Props, and thank you for this.
feel like privacy tech like this that seemed wildly overkill for everyday users becomes necessary as the value of collecting data and profiling humans goes through the roof
If you don’t want your private information transmitted, worry about the things that are verifiably and obviously transmitting your private information instead of pointlessly fretting over things that are verifiably behaving as they claim.
Do you have the Instagram or Facebook apps on your phone? Are you logged in to Google?
These are much bigger threats to your privacy than a mic.
The sum total of all of your Telegram, Discord, and iMessage DMs (all of which are effectively provided to the service provider without end to end encryption) is way more interesting than 86400 images of you sitting in front of your computer with your face scrunched up, or WAVs of you yelling at your kids. One you knowingly provide to the service provider. The other never leaves your house.
I mean, I appreciated the little green light, but the fact that it seemed necessary indicates to me that humanity still needs some evolving.
A switch to break the physical wire connection is about the only thing I can come up with out of hand right now. I believe the PinePhones come with physical switches for their antenna's so there's that.
To allow for swappable bezels, the switches (on the plastic bezel) in fact just introduce obstructions in optocouplers (on the camera board screwed to the metal lid), which—I don’t know what they do due to Framework’s refusal to release the schematics, but I guess just cut the power line of the camera resp. the signal of the microphone using a couple of MOSFETs.
The problem is, the camera and the microphone are live if the obstruction is absent and disconnected if it’s present, not the other way around. So all it takes a hypothetical evil maid to make the switches ineffective is to pick up the edge of the bezel with a nail (it’s not glued down, this being a Framework) and snip two teensy bits of plastic off to make the switches nonfunctional while feeling normal. This is not completely invisible, mind you—the camera light will still function, you’ll still see the camera in the device list if you look—and probably not very important. But I can’t help feeling that doing it the other way around would be better.
I vaguely remember another vendor (HP?) selling laptops with a physical camera switch, but given the distance between the switch (on the side near the ports) and the camera (on the top of the display), I’m less than hopeful about it being a hardware one.
I'm a little curious if iPhones could be modified to route the {mic,camera} {power,data} through the silent mode switch, either instead of or in addition to the current functionality. I don't really have a need for a physical silent mode toggle, I'm totally fine with doing that in the settings or control panel.
A question: does it run only on the Pi5 or other (also non Raspberry Pi) boards?
The only thing which might pose an issue is the total RAM size needed for whatever LLM is responsible for responding to you, but there's a wide variety of those available on ollama, Hugging Face, etc. that can work.
But seriously - the name got my attention, then I read the introduction and thought "hey, Alexa without uploading everything you say to Amazon? This might actually be something for me!".
> The default wake word is "hey assistant" - I would suggest "Computer" :) And of course it should have a voice that sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majel_Barrett