Hacker News Reader

Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the 5th category. 5) Understand ML; concerned - won't allow any of these things in my house period because they will always use them for things behind the scenes that they won't state. I don't care how well trained they are, or "ethical." Ethical... according to who, and at what time period in the future? Ethics change. The data they have on you won't. Look at all of the politicians and other people getting in trouble for things they said 15 years ago, which were generally more acceptable at the time but we've "progressed" since then. Who will be making decisions about you in the future based on last years data? Just don't give it to them.

View on HN

Before I go further: do you own a smartphone? If not, you can ignore the rest.

So, assuming you have a smartphone. That is a device which has:

- Permanent network connection. Doesn't matter what you do on your Wifi, it has the cellular data network. Which is controlled by an independent processor with its own firmware

- Excellent noise-cancellation microphones. They may not be able to pinpoint the sound source like an Echo would, but they are still pretty sensitive

- Accurate location updated via GPS. If you block GPS, it can still use the cell phone towers as an approximation, plus any SSID beacons nearby

- Very powerful processor, capable of listening for 'interesting' data before sending anything

- Similar functionality to an Echo / Google Home / Apple whatever. They'll be listening for "hey siri" or "ok google"

And so on. Plus, anyone you interact with will have such a device in their pockets.

Given that. why would an Echo be of any particular concern? At least you can monitor their network activity easily. Not so with a smartphone, which is a much higher threat. And yet most people sleep with them next to their beds.

On my smartphone I can at least turn off the apps that would automatically listen for voice commands; I can use the phone just fine without them. And if I thought there was enough of a threat that Google or someone else was listening in using my phone's microphone without my knowledge, even with the apps turned off, I would switch to a rooted phone that would give me more control.

For the Echo/Google Home/etc. devices, I don't have any of the above options, so I simply don't buy them and don't use them.

Even a rooted phone will not help, since the monopolistic baseband processor will do it. The big ARM CPU is just for the users, the baseband is for control of the public masses and mass surveillance.

The surveillance problem is not black and white. A rooted phone may not help you if a state actor is after you, but it will help against companies that make money by building an invasive profile of who you are and what you do. Again how much a rooted phone helps in that depends on how many ties you want to cut with the digital-advertising ecosystem.

Here's a paper describing the privacy invasive and potentially harmful properties of pre-installed apps [1]. I specifically saved this paper in my files so I can have a comprehensive answer when people ask me why I go through the trouble of rooting my devices.

P.S. People who know more than me are saying that the baseband processor can be restricted with hardware practices such as IOMMU [2]. I don't really know how effective that can be.

[1]: https://haystack.mobi/papers/preinstalledAndroidSW_preprint....

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20151431

I tend to believe you, but I'd love to see some material to back up your suspicions.

> the monopolistic baseband processor will do it

The baseband processor isn't running Siri or Google Voice on my phone. Yes, if the state has a back door into the baseband processor there's not much I can do about it, but that's not the threat model that I'm avoiding by not using devices like the Echo or Google Home.

> that's not the threat model that I'm avoiding by not using devices like the Echo or Google Home.

100% this. IF a state intelligence agency is after my data they'll get it somehow (most likely just by asking). My concern is the rampant dragnet aggregation of personal data that I didn't expressly provide them by companies like Google and Facebook. I mean, Google having access to your emails that you store in Gmail? Kind of understandable. Google buying MasterCard transaction records to cross-reference against your web browsing data as tracked by any site using Google Analytics? No.

Theres a mute button on the echo. You can turn voice off just the same as you can on a phone.

Turns out the NSA has an implant for smart tvs that among its features is keeping the tv on and recording you while turning the indicator light that indicates its on status off.

You don't own the device despite paying for it. It updates itself when it feels like it and does whatever its actual owner says including compromising itself if told to.

Not without internet.

my parents smart tv has over a gig of storage for apps.

i'd be really surprised if that couldn't act as an offline cache.

still needs internet to fill that cache, don't use the smart tv part, or whitelist it at the router.

> Theres a mute button on the echo.

Which defeats the whole purpose of having it, namely, to respond to voice commands.

> You can turn voice off just the same as you can on a phone.

I don't have to turn off voice altogether on my phone, I just have to turn off the apps that I don't trust. On an Echo, either I turn it off and might as well not have it, or I turn it on and it's recording everything. There's no middle ground where I get some basic functionality without being spied on.

> On an Echo, either I turn it off and might as well not have it, or I turn it on and it's recording everything. There's no middle ground where I get some basic functionality without being spied on.

I'd guess that most people could effectively find a middle ground by treating the Echo as if it were someone in a cordial but not really friends relationship with a family member, such as a classmate of one of you kids over to discuss a school project, or a member of your spouse's church over to discuss planning the annual church picnic.

If they are doing things that they would not mind such a person overhearing, have the Echo on. If they are doing things that they would not do until such a person leaves, have the Echo off.

It would be interesting to give these home voice assistants faces, including eyes that look at and track people it is listening to when they speak, to help people remember that it is still listening to them. That might make it easier to remember to turn it off before discussing sensitive things in its presence.

The analogy you make is helpful, but it immediately brings attention to one thing: you generally don' invite "someone in a cordial but not really friends relationship with a family member" to stay with you all the time, day and night. People you do let stay with you are people whom you either trust, or expect to trust as the relationship develops. There's no relationship development with an Echo - it's forever an agent of a faceless corporation that's indifferent to you.

There's also the perma-mute button which you can activate by not buying one in the first place.

My kids left Alexa outside over a rainy weekend. Cest la vie!

None of which invalidates these concerns. You just fall into category 1 or 3.

>Before I go further: do you own a smartphone?

Someone really needs to make a decent modular smartphone with a detachable radio.

It's not quite what you're asking for, but Apple does still sell the iPod Touch, and they recently revved it. One could pair that with a mobile hotspot with a power button...

I have been considering a battery powered raspberry pi with a usb hotspot and a virtual phone number.

I guess it makes sense to detach the radio if you're not using your phone to receive calls...

Pull out the SIM card? I guess once eSIMs catch on, this won't be an option.

The Librem 5 has a kill switch for the radio: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

Oooh, a Debian derivative smartphone. I been wanting one of these to reappear in the wild ever since having a play with a Nokia N900.

Does the radio have DMA?

nope! awesome.

Do you mean the part where you can pull the Sim card out of the phone and reinsert it when you need to make a call?

> Similar functionality to an Echo / Google Home / Apple whatever. They'll be listening for "hey siri" or "ok google"

This seems to be a pretty big assumption, without which your whole argument falls apart. In my case, at least, I have no such functionality enabled. You could argue that the manufacturer of my phone could push a software update that enables it without my knowledge (in fact, they likely couldn't, because I don't have automatic updates turned on), but even if this were true we're now arguing about a very different thing - the theoretical ability of MegaCorp to spy on me as opposed to actual known spying.

EU governments and telcos spy on you by law. 10 years ago there was a law across entire EU that forced telecom companies to store the position and call numbers of users for the past 6 months. Germany got even fined because it did not implement the law.

And in US all SMS are stored for not less than one year, also required by law.

And time and time again we hear that this data is used for every tiniest detail of a crime, because it's cheaper than actual policework.

https://www.techspot.com/news/73776-google-receiving-police-...

https://www.propublica.org/article/no-warrant-no-problem-how...

https://www.csoonline.com/article/2222749/mobile-phone-surve...

And of course, the police have been caught abusing this data. Data acquired this way is likely to get to you in another type of cases: divorce proceedings often use this sort of data as well, and it's been used in trade disputes too.

Given that all that already happens with cellphone data, what's the point of doing anything about it at this point ?

> In my case, at least, I have no such functionality enabled

How do you know? Is your device _incapable_ of performing that task, or did you just click a checkbox somewhere? Because if you just politely _asked_ the OS to disable it, it doesn't really matter, does it? We are back to the matter of trusting the vendor.

> (in fact, they likely couldn't, because I don't have automatic updates turned on)

So you say. The software may or may not agree with your statement.

> the theoretical ability of MegaCorp to spy on me as opposed to actual known spying.

There's no "actual known spying". Spying implies intent, none has been demonstrated so far.

Where your argument falls apart (yeap, I can use that line too) is this: you are interacting with other people also carrying powerful listening devices of their own. They may or may not have disabled a "ok google" functionality, and they may or may not have disabled updates. Again, where do you draw the line? Do you ask everyone to leave their devices behind before interacting with them?

Yes, but there's still a difference from what we are worried might be doing with our smartphones, and what we KNOW they are doing with 'voice assistants'.

I turn off voice assistant on my smartphone and don't have any google home/alexa devices either. I have a TV with no voice activation. I won't use voice activation devices.

Is it possible my phone is listening to my anyway and sending recordings to someone? It's possible. If I were smart I would never say anything that would be 'dangerous' if someone heard it with my phone in the room, although Im sure I'm not that careful, it's probably not possible.

If I found out for sure my phone was listening to me surreptitiously, rather than just knowing that it's not impossible -- I'd do something about it.

One affect of arguing "it's all the same, your phone COULD be spying on your voice conversations anyway" is, perhaps ironically, to make people care LESS about it. If it's doing it anyway (or just if I can't prove it's not?), what do I care about Google Voice doing it too? But one disincentive for companies doing it is precisely that people will be upset if they find out. (And they're gonna find out eventually).

You don't need to go live in the woods to care about it. It's good to care about it. You don't need to either "draw the line" at living in the woods without electricity, or draw no lines. We can draw lines. They can move. If your argument is that since you can't be sure that nobody's spying on you, you shouldn't care about the people you DO know are spying on you and shouldn't get upset about it -- that's not how any of this works.

Insisting on all or nothing gets you nothing (cause it turns out 'all' isn't really an option), and who wants nothing?

I'm just inserting a comment here in the hopes that it will come before a more deeply nested soon-to-be-written XKCD comic. Although I'm fairly confident XKCD has covered this in the past already.

I'm in this camp

He's just using a classic strawman, making the argument he could win.

because I don't have automatic updates turned on

...the malicious entity already pushed it out silently in the last update you did accept...

You really have to trust the entity building the software on these devices. These little half-measures are purely psychological protection.

Not really.

There is a huge difference between "we listened to your conversation, but hey didn't you accept our EULA?" and " let's spy on some random people".

I use Lineage OS (https://lineageos.org) with the cameras taped. It's not perfectly secure, but it's the best tradeoff I can make at the moment. Here's a few better options I want to switch to in the future:

Graphene OS, a security-hardened Android ROM: https://grapheneos.org

Librem 5, probably the ideal solution: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ Just look at the bullet-point features:

  + Does not use Android or iOS. The Librem 5 comes with the mobile version of our FSF-endorsed operating system PureOS by default, and is expected to be able to run most GNU+Linux distributions.  
  + CPU separate from baseband, isolating the blackbox that the modem may represent and allowing us to seek hardware certification of the main board by the Free Software Foundation.  
  + Hardware Kill Switches for camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband.  
  + End-to-end encrypted decentralized communications via Matrix over the Internet.  
  + We also intend the Librem 5 to integrate with the Librem Key security token in the future.

Pinephone, not as good as the Librem 5, but much cheaper: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

I won't have one either. Well, I have my Android, which I guess is essentially the same.

I was visiting my neighbor the other day. We were wondering something about special counsel mueller, and she decided to ask Alexa. This was new, and I was surprised she had this surveillance device, but I didn't say anything.

There was some back and forth, then I said to her "I think you're ordering motor oil "

"Alexa, stop! Alexa, stop!" As if a dog was chewing on the furniture.

And now Amazon knows that I was discussing politics, and my opinion. That kind of analyzed data is going to be lucrative in some future military or law enforcement or political contract.

Rule 1. Don't leave money on the table.

Rule 2. Ever.

Are there microphone-blocking phone cases? All I can really find is https://www.privacycase.com/, and it seems like overkill.

Do they know it was you, specifically? I would say they know your neighbor was talking with someone else, and possibly that politics were being discussed (not really something they seem to have put a lot of effort into recognizing, since it doesn't lead to shopping...) If you're interacting with an Echo or gHome you can always ask it "who am I?" GOOG is sneaky enough to recognize you on any other device, Alexa, not so much (and in this case you shouldn't be on their radar to being with).

> Do they know it was you, specifically?

Maybe not with today's technology, but in the future, they will still have the recording and will have the technology.

It's the same thing with encryption. It's safe today, but in the future it'll be decodeable, and they'll still have the encrypted copies to work on.

What WalterBright says below.

They can eventually know who I am by voice recognition, especially they can get corroboration by the fact that we live in the same building.

I imagine we probably said something that would suggest I live nearby (... "Checking database" ...) or that I'm a regular visitor (... "Checking database." ...).

They could be sending an inaudible tone, to be captured by an app on my phone. I don't have an Amazon app, but some other app might capture the tone and sell that fact to Amazon, so that they don't leave money on the table.

Imagine 20 years from now you decide to run for political office. Do you want someone "ethically" going through all your old recorded conversations looking for statements that will be politically incorrect 20 years from now?

Not only you, but your kids. People have lost sponsorships and contracts because of things one of their parents said before the person in question was even born. Look at last year's incident where Eli Lilly pulled their NASCAR sponsorship of Conor Daly over something his father had said a decade before Conor existed. https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/motor/2018/08/24/eli-l...

That's nuts. Things like this should cost company its reputation.

Fortunately, Eli Lilly took a bigger hit over this than Daly did. It's still disgusting on the principle of it, though.

I would expect it. I would watch what I say now and in a few years what I think.

Or intentionally don't watch what you say and stop giving this kind of system any power. If you run for office in 20 years planning to hide what you think now, or apologize for it, then you're in for a losing battle. Say what you think, admit when you're wrong, learn from your mistakes.

This. There’s nothing that binds today’s ethical company to voluntary ethical behavior when things get tough (or they get acquired).

There's nothing that stops the most ethical companies from being completely compromised by state actors either.

>won't allow any of these things in my house period because they will always use them for things behind the scenes that they won't state.

As OP stated, "this extends beyond home speakers to any voice-enabled device in general".

Unless you're living like the Unibomber, it's not a matter of "just don't give it to them". The moment you step outside your house and socialize with almost anyone anywhere, it's liable to being taken from you.

Neatpick: "unabomber" as in UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber).

As in Not EAT PICtures, oKay ?

"oh but i deleted all my data through the helpful portal they provided. they said i had full control?"

Data is Googles game. Once they have it, they have it. Nothing else matters. You own nothing. Your image, your voice, your ideas, your conversation, your habits, your medical records. Google wants it all. Thats is Googles world.

Google aint giving that up. Everything they do is about getting more and more of it. Everything to the contrary is just PR spin.

Additionally, in order to be 'ethical' by any means, they still have to collect the data in the first place. Regardless of actual intentions around ethical/defined practices, that always leaves the possibility for someone else to access that data and do unintended things with it.

Could I ask your age?

I have been casually tracking who actually owns these types of devices and have never met anyone under 25 who would even consider it whereas I go to the homes of people in their late 30's and 40's and see them all the time.

If you visit your friends or relatives, you cannot fully protect yourself from this data collection by simply choosing not to own these devices yourself.

What's strange about this conversation is that your refusal to trade privacy for convenience is passed off as some kind of no-loss decision, when in reality there are all kinds of downsides to living your life the way you claim you do.

The conversation can't even be had until the facts are presented honestly, and when you present your position this way, it's not honest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com