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Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

There's a ton of difference. My phone is not always listening -- its voice controls aren't enabled, and even if they were enabled they would be hidden behind a button press.

Sure, somebody could hack my phone and take over the microphone, but that's a very different threat model than "this AI might misinterpret a random sound as a command and start uploading my conversations to the phone."

To the extent that normal people leave their phones in always-listening mode, we should be educating them about the privacy implications of that as well.

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iPhone: if I say 'Hey Siri', I see an onscreen animation indicating it's listening and ready for my next command. Alexa: if I say 'Alexa', I see the ring lights animate indicating it's listening and ready for my next command.

Putting Amazon/Apple's privacy and security implementations aside, how are these different? Aren't they both 'always listening'?

You can set your phone to require a physical action before it will start listening. On Android, I think it's a long press on the home button, or it was the last time I was looking at the controls. You can also disable both 'Hey Siri' and 'Hey Google' on your phone entirely.

If you are using a voice assistant on your phone, and if you have it set up to always listen, then it's almost the same as a smart speaker (minor quibbles about the positioning and quality of the microphone aside). But those are two pretty big ifs.

Usually this argument gets pulled out to shut down people who have concerns about smart speakers in general, saying that any effort to make smart speakers more private or avoid them is pointless because of course their phone is always listening to them. That's not necessarily true. If someone wants to get rid of their smart speaker, owning a phone doesn't immediately make them a hypocrite. They can keep their phone and still have better privacy.

you are assuming the physical action before listening will always remain a faithful setting. If the NSA wanted Apple to play ball one day, that setting would be merely cosmetic.

I'm not assuming anything, I just understand that the risk of the NSA forcing Apple to install malware on my phone is lower than the risk of my local police office following an already legal process to get data that I know Amazon is inadvertently collecting from people today.

You're correlating risks that aren't related to each other; these are two different devices with different threat models. If the NSA wants to bug you, it will bug your house. That doesn't mean you should bug it for them.

You can mute the mic on a smart speaker too. Doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people have them always on, just as they do with their phones.

It's far, far easier in practice to use an unambiguous gesture like a button press on a phone than it is to use an unambiguous gesture with a smart speaker.

Most normal people could get by with a voice assistant on their phone that required manual prompting, but a voice assistant like Alexa that required you to walk across the room and push a button to use it would be useless -- at that point carrying your phone in your pocket would be a better UX experience.

How the products are designed and implemented in the real world matters: phones are designed to be in-reach of people, smart speakers are not. You can't just stick a mute button on a smart speaker and say it's the same UX as phones now.

> How many people that refuse to have a smart speaker also refuse to have a smart phone?

If somebody is avoiding a smart speaker out of privacy concerns, but they have an always-on voice assistant on their phone, the correct response to their concerns is not to tell them to stop worrying about smart speakers. The correct response is to educate them about their phone settings so they can change them and exercise more agency over their lives.

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