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Comment by fortythirteen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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).

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