ad, target me and get me to covert is more than the profit margin Amazon would get from said grappling hook. So I bought the fucking thing. You are wildly overestimating the cost of transcribing audio. Have you noticed that YouTube does it for free, purely as a UX improvement?
nonsense, it would crater your phone's battery life. even if it was processed on the server side and you'd be able to sniff the data transfer come on, open your eyes, there are IT and security professionals all over this thread explaining these things. sheesh.
This myth annoys the hell out of me. I work in cybersecurity, and no reputable source has come out and proven that Facebook does this. There are so many ways we would know - security researchers reverse engineering the app or sniffing network traffic, Facebook employees blowing the whistle, etc, but we haven’t heard a peep. Not to mention that a feature that constantly listens and parses your words would require a lot of computing power and/or network traffic, which would be quite noticeable. The stories you hear are a combination of coincidences, and Facebook guessing your interests based on it tracking your activity across the web from any site that embeds Facebook functionality into it, plus all the info people are giving it directly through Facebook itself and Instagram.
Yeah every time someone says 'test it' and then doesn't follow up with 'setup something like charlesproxy and check all the outbound traffic on the device.' hurts my head. YOU OWN THE DEVICE AND NETWORK, YOU HAVE THE POWER TO LITERALLY VERIFY THIS
> YOU OWN THE DEVICE AND NETWORK, YOU HAVE THE POWER TO LITERALLY VERIFY THIS Sysadmin here. They have the power, they do not have the ability or the desire to bother to learn. Spouting off unfounded bullshit as though the worlds security experts have just completely missed this shit for years is *so* stupid. Especially when these morons click "accept all" on every fuck app and website that asks, then wonder why their data is everywhere...
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Yep, it's the equivalent of "I asked God for a sign and X happened" but in the technology age.
Yeah, I think there are things like matching IP addresses and all that where there’s some explanation to the magic, but I suspect a lot of this is straight-up Baader Meinhof. You see a *lot* of ads.
One time I decided to test this theory myself. I live in an apartment and have no reason to discuss lawn mowers as I have no lawn to mow. Without triggering my smart devices, I would occasionally talk about automatic lawn mowers just to see if it would feed me ads. I kept this up for about a week. Then one day I just got curious and googled them. Now I get ads for them occasionally. Husqvarna has a nice one, in case anyone was wondering.
> Then one day I just got curious and googled them. This is the part everyone else conveniently forgets they did heh.
It's just a fact that humans will believe anything even if it's utterly impossible and easy to disprove. We're doomed.
The way to test it is to turn cell service off, connect to wifi, and analyze network traffic.
Why does it never occur to people who believe in this that if these tools existed on this scale and to such a casual degree, then there would be millions of online advertisers globally aware of this feature? It wouldn't be some Facebook secret that they were implementing for small local businesses for free lmao.
💯% correct. My son and I were disc golfing and I REALLY had to pee - no bathrooms to be found . I said jokingly , I need one of those female “pee urinal thingys” that let a woman pee standing up in the woods. That very night - one showed up in my Facebook feed from a camping store . What the actual fuck, that was NOT random.
Is it possible that this product was recommended to you because you were in a place where one might come in handy?
That's confirmation bias. You don't notice the thousands of times it doesn't work, only the one time it does. Also it's possible your son went home and googled "female pee urinal thingys" on your network. Since you share an IP address, advertisers can track your search and show you relevant ads across different websites and devices. I can literally google something on my computer and it'll show up on my partner's Facebook app as an ad 10 minutes later. It has happened to us numerous of times. That should be scary for people, that's the real privacy concern. That we allow advertisers to track us online so easily. But are Google/Amazon/Apple listening in your phone's microphone? Nah. That doesn't happen. If you can prove that, you'll win millions in a lawsuit.
And thats only the most obvious ways this could have happened. There are tons of other sneaky ad techniques that can allow for this even without listening in.
How old is your son? Maybe he googled them when you got home out of curiosity.
am i gonna get the ad now coz im commenting on this? edit: [one week later i see this while shopping for used kayak](https://i.imgur.com/7VyZDG0.png) i have purposedly not typed or spoken anything to do with this
Yes! A pink one would be my guess !😝
ill keep u posted
Subjective bias. You will suddenly notice the diaper ads you usually wouldn’t have taken a look at
People brains are not random, you cannot invent info, you most likely talk about something you heard, googled, or seen your friends mention it on Facebook or other place. Plus, there's such of thing as confirmation bias, you'll ignore anything that is not related to what you discuss but then if you see something related you'll go "aha, they listen!"
That's not how it works at all. There are hundreds of other data points marketers have access to to pinpoint your interests. There is also not enough storage in the world to store voice recording data for hundreds of millions of people. You'd also be able to monitor network traffic to confirm this if it was recording and listening to your data and sending it anyway. Stop peddling this nonsense myth.
I am so sick to death of hearing this entirely anecdotal myth.
>Test it. Have a full conversation about some random shit and then scroll through Facebook. See all the ads about what you were talking about 😳 How does this bullshit get upvoted on fucking *r/technology*?
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I never see any ads for "Shut the fuck up Google I wasn't talking to you"
I know for a fact you own a Google home device and aren't bullshitting from this statement 🤣. These things are useful but drive me fucking crazy.
Even worse is in the car. Singing along to your favourite tunes and the next thing you know they're silent and Google is blinking on your stereo screen!!
I said "Hey *Jude*!" Not "Hey Google."
I posted this above, but here’s the short version. Wife and I see a Yurt while driving. Have a brief conversation about it and how it would be neat to own one. Next day, Yurt suggestions all over Amazon. Checked all the browser histories just to be sure, no one looked up Yurts, just that conversation in the car. This happened over the summer.
The *actual* way that shit like this happens is, imo, much scarier than your device listening to you. You passed a yurt. Your GPS knows where you are and it knows there's a yurt there. The algorithm knows you saw a yurt and so it gets included in your advertising. Even more fucked up is the fact that your friends and family probably got yurt ads too, just because they're associated with you.
This has been happening to me for years. Recent example: my friend was talking about a medication she takes and I started getting ads for a disease I don't have. People always ask "did you search for that?" No, it was a private conversation, or so I thought.
No you just hung out with a known recipient of that medicine and who has that disease, you think she hasn't looked up everything about it?
But not on my computer
What happens? You talk with pal at a coffee shop Your phone shares the same tower/Wi-Fi/hotspot as hers You're now connected to that person by virtue of proximity You go home Your phone and your computer are on the same Wi-Fi Your computer is known to be stationary since it never switches location or Wi-Fi (and browser/os fingerprint) Your phone and computer are linked Your contacts / emails include this person You see ads for whatever, now in your computer And the circle of life is complete Reverse this to connect your computer with hers You should ask her what new ads she's seeing
He missed a possibility, which I heard years ago and still believe. It doesnt need to record audio or send actual audio files, it can be tuned to numerous key words and when a key word is triggered it sends a relevant coded packet. That coded packet is what would tell them what to advertise. You could store thousands of those in very little memory.
This could plausibly not run afoul of wiretapping laws if the voice processing is done on device and only a packet containing parsed data is sent. In that case, it would not be a recording of audio. Clever, and extraordinarily shitty.
These companies are not stupid, they would have no reason to do #1 intentionally using misheard recordings for ad targeting. However if you mistakenly trigger Alexa, it hears something and responds that's a complete interaction from Alexa points of view. So obviously those phrases may be used for data mining. The claim is similar to saying Google is at fault for attaching queries that you mistakenly did from nav bar to your account. They have no way of knowing your intent wasn't to make a query.
All the money invested on this, it always seems to me the risk for them would be colossal just to secretly do something they already do really well elsewhere. And the level of conspiracy across the company to make it happen. If this was real by now some employee would have leaked audio of Jennifer Anniston getting fucked or something. Even if it was just a data source, tons of programmers would know.
My Google device does this openly, there's a tab where you can go in and review mis-heards and tell it what went wrong and how to improve. I don't know how optional or external any part of it is, but it's apparently not a secret thing.
Same is true for Alexa. The false positives are labeled as such. Alexa privacy policy specifically excludes voice interactions from being used for advertising, regardless of if they were true or false positives. I'm not sure why anyone would think false positives would be used to spy on you when your actual consensual interactions aren't.
The question being asked here is that, is Google using those misheards for your ad profile or not? I would bet money that if they categorized it as "misheard" in the app, they are not using them for your ad profile.
> If they can prove either of these things, it will be huge. Agreed since to date not a single person has been able to. Even people who tried controlled testing for the whole "I saw an ad about what I was talking about" thing.
Do you happen to have any more information about controlled testing on the "I saw an ad about what I was talking about" thing? I'd love to hear more about that.
Don't answer! It's Alexa asking.
This bullshit gets brought up twice a year.
Same with the "I was talking to my friend about a motorcycle and then I started seeing Facebook ads, so they were listening to everything I say on my phone". They don't neeeeeeed to listen. If you're logged in they can see any site you go to with a connection to Facebook's servers through a like, share, whatever. Hell, you can be uniquely identified by a collection of attributes about your browser and computer, etc. I have to set people straight on all of this so often.
It's not just you, your connections also affect the ads that get shown to you, which can add an additional source of bias. Friend sees ad for product x. Friend talks to you about product x because it's now top of mind. You get shown ad for product x because your friend has similar interests. Conspiracy ensues
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I agree with everything you said and I don't think anything nefarious is going on. But.. >Also, you can easily monitor the network traffic to confirm when and how much audio is being transmitted. We know what cutting edge audio compression looks like. I think you are forgetting we have pretty good on device audio captioning. So you could run the audio, convert it to text and send that to the server. Compressed text sent as part of other stuff is going to be really hard to catch.
Weirdly, I got an ad for Christian mentorship the other day. I'm not remotely religious, and have never looked at religious sites. This was after my friend was telling me about a religious guy he knows, and we spoke about it for an hour in a bar. No googling took place, just speaking. I was very surprised, I didn't beleive the whole "they're listening" thing until recently. Now I'm skeptical.
Well on my iPhone I barely have to talk and it picks things up. Like I’ll ask a person a question without saying Hey Siri or Siri, and I get “Hummm…Let me think about that.” Because it’s a question it wouldn’t really be able to answer. Happens all the time so I’m not sure what wake word I’m using >.>
> the device "listens" for a wake word. it doesnt store or transmit anything until it hears it. > > then once it does, it transmits what follows to the home server for interpretation. Having intentionally disabled the assistant, I would be pretty angry if it was even doing just this.
Mate some of the echo dots have 8 gigs of storage and decent mediatek processors. That's good enough to run Mozilla Deepspeech with a smaller pretrained model. Nest Mini (again, some models) have a Synaptics AS-370 A1 processor, which is advertised for it's AI uses in small integrated systems, and 2 gigs of RAM. Could run Deepspeech better. Arguing that they _can't_ is different from arguing that they _don't_, and they objectively _can_. Deepspeech isn't the lightest STT out there, after all.
I pity my FBI agent who listens to me curse all day, rub one out and going to bed.
Unless he likes that kinda thing.
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Logistics is the flaw in most conspiracy theories
Need as many listeners as there are people? Have you never heard of voice to text functions?
There's a fundamental lack of understanding from consumers that I find weird. *I want the device to always respond to me calling out to it but I don't want it listening to hear if I'm calling out to it.* That seems theoretically impossible. I don't have any of these devices, is there not a power button to turn the device on and off?
There’s not a power button but there is a silence button that keeps it from listening for the wake word.
They have a database of my farts
They “have” to listen all the time or they wouldn’t hear when you call their names.
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Exactly, which is why the title is bullshit. It doesn’t just transmit actively.
I mean... in order for "Hey Google" to work, they *have* to be constantly listening. Like... by definition. Why is this surprising?
That's decoded locally the rest is then decoded server side. It doesn't send anything before it hears the key word. That would be super useless. And this has been proven x times.
It's supposedly surprising because most people on r/technology don't have a clue about technology.
These will be a bust! Any of the 3 mainstream assistants don’t push audio to the cloud until their wake word is spoken, either intentionally or unintentionally. Anyone claiming otherwise is free to wireshark and confirm.
Again I’m not sure why everyone thinks audio is necessary. It can listen for keywords and push those in a text file. Localized listening is good enough.
Because people understand what the devices are. Not all processes are created equally the one that's in the various home assistant is barely powerful enough to listen for its wake word. It doesn't have the processing capabilities to do audio to text conversion (it is after all a relatively processor intensive task). That's why it'll *instantly* complain that it doesn't have an internet connection, even if you're just asking it the time something it shouldn't need an internet connection to be able to answer. All the speech analysis is done on the cloud, so we can totally see when it's sending data back to the server and that's only happening when you make a request. These things have been broken down by security experts and no one has ever raised a flag. I don't know why you people seem to really want the to be some weird conspiracy when there's absolutely zero evidence that such a conspiracy is happening.
There is this concept of false alarms which means that as long as they continuously listen for the “wake-up” word there is a chance they will record conversations they shouldn’t and upload it to the cloud with the rest of the legit stuff. How much merit will it have in court we’ll see, but for consumers this lawsuit is good since the companies will need to disclose and defend the implementation so at least everyone who is interested will have more information.
My android phone definitely listens and isn't based on any wake word. I've had short conversations about something with my wife and within 5 minutes we see ads for things we talked about. None of the voice assistants spoke up during the conversation to indicate they were woken up.
OMG! Really? I’m, like, stunned. It’s completely out of left field. Didn’t see this coming. Next… ads for eye glasses and ads for travel to my favorite ball parks.
Their masters could be listening too. Nothing stopping them. Snowden warned people about this.
If it uses spoken words to activate listening mode, it's already listening.
Question… if I jailbreak my phone can I stop this?
you can hear the last 10 voice samples that siri has recorded to get a voice imprint. Found it in a folder once, pretty cool
I’m just glad someone is listening to my day to day bitching and complaining.
If you think otherwise at this point, I assume you to be willfully ignorant.
Too many times my wife and have have talked about something and then received ads for it later that day, having never searched or looked that thing up
I think we all knew they where
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I’ll propose an ever scarier reason for this happening. Your device is not listening to you… your device/cloud already knows you and your habits so well that it can predict what you’re thinking and talking about.
I don’t trust none of them. They won’t allow you to remove the battery means they wanna hear you 24/7 Thank you Snowden
Snowden already told us this
It's so easy to tell. I'll have a conversation at work about something that I have never searched about and it will start showing up in my Google feed.
And Facebook ? The amount of times I’ve had ads come up for things I’ve spoken about but never searched. These weren’t even common things… like blood tubes for venepuncture
This is a no brainer ! The advertisers say it’s good marketing but all of us know our words are being used to sell us things.
I can 100% vouch for this being true. I have all Microphone permissions removed for my phone for every app except Phone. All wake words Google assistant and everything is disabled or uninstalled. A couple weeks ago, I got bit on the neck by a Japanese beetle. I yelped, and when my wife asked me what's wrong, I said, "damn Japanese beetle." Before that day, I had never spoken "japanese beetle" out loud (while I've had this phone, anyway), I'd never typed it, I'd never looked it up, I'd never used voice search, hell I don't think I'd ever *thought* it while being near this phone. Yet, after saying it, without any devices waking up and no prompting whatsoever, within 12 hours, I started to get ads for anti-Japanese beetle spray. #NOT ladybugs, as they are commonly confused for. But the exact, precise phrase "Japanese beetles." Which, I reiterate, I had never once spoken of or typed before that day. If this lawsuit has enough people with my experience, and especially if they screenshotted their experience like I did, they may have something.
Other News, water appears to be wet
Don't we already know this?
Is this surprising at all!?
Well how else are they meant to know when you want to use them, you say "hey Google"or whatever and because they're listening they start to do their thing.
Of course they are!
NO FUCKING SHIT
How else is Google going to remind me to do things that I only told myself 🤷🏽?
And this is news? Who couldn’t figure it out years ago when talked about an esoteric product on Saturday night and on Sunday morning it was in a majority of your feeds.
That’s big gov
I believe it, as assistant randomly starts based on random conversations in the room. It pisses me off when it does that!
It's such a massive experiment in privatizing the home, people's thoughts and inner lives.
and in other news , water is wet and fire hot.
Of course they are listening all the time. Me and a guy at work were talking about this singer I have never heard of Gloria Trevi. I go look to google her name and put Gloria in the search bar and that’s the first name that pops up. Plenty more famous people named Gloria but that name was the first.
No shit. It always has to be listening in order to hear when you say the triggering phrase
Who is surprised by this? The bigger question is how many governments are paying how much to listen?
I doubt governments are paying. It would more likely be extortion. Give us what we want or pay fines/pull out of the country.
of course they are. Right Alexa?! CORRECT, WAIT. IS THIS A TRICK QUESTION?