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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

Precisely - the person who owns the conference room and placed the device there should expect to get sued. The person who manufactured the device shouldn't since they didn't use the device to break the law. The owner of the private property did.

It's the same with phone and security cameras - the manufacturers are not the ones at fault when the devices are incorrectly used by owners in states with specific legal laws regarding recording.

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Imagine how long the devices would stay on the market if owners started being held liable for what the device does.

I'm not suggesting the device be made illegal, but I do think a ton of common applications should be... and without those applications, the device loses viability.

I imagine they will face the same market consequences that smart phones, security cameras, and other devices that have the potential to be used to record people in private places currently face. Customers with a low tolerance for being recorded simply just won't buy.

Security cameras often explicitly lack audio because of these laws. The other devices you mentioned all have primary functionality that doesn't depend of recording nearby audio arbitrarily. The possible exception is Siri and Google's assistant, which fall into the category of services/devices being questioned in this instance.

Tape recorders are still on the market.

All of those toget devices you mention are activated manually by the user. Smart speakers activate automatically.

They activate on very specific commands. It's no different then adding a trigger phrase to start recording with those devices. Whether it's a VUI, physical button UI, or even motion-sensor triggered is splitting hairs, since the device is still owned and operated by the person who put it there.

It's very different when the trigger is locally a not-so-great guess followed by shipping the audio to a remote service that can make a slightly more informed guess.

> The person who manufactured the device shouldn't since they didn't use the device to break the law.

The issue at hand is that if the manufacturer is the one who turns on the device, then yes, it is 100% them breaking the law.

If my phone is hacked and the microphone is remotely enabled to record a conversation and ends up violating the law, I'm not at fault, the hacker is.

So how is it different if the "hacker" is just the manufacturer using a private channel that they built for themselves?

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