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Comment by jhall1468 | Hacker News Reader

You'd be correct: they do the exact same thing. But people need to justify their opinions when they are inconsistent with reality, so here we are. Android and iPhones both have always on mics. But nobody is dropping their phone.

I don't see a conflict if people admit the potential invasion of pirvacy is worth the utility of a phone, but not the utility of an Echo device. But apparently that alone isn't good enough.

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It's not that I think they're really that different, but one is very optional and the other is so hard to live without these days. I'm absolutely not happy about the inclusion of those features in phones but the alternatives to having a smartphone are slim and difficult to live with.

> It's not that I think they're really that different, but one is very optional and the other is so hard to live without these days.

You can buy a non-smart phone right now. It's not hard to live without one, it's a choice that you are now downplaying because it fits your narrative.

The distinction for me is that Google is an advertising company, and Amazon a retailer; they both stand to make non-trivial amounts of money by listening, storing, and analyzing every little bit of audio they can from your devices.

So far at least, Apple claims to be privacy focused and makes money hand over fist by selling essentially luxury goods. Aside from selling your data to some third party (which seems unnecessary for a trillion dollar company), there's not much Apple could do with it.

TL;DR Personally, I have more trust in Apple not to "spy" because they seem to have nothing to gain from it. Amazon and Google have plenty to gain from spying.

Your phone is only listening for 'Ok Google', though. It isn't streaming the audio; you can easily verify that.

I never said they were streaming audio. They can, however, pick up more audio than is required, and listen for things other than the commands being spoken. Just because someone says "OK Google, whats the weather?" doesn't mean there isn't a conversation going on in the background that they can pick up on.

Google purchasing MasterCard purchase transactions so they can link to their profile of users is a great example of them having zero respect of your privacy.

> Just because someone says "OK Google, whats the weather?" doesn't mean there isn't a conversation going on in the background that they can pick up on.

And filtering out the background conversation is a difficult problem in machine learning, but one that has to be accomplished in order to make the service work correctly.

We don't store the audio, much less the filtered-out noise, but I don't imagine there's any way I can prove that. Maybe an appeal to cost? There's way too much data to do that, even if we wanted to.

The parser output (text) is stored, mind you. You can find that on the Google dashboard.

Storing the data no, but text output as you’ve mentioned, or even passing it into some algorithm that update your profile with some signal that “may be interested in...” is entirely possible with minimal data requirements.

And I’m not saying Google or Amazon are doing this today. If not then it may be one bad earnings call away for some engineer to say “well....we could...”.

Anything is possible in the pursuit of profits. I’d Google is willing to buy users offline credit card transactions to link to their profiles, it’s clear they will slurp up all data available for them. Why not that listening device in people’s home? “Overheard user X saying they signed up at google-ads-customer.com” “overheard user Y saying google-ad-customers service is fantastic”

> Google purchasing MasterCard purchase transactions so they can link to their profile of users is a great example of them having zero respect of your privacy.

You signed the paperwork that gave MasterCard the right to sell your data and your bitching about the company that bought it? For real?

It blows me away just how many people are willing to use services where they are the product (and that's MasterCard and Visa these days too) and then whine when they get sold. Google is just doing what it can to remain competitive. Don't sign anything that means signing away your identity and stop whining.

The conversation is about Googles lack of respect, not Mastercards.

For Maastercard, hiding “we can sell your data” in a 8+ page contract full of small print legalese that’s designed for people to skip over is hardly fair notice. Should people read and understand it? Yes. But most don’t.

Also, it’s silly to say that “you’re the product” with Visa and MasterCard. Most cards have a fee associated (with the norm for any rewards card being around $80-120 in Canada) and they have a insane 20% interest on purchases. That’s vastly different than using Facebook for free.

The privacy quip was directed to Google. Just because they -can- do something, doesn’t mean they should.

The third most valuable company in the world hardly needed to purchase offline purchases to further profile people who don’t know they’re being profiled “to remain competitive”.

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