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Comment by cbm-vic-20 | Hacker News Reader

For the sake of argument, let's assume this is intentional. What would be the point of doing this? Capturing millions of random people's background sound, in the hopes of landing some "big fish", to provide/sell that audio to the Chinese government?

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Aggregate keyword data to sell to advertisers and hedge funds. Same thing pretty much every smart device does.

Source?

I'm a big fan of bashing corporate for things like this, but smart devices haven't been proven to do this, yet. We had a myriad ways of tracking enabled by these devices, but voice, and its mining for data, is off the list for now. Attractive target though, for sure.

It's like LastPass or GitHub Copilot collecting private data. It just goes against their business model to violate privacy. I'd be a lot more suspicious if it's Meta/Facebook, because it's directly part of their business model.

The problem is that not every business is fully transparent about their business models nor we don’t know which state level actor is sometimes behind the ”accidental” data collection.

Do we have any examples so far of a state-level actor using data that was "accidentally" collected from users?

You're asking a silly question. States use data indiscriminately, whether it was "accidentally" gathered or not. Ultimately, it's not really accidentally gathered. There is pressure to over-collect.

Technically it is illegal at least in the U.S. to pressure for overcollecting the data. That is why I used the word ”accidentally”. However, in reality some companies might think in the end that it was their own idea.

they have a massive free tier that has yet to be monetized

ads targeted to users based on conversations within ear shot of an always listening device sounds like a big money maker to me

although I don't use zoom, something(s) is already doing this on my phone as I get targeted ads based on conversations I have, routinely ( typically within 45 mins) despite taking many precautions... some technology is already out there in production

Background noise can be used to identify location and device association.

Perhaps they've been 'compelled' by the US Government to capture: 1: as much data as possible from their users. 2: recordings from specific users, but in order to hide their intentions, it's a universal "feature"

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