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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

> I wouldn't be willing to put an open wiretap in my home... all of their practical uses can be duplicated with the minimal effort of tapping a screen a couple of times.

I've never understood this argument. Why is the portable wiretap in your pocket inherently safer?

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Not the Parent commenter, but I can give some thoughts:

- The phone is not designed to listen around the room explicitly, more near field, so it can't hear everything.

- An iPhone seems to have pretty decent privacy settings (only the app can listen while app is open, etc)

- I personally have a phone I can reflash with mostly open source software (only baseband/fivers proprietary), so I am reasonably sure that my phone is not spying on me.

Why are you so sure the baseband isn’t spying on you?

Frankly, I am not 100% sure it isn't, I am just reasonably sure. I think to do that is beyond the capability of the type of attacker I am worried about. Google/Amazon/Facebook/name your favorite commercial spying company won't exploit it, as they have their apps to do that sort of stuff. I don't think anyone else with that capability (i.e. name your favorite "spooky" government agency) is coming after me. Hence, reasonably sure.

It may not be designed to "listen around the room explicitly", but my phone makes a decent speaker phone, so it still has that capability. And to be honest, I'd be less concerned with what my Echo hears in my livingroom compared with what my phone hears all day long.

The Echo has pretty decent privacy settings (only listens when you say the "wake word", etc).

I don't disagree with phone vs stationary speaker in your house, but the "wake word" issue is precisely what the article deals with.

The article is talking about patents filed that may or may not ever end up in products, not current technology.

But any wider use of audio processing to listen for keywords besides the wake word apply equally well to a cell phone. So again, the cell phone is at least as big a concern as an Echo, if not bigger since many people are rarely outside of arms-reach of their phone.

>Why is the portable wiretap in your pocket inherently safer?

Who says it is? Its astounding to me that people willingly carry around portable (wi-fi enabled!) wiretaps.

Not safer, but not there is a key difference.

If I turn off voice assistant on my phone, ethically speaking, it shouldn't be recording my voice. Companies/governments doing so is an actual wire tap, and they should have a warrant.

Putting these devices in your home is giving Amazon/Google/Apple permission to record your every conversation.

That's not true. Those devices are designed on the same ethical grounds you claimed for the phone case. They're only supposed to listen after you invoke them. Regardless if this is true or not, a phone is millions of times more dangerous for privacy if it's being used to record you and track you.

> They're only supposed to listen after you invoke them.

How can a device that is only activated by listening not always be listening? If I turn off Siri on my phone the microphone is supposed to go off.

Edit: I know about the wake word. It was a statement on the quote that a device that only works on voice wouldn't be "listening".

Wake word detection (listening for a specific phrase, such as "Hey Siri") typically happens using a completely different subsystem from active voice recognition, since it's a much more bounded problem that also needs to run with far lower power consumption. (in the case of Siri specifically, Apple actually has a pretty nifty whitepaper: https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html)

That said: right now, common sense would dictate that your phone's battery really can't handle recording full audio at all times, but once that's no longer the case, it does seem problematic that we don't yet have the audio equivalent of putting a piece of tape over your laptop webcam.

It's always listening for the keyword. The listening isn't problematic, it's the sharing.

Remote activation of the microphone, wake word or not.

https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdr...

I don't know how easy it is with today's smartphones, but it was definitely a thing in the dumbphone era.

Similar issues with your laptop or these smart speaker devices.

You're living in a fantasy world if you think that fiddling with the settings deters, in the slightest, any corporation or government from using your portable-wiretapping device to listen to you and track everything else its technically capable of tracking (with its gyroscope and internal measurement devices of all kinds).

I don't have Alexa (though I assume it has the same), but you definitely can turn off mic on Google Home.

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