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Comment by pdkl95 | Hacker News Reader

The only things in my pocket are my wallet and keys. My phone[1] could probably be used for remote surveillance, but without a warrant, that's a crime.

Note: intent and expectations matter. A cellphone by itself (without any type of "voice assistant" app or feature) is only intended to record audio when it's being used to make a call. Yes, malicious actors or buggy software could enable the microphone, but that's not the expected behavior of the device. Kyllo v United States is all about what the public understands and expects about a technology.

[1] https://www.cdw.com/product/att-trimline-210-corded-phone/30...

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You're trusting that the microphone is not listening, which is about on par with trusting any device that claims to only store stuff in a local buffer, except when commanded to talk to the cloud.

I think to your point, there is possibly more legal protection around wiretaps than voice assistants. However, how many apps have access to the microphone? Are these apps covered by the same protections as making a phone call using POTS?

Edit: I see you've linked that your phone is an old-school landline, which doesn't really help people understand the legalities around smartphones, which many feel are a requirement to daily life.

> You're trusting that the microphone is not listening

The point of the original comment is mostly that devices like echos are expected to always be listening, and this has legal implication.

Can the police right now go to Amazon and demand to listen to anyone's Alexa in real-time? Can the NSA go to any landline provider, and demand a secret list of a person's entire call history(or they may already have this already)?

The biggest profile case where Alexa audio recordings got turned over was during a murder trial after a judge's orders.

I am not entirely clear that the ramifications of Kyllo v. United States are as dire as OP is stating for Alexa-like devices. How exactly do the police freely gain access to a "in general public use" Alexa-like device that is secured through something like an Amazon account and secured WPA password-protected WiFi network? Amazon would have to turn over credentials or the police would have to hack your account or WiFi somehow...

Police- maybe some court decision is required. NSA- I very much doubt so.

As we learned from the gospel of "Sneakers," you're thinking of the FBI. The NSA is not chartered for domestic surveillance. :P

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(1992_film)

> How exactly do the police freely gain access

They don't, Kyllo v United States isn't about gaining access to someone's devices. The police used their own thermal camera to search Kyllo's residence:

>> In order to determine whether an amount of heat was emanating from petitioner's home consistent with the use of such lamps, at 3:20 a.m. on January 16, 1992, Agent Elliott and Dan Haas used an Agema Thermovision 210 thermal imager to scan the triplex. [...] The scan of Kyllo's home took only a few minutes and was performed from the passenger seat of Agent Elliott's vehicle across the street from the front of the house and also from the street in back of the house.

Okay then what does this have to do with someone's private Alexa device? Are you suggesting the police will install their own Alexa device at someone's house?

> My phone[1] could probably be used for remote surveillance, but without a warrant, that's a crime.

That's a neat phone, but we already know pretty much all phone communications are intercepted and recorded. This is why I do all of my communications over IPoAC[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

That's all fine and well, but you're still susceptible to a stool pigeon attack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3xU0fnjUcg

> The only things in my pocket are my wallet and keys. My phone[1] could probably be used for remote surveillance, but without a warrant, that's a crime.

Sure, a bit naive, but I digress. Even if it's illegal, it would be better if it was simply not possible in the first place. It's optionally having that functionality, rather than building solutions considering privacy in the first place.

> without any type of "voice assistant" app

I don't think you can uninstall Siri or Google Assistant on neither iPhone or Android, so that point is kind of null. Only with root or custom roms you'll be able to do that.

you have to give explicit permissions for those things. google assistant doesn't work on my phone because i never gave it permission to enable that feature.

me neither but i have no way of verifying if this is the truth or not without installing a vpn with a firewall and analysing the logs

> you have to give explicit permissions for those things. google assistant doesn't work on my phone because i never gave it permission to enable that feature.

I wouldn't trust that whatever people who sit in power doesn't have a way of overriding that.

Those toggles are not inert, it does loudly throw errors if I revoke any permission of Google Play Services

Cellphones with voice assistants are already in general public use, even if you don't have one. So if general public use is enough to justify warrantless surveillance, we're already there.

A cellphone doesn't necessarily have the voice assistant enabled, and works just fine without it. An Echo, Homepod or Google Home without the voice assistant is basically useless (I don't know whether you can even disabled the VA).

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