Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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Yup. So another excuse for the "smart speaker"[0] to be always listening and always transmitting data.

And honestly, I'm not against a microphone that's always on. But I am against a microphone that sends what it hears to the cloud, to be owned, stored and processed by some third parties in unknown ways. Ambient computing is a very fine concept on its own - but what it needs is to be pried out from the hands of commercial entities driving it. It should be implemented in such a way that the user owns the data, storage of that data is entirely decoupled from the software that's being run on it and from the cloud that brings the two together. That is, I should be able to choose software that operates on a data I own, in a place I want it to, and that software should not exfiltrate that data.

I guess it won't happen without a long legal fight that's still ahead of us. But until then, there's no way in hell I'm going to let such a device be anywhere near my kid.

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[0] - It's funny how the name emphasizes the speaker aspect, whereas the core competency of such devices is the microphone.

I came to the comments just to voice a similar concern. We need to take ownership of our data, whether it is biometric, environmental or social. And once we have established this for ourselves, we should make it as accessible as the commercial offerings. This should be the new open source movement. Projects like OpenHAB and homebrew sensor networks with low power open source schematics and drivers.

Hey, we are already heading there. It’s just the masses that will stay ignorant for a decade.

I'm not sure where you're getting that this requires transmitting all the microphone data to the cloud. All of this could in theory be done on the device without cloud processing at all.

It could be, but it won't. The article mentions mainstream "smart speakers", none of which does it, and whose producers have every incentive to not do it.

Yet the photos from the article clearly show it running on a laptop.

> To make things easy for new parents, the team made a system that could run on a smart speaker that replicates the hardware in an Amazon Echo.

> "Smart speakers are becoming more and more prevalent, and these devices already have the ability to play white noise," said co-author Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the UW's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the director of the UW computing for health group. "If we could use this white noise feature as a contactless way to monitor infants' hand and leg movements, breathing and crying, then the smart speaker becomes a device that can do it all, which is really exciting."

They are clearly aiming to get this running on smart speakers.

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