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Comment by secabeen | Hacker News Reader

Now that the feature is disabled, it's hard to know. Once the feature is enabled, it's pretty easy to tell by looking at the network traffic the device generates. Sending every sound to google is going to be obvious.

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You could have covert wake-words.

You'd still see the network traffic for the audio going back to Amazon's servers for analysis.

The article makes it unclear, but this feature is available right now for all Nest Aware subscribers (if you have any type of Nest camera, you'll have a Nest Aware subscription). The article mentioned that this feature was "accidentally" available to non-Nest Aware subscribers as well, but it's the same existing feature and not some test of upcoming features.

You can toggle glass break and fire alarm detection on any of your Google Home devices in the Home app, and this includes the old Google Home mini pucks and hubs, as well as new Nest branded minis and hubs.

Nest cameras are a completely different system than Echo, all Nest camera devices stream full motion video and audio back to Google 24x7. That's why you buy them.

What about transcribing all the audio you get and then sending it as a chunk of stuff every time the Hone is activated. Don't think you could catch that.

That would require a lot more computational power than is currently available in an Echo device. It's possible that Amazon could sneak a custom ASIC into the device to do something like this, but it would add quite a bit to the device's Bill of Materials, and would still probably be noticed by the iFixit crowd.

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