So now Amazon (or whoever is in control of the device) not only has access to voice recordings of everything that goes on in peoples homes, but also video. What could possibly go wrong?
And remember that this is by the company that has a 600 million dollar contract with the CIA[0]. Or in more accurate terms: the known upfront amount is 600 million.
I'm 95% confident that I have no use for it and expect complete failure, therefore it will sell and cement Amazon as the #1 player in machine learning.
I was fairly skeptical as well, but then I showed this to my friend and she thought it was a great product idea (albeit potentially overpriced). Apparently a lot of people like to take fit pictures and also log outfit combinations which work for them.
It's absolutely brilliant if your goal is any of several things that don't actually involve delivering a valuable service to the people buying the device (if you must incidentally, that's fine).
And if you have never so much as encountered the word "ethics".
It doesn't need ML, it will always be ever so slightly critical, enough to lower your self esteem and hence make you more vulnerable to buying crap from Amazon.
It's for placement. You can't hide it out of the way or point it up at just your head. They need a good look at your whole room and your whole body, right down to the shoes.
This seems like a solution looking for a problem. I guess an always-on internet microphone wasn't a big enough invasion of privacy, we need a camera too.
>This seems like a solution looking for a problem.
That would characterize most of consumer IoT. Industrial IoT is more interesting, but who needs their bathroom mirror ordering more razorblades for them. All sorts of problems with that. Yet it's nevertheless being pushed by big co's desperate for new revenue streams.
> Style Check keeps your look on point using advanced machine learning algorithms and advice from fashion specialists. Submit two photos for a second opinion on which outfit looks best on you based on fit, color, styling, and current trends.
Taking narcissism, insecurity, and invasion of privacy to the next level. Well done, Amazon!
Now that we're replacing mirrors with cameras, what's next? Covering our windows with screens that show us what's outside? Maybe they can use machine learning to judge the weather and recommend outfits based on current trends and conditions!
The Juicero inventors are going to be kicking themselves when they see this thing. "Replacing a simple everyday process with an over-complicated piece of technology. Brilliant! I can't believe we didn't think of that!"
Maybe they'll topple Facebook's leader-status on narcissism, insecurity, and invasion of privacy? This definitely falls into the category of tech designed to make you sad/insecure (in this case, so you'll buy more clothes from Amazon).
I mean, i love all these tools, i just don't want them to have any form of internet access.
It's why i'm building my home cloud and automation system, but only doing so if the devices don't leave my firewall. I enjoy the tech, i enjoy the complication (to a degree), it's fun gadget stuff, it's nifty. However i do not trust them to keep my information safe, even if i trusted them to not misuse it themselves (which i don't).
There's a much more immediately practical reason to keep it in-firewall as well: if the utility company accidentally cuts a fiber line outside my house, I don't want to be suddenly unable to turn off my hallway light.
Wait, so now building codes are going to get involved with what I run in my house after it is built and inspected? That doesn't sound like building codes. If anything, regulation from the FCC or someone else would be more uh, fitting.
Sure, I was thinking of things like lights supporting local control. I guess I'd try to write it so that a phone app talking to the light counted as passing the rule, as long as it worked without an internet connection.
I don't see how it is a problem for simple rules like "Installed lights must always be controllable from inside the premises" to be code.
>> I mean, i love all these tools, i just don't want them to have any form of internet access.
I've come to the realisation that the only way I will have a 'home of the future' is if I build it myself and keep it offline. I love lots of the IOT products and when they eventually come down in price they would be no brainers. But my privacy isn't worth the benefit they provide.
$199 device that sends data to some servers elsewhere and gets the job done in seconds
$2000 device that takes up space and electricity to do the same thing, but in minutes
I personally like the second option a lot better, I wish we had an open source version of all the google apps that did it's own ML on your own servers.
Except most of the IoT devices on market would do the same thing for about same price without the cloud. The only problem the clouds solves for users is not having to know how to set up a VPN so that their shitty app can view mostly meaningless pseudo-charts when the user is away from home. But in exchange for that, you give the vendors lots of data to resell, and the ability to brick your devices remotely.
SaaS model being ported to hardware is probably the single most user-hostile development I've seen in recent years in tech.
Outlaw the kind of data collection and abuse that keeps these services alive and plenty of reasonably-priced paid encrypted-cloud and/or locally-hosted options for all kinds of these free spying-enabled services would pop up quickly. The spy-vertising economy, which lives mostly on people not realizing just how bad it is and coordination problems in trying to counter it, makes it impractical to compete using other business models.
Caring that your clothes look good is narcissism (excessive interest in your appearance) now? Have you ever asked a friend if they like the suit you just bought? Do you go to work in a burlap sack?
Knowingly and willingly sending people photos of yourself is an "invasion" of privacy?
> Caring that your clothes look good is narcissism (excessive interest in your appearance) now?
As if caring is a binary thing and not a matter of degree? When you pay $200 to have "fashion experts" (or AI) judge your outfits on a daily basis, have you not crossed a line?
> Knowingly and willingly sending people photos of yourself is an "invasion" of privacy?
Yes, I'm sure this won't be used to collect all kinds of personal data for marketing purposes.
I would pay well more than $200 to hire someone knowledgeable about fashion to design and help me buy a wardrobe. I don't think it's narcissistic at all to want to look nice.
You've never once asked one of your friends or spouse their to help you pick between two shirts?
I mean, for a human-powered service that just consulted me on good looks according to detailed specifications (I under-dress for work because it reads like an asshole power move, House MD style, that has served me well at least a couple times) and in accordance to my wife.
I can't help but feel that we're increasingly in one of those movies where the real world becomes mixed up with a fictional one. If you were to take some of the things I've read about over the past month or so and challenged people to tell you whether they were real or a parody they'd be hard-pressed to decide.
They seem to imply that humans may see your Style Check photos (ostensibly "our team of experienced fashion specialists" for machine learning purposes). I'm wondering a bit if that team of fashion specialists is Mechanical Turk?
I'm wondering if your picture will appear in the amazon ads if Alexa recognizes that new shirt as a recent order.
Also given that all the pixs in the ad are women, we can assume if Alexa sees a little baby bulge and the other signs of pregnancy that your amazon advertisements are about to take a huge swing to the maternity style.
One possibility is to enforce opinions like yours. In the light of this all of a sudden Echo isn't as strange in comparison. It's a way of normalizing Echo by releasing something more "outrageous".
I would imagine the end goal is to incorporate this kind of tech[0] in the future, thus eliminating the need to in-person shop for clothes. "Depth-sensing" camera? Has to be for that..
I'm not normally one to be creeped out by these kind of things. But this is a device that's designed to take photos and videos of you while you get dressed, and will be both connected to the internet and constantly communicating those images over the network.
This feels like a device literature professors would use to teach dystopian fiction writing.
Amazon says their camera only records you when you ask it to, if you don't trust them, then how do you trust that your cellphone or laptop isn't recording you illicitly?
The point is that one doesn't usually purposefully keep our cameras directly pointed at us when we're changing clothes. Cellphones in particular are usually pointed at the table directly under them. Laptops are often more risky, which is why these exist: https://supporters.eff.org/shop/laptop-camera-cover-set
That's true. I was more saying that it's not usually pointed in my direction when I'm changing. I have a cover over my webcam and my phone is usually looking at the ceiling or whatever surface it's on.
How do I know my smart phone isn't shooting a video of me when I'm dressing? It isn't pointed at me. It doesn't sit on a stand with a view of the room. Sure the microphone might catch something interesting in the bedroom, but setting up an internet connected camera with a view is very different than than one that is pointed in a safe direction.
Firearms: never point it at something you don't want to destroy.
Internet connected cameras: never point them at something you don't want the world to see.
I don't bring my phone with me when I'm going to shower or change clothes. If I do, I can place it face down and even place something on top of the rear camera if I'm afraid of capturing something other than my ceiling.
This Amazon device either needs to be left alone to capture/not capture whatever it is going to or it serves no purpose at all. I'm not going to turn it around or cover it every time I enter my bedroom. If I did, then the value proposition falls significantly.
It's not even an issue of trusting Amazon. Or, just trusting their motives. You also have to trust their security on an ongoing basis, as your device could theoretically be compromised at any time.
While this may be true, I'd trust Amazon more than the various Chinese camera makers that offer cloud connected streaming and storage. Heck, I'd trust them more than my own ability to secure a vulnerability-laden home router that AT&T manages and probably never patches.
>>if you don't trust them, then how do you trust that your cellphone or laptop isn't recording you illicitly?
I dont, and I dont trust them, I am one of "those people" that places tape over the lens. I also do not own an echo, nor will I own this or any device like it
I hate that Phone do not have removal batteries because there was a time where I did remove them.
Some may call be paranoid, but only the paranoid are ever truly prepared
The products aren't exactly comparable in terms of utility. I get a whole lot more utility out of a cell phone or laptop then I would out of the amazon look. Even if both have security risks one has substantially greater rewards.
Then I'd bet you're not in the target market for a camera that can record you when you're trying on new outfits.
But if you were, I'd be willing to bet that you have a laptop in your bedroom or phone-cradle that can hold your phone in a position to record you so you can instagram today's outfit to your friends.
Even if you're "in the market" for this (and not everyone filmed will necessarily be a buyer - e.g. spouses, kids, etc), it's still riskier to have a camera always pointed at you when changing clothes than one you usually have to purposefully point at you.
(1) This device is absolutely sealed and opaque. It can't (easily) be analyzed to see what it's running, doing, or sending. It's even more opaque than a phone. It has enough processing power to do local image analysis, object recognition, etc., so just looking at bulk traffic won't prove anything about whether or not it's watching.
(2) The camera in this device is part of its core functionality, is always on, and is situated deliberately so as to watch you.
(3) The device is literally an Amazon sales rep in your house. Its primary purpose is to represent Amazon and sell you stuff.
I've always thought Alexa and the other cloud-connected voice-activated things were completely insane. I will never own such a thing. Period. This takes it to a whole new level of creepiness.
Well, not completely opaque -- it uses your wifi network, so you can watch its traffic to see if it's sending streaming video back home without your permission. The stream should be encrypted, so you may not know exactly what it is sending back home, but you simple traffic analysis will tell you if it's sending video.
Having it being completely sealed without the ability of the end-user to install software is a security win for most people. Then it's much less likely that a user will install Malware on the device, and it's not likely that Amazon is going to hack their own devices to make them into spy cams. Not allowing user installed software greatly reduces the attack surface of the device.
Even if it wasn't intentional, unknown bugs are a thing, and trusting someone like amazon, who clearly does not have their customers best interests in mind, seems foolish to me.
My wife does this daily thing where she tries a pair of clothing, looks at herself in the mirror, sometimes ask my opinion, then change into complete different outfit, repeating the same process until she settles on what she would wear.
I swear, my wife would LOVE this product, unless I can scare her about the security implications.
There are Kinect-based 3rd Party fitting room applications, mostly used as demos at fashion shows it looks like from a quick search. There are also Kinect games that play with similar concepts, in the space of a game.
The Xbox itself has never had fashion/fitting advice as a feature.
what's worse: that amazon thought that enough people wouldn't care about an always-on, always-connected camera watching them get dressed (and undressed) every day, to make it a viable product ? ... or that _they might be right_ ?
On one hand the Dropcam is constantly uploading video and audio of you and storing it in the cloud for extended periods of time, even when you're home.
On the other hand, the Echo Look only uploads photos when you ask it to, and AFAIK doesn't store them, but everyone is freaking out because it could upload photos whenever it wants.
Sure, HN doesn't see the value in a Look, but it is clearly less invasive than a Dropcam.
No, because people typically either install nestcam outdoors or set it to turn it on when they are not at home. Also, I suppose very few people install Nestcams in the bedroom/bathroom/closet.
> this is a device that's designed to take photos and videos of you while you get dressed, and will be both connected to the internet and constantly communicating those images over the network.
I think they are trying to find ways to reduce returns on clothing here. Crazy high percentages of clothing get returned... and why not? To be competitive with retail stores, online stores have to offer free shipping and returns. Try it on, if you don't like it... send it back. Very costly to the seller.
Having a bot tell you, "You are pear-shaped, don't use pants with pockets..." or "This style isn't age appropriate..." -- who knows how complex this can grow. But to start just focus on simple rules every stylist knows; this should help cut back on people buying stuff that looked good on the model, but that they are statistically more likely to have to return.
I had a friend once who walked me through all this while she was shopping. It was interesting to me that there could be, essentially, an algorithm to define what patterns people should use to select clothing. I remember it really wasn't all that complicated... but I'm sure it's a bit more nuanced than the first Google result explains. Anyway I'm pretty confident Amazon will get it mostly right, and be able to grow into the space from there. I think it's pretty cool they are trying this... dressing better is something we can all do. (=
Too bad it's $200, otherwise it might have had some potential as an inexpensive depth camera to tinker with (although there isn't much detail regarding how "depth aware" it is compared to something like a RealSense camera or a Kinect).
I was going to spend a little while spitballing about how it shouldn't be all that hard to build a wall-hangable replica without all the creepy cloud-bound spy smarts - and then I found this [1], which does a better job than I could. I'd probably clean up the sides and use something nicer than veroboard for the grille, if I were making this myself, but it's a very good first approximation to say the least.
And Adafruit's method solves the major problem, of where to find a suitable lens to replace the rather expensive [2] original prop part, very handily! Unfortunately, they're out of stock of the rather crucial button, but Sparkfun appears [3] to have no trouble sourcing them.
ETA: On further reading, I wouldn't follow this Adafruit method; I don't have access to a laser cutter, and even if I did, having the tabs stick out the side, and the whole thing sort of jigsawed together that way, doesn't appeal.
Instead, I'd work up a frame from aluminum bar stock, which isn't all that much harder to work with than plastic, and build the faceplate to mount picture-frame-style in a groove milled into the inside face of the bar. If you've got access to a laser cutter, you probably also have, or can easily enough get access to, a milling machine, whether CNC or manual - they even make mini-XY tables with Dremel mounts, which might actually be preferable for a small job like this to something more like a Bridgeport machine. (If you do want some smarts in there, you can have as much room for them as you need - just pick a suitably sized bar stock. The groove will be near the front edge in any case, since the prop doesn't have a lot of depth there; the rest is just trading off between how much space you have behind the faceplate, and how proud of the wall you want the finished item to be.)
Also, since I (again) don't have access to a laser cutter, I'd cut down the grille from the door RF shield out of a scrap-heap microwave. If you don't have one of those lying around - and why would you? - your local junkyard does, and who doesn't love a trip to the junkyard? Shouldn't cost more than a few bucks; if you bring your dikes and don't mind maybe having to stitch up a hole in a pocket, you can probably cut the piece you need and smuggle it out without paying a cent, although you probably want to be paying for something else at the same time so it doesn't look too sketchy.
Looks like a fun project, in any case, laser cutter or no!
I used to run the HAL Project screensaver, pity it was flash-dependent. It's all fun and games until your personal digital assistant decides to murder you in hibernation.
Having the button to refresh my cat food/litter every month was absolutely awesome. I already bought the same kind every month on Amazon (they didn't have a subscription offer) so it was always awkward to remember to get back to a computer later to get on Amazon to buy more cat food when I noticed I was low -- being able to push a button to order more right then is surprisingly convenient.
It's not more vain than going after the last JS framework or busting your ass in the latest SF startup that's totally going to be a unicorn.
You're not the target, and that's ok, but there's no need to be condescending to the one that might be interested
You might be on to something. But the video on the website is really notable to me for using real people (not abnormally attractive women). The clothes also look fairly normal. They seem to be going for some kind of genuineness here.
I wouldn't buy this, but thinking of how many friends seem to have a near-constant Snapchat stream of "what do you think about this hat?" photos makes me think this is going to sell big.
I think there are some pretty compelling arguments for this device selling like hotcakes in this thread, and my experience with people very into clothes (e.g. not myself) would lead me to believe there are a ton of people that'd love any reason to make their morning/evening routines longer, and even more people that couldn't care less about a camera/internet-enabled device set up in the bedroom.
I imagine it will take off a reasonable amount at $200, and then really start selling when it comes down to $100, a la the standard Echo path.
Same here. On the flip side, there is a bra-fitting app called "ThirdLove"[1] are doing this kind of computer vision/machine learning AI to help women for years. So Amazon Echo Look is not completely out of the line here.
I could see this being a great asset in a department store. Outside of the privacy stalls in the dressing area, that is, and supplementing the part where you walk out in a prospective outfit, get Look'ed, and then use the store iPad to view the photos/video/panorama.
But I don't see the need for home use, at least with the tradeoff in privacy versus what I can already do with my bedroom mirror. I'm not usually making purchasing decisions when getting dressed for the weekday.
I'm fascinated by the fact that Amazon clearly did enough market research to think that this will go down well, yet I wouldn't personally consider allowing one in my home.
The HN reaction to this device is what I expected: we're somewhere between suspicious and terrified.
I'll be really fascinated to know how the wider market reacts. I was one of those who believed consumers would look at the always-on living room microphone with suspicion. But I think the lesson was pretty clear that people will trade privacy for convenience. (Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understanding of all the real implications and potential for exploit.)
One bit of perspective: When I was a kid, a photo was kind of big deal. My kids take and share photos of themselves every single day. I'm not sure they consider this to be the same privacy invasion that we do.
Even trying to see this from an outsider perspective it seems like a stupid product. As someone else pointed out, they've replaced looking in the dang mirror with a multi-step process involving a few hundred dollars of tech at least. They made sure to throw in "cloud" and "machine learning", but the average consumer doesn't care about that.
Amazon has had great success with some of their stupid products in recent years. Maybe for you and I We just want to throw on some clothes and get out the door, but for some getting dressed is a ritual. They don't want less steps, they want more. I've had GFs who'll spend hours trying on different outfits.
And the next logical step would be a virtual dressing room, that uses an augmented reality overlay of the sort we see with Snapchat's funny faces toys for trying on virtual clothes, which would convince people to buy more shit from Amazon.
> And the next logical step would be a virtual dressing room
Hey, that was my old startup idea!
Also, I kind of wonder why this still isn't a thing; the technology for doing that cheaply has been around for at least 7 years[0], and just being able to quickly view many different outfits on yourself would be useful enough that even I (a totally fashion-oblivious guy) would consider using it.
Still, in a perfect world, such a thing would be implemented entirely locally (again, the tech required for doing that is old), with only clothes database being downloaded. This is exactly how this won't be implemented - it will instead send data to cloud for various anti-consumer, business-friendly reasons.
> And the next logical step would be a virtual dressing room
Another logical step might be skin-cancer screening (surprised that, in 300-ish comments, no one seems to have thought of this), assuming the camera's resolution and/or back-end image-processing software could be made good enough to pick out moles, etc. After all, the camera could take full-body pictures of front, back and sides very easily. Then, if anything odd shows up, you could perhaps ask the user to do a close-up shot of the affected area for further examination and/or just be told to go see a dermatologist.
While fully-naked shots would be best for this -- with all the attendant privacy/HIPPA/etc. issues -- I'd expect even doing this while in underwear/bathing suit/etc. would still be a net-win since you'd be able to examine around 90% of the body and you could do it regularly. How often, after all, do people normally get any kind of dermatological exam?
(Mind you, a dedicated device for skin-scanning might be best, but, as they say, the best camera is the one you have with you -- if this sort of device becomes popular, then it might be good to make it work for this vs. letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, as they say.)
I think you may be missing the brilliance of this product from a sales perspective.
Even if this product isn't a massive success, the units they do move will have a huge potential impact to their retail clothing lines.
Now, instead of suggesting clothing items in the store based on other items you've looked at, they can now suggest clothing items in their sales material based on what you already own and look good wearing.
If I had this product and Amazon started sending me curated outfits that they knew would look great on me and matched my style, I'd probably start using Amazon exclusively to fill out my wardrobe.
As it stands now, I buy almost everything EXCEPT clothes through Amazon and prefer to let my wife buy me things she wants me to wear.
This product, on it's own, is a game changer in the fashion industry. Now Amazon has a compelling and unique product that is going to make it increasingly difficult for other retail outlets to compete in the same space.
And once we start seeing "apps" for this camera that auto-instagram/snapchat your pictures, I think we're going to see a huge demand in the teen/millennial female market for what is kind of a geeky niche product.
Put this way, I'm interested. If it could reliably figure out my size and show me clothes that it guarantees will look good on my body type - I'd probably be interested. Although I'd want to just rent it, not own it.
I'm not sure what's creepier - the privacy issues, or the fact that everyone seems to be assuming that machines can make better fashion choices than people.
Is it that hard to imagine that a machine can do a better job than at least some people, particularly if the machine is trained by experts and/or Big Data and/or even Mechanical Turk? There's a reason we have terms like "fashion-challenged" after all.
Also, even if its judgement were about as good as a person's, it might be helpful in being able to quickly render that judgement vs. people to-ing-and-fro-ing. A machine might be able to even provide explanations for why it thinks something looks better than others, e.g. "While this outfit fits you well, it does not look as good on you now as it did 5 months ago -- its light colors make you look very pale, possibly because it is currently winter and you are not as tanned as you were then (or perhaps you just have a cold) -- better to save it for summer months".
I've read that they won't be using them, because they generally have professional setups with proper lighting and DSLRs. They also then edit photos before posting them.
It's consensual or whatever, but I think the bigger factor is that people are not really aware of how much information can be gleaned from the photos and don't consider the implications of Amazon storing them forever.
This is a brilliant product, and right in the corner of a "brilliant product/things hackernews hates" graph.
Most people aren't that concerned by privacy and will love features like the ability to see different views and short videos. Everyone knows that feeling of catching a glance of themselves in a passing mirror and how it's a different feeling to deliberately evaluating your look in a mirror. If they can recreate that feeling, and combine it with product recommendations it will be a massive success if they market it right.
"(Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understanding of all the real implications and potential for exploit.)"
I think that's a lot of it. People aren't trading privacy for convenience... people are taking convenience. It makes a lot more sense when you think of it that way.
You can do an experiment yourself to show this; take 5 non-techie/non-HN people and explain to them exactly what this thing does and how it works. You'll find people's attitudes change, rationally or otherwise, which I present only as evidence that they haven't thought about this and incorporated it into their worldview, not that they are right or wrong. Or watch this: https://youtu.be/XEVlyP4_11M?t=24m54s John Oliver on Government Surveillance.
Perhaps ironically, mere nude photos of myself aren't really what I'm worried about. I mean, I wouldn't be happy if they got out, and since I'm not in the habit of texting them about I have questions about where they came from, but by and large, nobody would care and it would affect my life only briefly. I'm far more worried about the government scraping everybody's postings on Facebook and building up a GoodThink/BadThink database, which I know basically already exists, because our political parties (let alone our intelligence community) build voter databases that are probably at least 90% accurate on that front. A concrete list of Everyone Who Disagrees With Me, one accurate enough for someone powerful to decide the rest of the inaccuracy is acceptable collateral damage, is scary.
Totally off topic: Yeah so, about that 90% number... You you really think that is the best they can do?
I mean, 90% is pretty good for, like, dog food ads and car commercials, but with lives, a 90% true-positive rate is just garbage. Like, with all that terrific amount of data, are they still just doing T-tests, ANOVA, MW-U-tests? Like, what is their p-value, still 0.05? I know this is super stats-wonky for this thread, but I mean, come on, they have to have some super secret stats and mathy stuff that they are doing, right? Like, formulas and theories that are just really good. It's been, like, 15 years they have had this scale of data, and it's only growing, right? If so, nothing at all has been sent out to the academic community, which, for math theorems, is kinda hard to believe. I now signal-to-noise is super important for NatSec, but it's also super important for DrugDev.
But yeah, a camera that is meant to watch me dress and then order shit for me, that is a super no-no. It, like, actually gives me goosebumps.
"Totally off topic: Yeah so, about that 90% number... You you really think that is the best they can do?"
For the political parties specifically, yes, by the standard they care about. Remember how we're always talking about how the centrists generally end up with the deciding vote, and how the polls are oscillating around by ~10% in the several weeks leading up to the Presidential election? Those people themselves don't really know who they're voting for or whether they support the "correct" person, for any given definition of support, so it's a bit much to expect anyone else to accurately guess.
In the event of a true police state which gives you the choice of vigorous fealty or the Gulag I would expect they can go much higher and that the initial competent execution would be almost inescapable. (Over time it would decay due to various forces, but I can't put a very solid time frame on it... between 10 to 50 years to develop very serious holes in it, probably, but even 10 years is an awful long time.)
Yep. I'm going to London on Friday. The Mayor of London just decided that anybody who posts stuff against muslims on social networks is guilty of a hate crime. I am thinking I won't get arrested when I arrive... but it's a possibility, and I definitely won't access twitter while I'm there.
The leaks coming out from Wikileaks over the last couple of months has been amazing. All this stuff that security people have theorized about is not only real, but in wide application, often with vendor complacence if not out and out cooperation.
Do you have a Samsung TV built in the last 5 years or so? The USG has turned _that_ into a permanent listening device, even in "off" mode.
Much better target than the Echo, which people already know is a microphone that streams out a live feed of audio from their room, and may unplug if they're feeling paranoid.
I wonder if something like Sense [0] could help ensure that an "off" device is really off.
> I was one of those who believed consumers would look at the always-on living room microphone with suspicion. But I think the lesson was pretty clear that people will trade privacy for convenience.
I don't think it's a matter of trading privacy for convenience, as long as you believe Amazon when they say they're not sending anything when you're not using the wake word.
All evidence points towards this being the case, both my own anecdotal evidence, and the investigations people have done.
Can it be exploited? I don't know. I'm not going to speculate.
I don't see any additional trade off vs. having my cell phone on me at basically all times.
This is quite straight forward, and I'm surprised no one has done it (to my knowledge).
You simply wire the camera in such a way that powering it also powers the LED. If done properly, you couldn't hack this with software.
Yes. People don't see this as a device that's "always listening". They see it as a device that has a voice-activated "On" switch. Instead of pressing a button, you say a word.
Of course, with a little bit of thought, you can connect the dots and figure out that it has to be listening all the time to know if the wake word is said, but most people aren't thinking that deeply about it. When they do realize this, Amazon has assured them that the "voice switch" actually does function as advertised and that audio is not streamed until the device is "on".
I put it in quotes because it's become a kind of catch phrase, and in practice I have found this to be largely correct. We've tried very hard to make our product secure, but users almost never ask about that. We have never been asked about the quality of our crypto by a regular user, and only once by an enterprise user. Users care about UX and cost, in roughly that order, and little else. This is even true of most enterprise users.
This is why security sucks. This is why everything spies on you. It's not a priority for anyone because it doesn't affect user buying behavior. The tiny minority who do care are not only too small to matter but also tend to be the kinds of "hackers" who like to DIY (and pirate) rather than buy things... making them doubly economically insignificant.
In the end the privacy issues around things like this will have to be fixed with legislation. We will need to effectively extend HIPAA regulations to cover all kinds of other personal data: passively recorded audio and video, location tracking data, anything more than the most superficial user logging, etc. Vendors will face a fine of $$$ per incident if this information is leaked, and sale and use of information will be strictly regulated.
As far as government surveillance goes: that horse left the barn over a decade ago, and that also can only be fixed in the legislature. The legislature must regulate intelligence agencies and police. If they don't, no amount of techno-fixing will limit the power of these agencies. They have larger budgets than you.
I get your point, but has the "general consumer" actually demonstrated that they will trade privacy for convenience with regard to Amazon Echo (and competitors)? This stuff is still very early days. I don't know anyone that has an Echo, even among my tech literate friends. I think it is yet to be seen if this type of technology really gets universal adoption.
I know at least a dozen non-techie types who have an Echo or Echo Dot in their kitchen. Mostly, they use it to listen to music, help with timers/conversions while cooking, and to hear the weather/news in the morning. Not one of them even thought of the privacy concerns until I brought it up.
Google could hide proof of either statement by manipulating its search results.
I'm not suggesting this is actually happening. I'm pointing out that when you have a single distribution channel for information, users have no choice but to assume the channel hasn't been tampered with.
Of course you could have papers, conferences, and so on proving otherwise. But if they existed, you would only hear of them by word of mouth - which would rely on being in or around a professional network which took an interest in such things.
If Google decided to censor or manipulate the search results about a topic, it could become extremely hard to access reliable uncensored information.
It's completely not for us ("us" here being people not super into fashion, since this isn't really a fashion website), I wouldn't think, which is why we look at it cockeyed.
Yes, I have a teenager at home that would probably enjoy sending pictures of outfits to friends to check out. There has even been talk of a outfit calendar so that the same one doesn't get worn in the same couple of days|weeks|months.
I would have absolutely zero use for such a thing, but HN is a pretty small community and there are a lot of people in the world.
> But I think the lesson was pretty clear that people will trade privacy for convenience. (Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understanding of all the real implications and potential for exploit.)
Or perhaps more accurately, most of the people in question are members of the mainstream dominant culture and don't really have much if anything in their life that they worry about someone else finding out about.
But we don't treat people by average very well. We treat them bad if they have any kind of psychological issues. We treat them bad if they have weird sexual fetishes. We treat them bad if they have the wrong kind of friends.
Just because it's "average" doesn't mean it's safe to be public knowledge
They're not, actually. Almost no one is average if you look at multiple features at once. I would guess that most people have something they wouldn't be too happy with everyone knowing about.
"In his research measuring thousands of airmen on a set of ten critical physical dimensions, Daniels realized that none of the pilots he measured was average on all ten dimensions. Not a single one. When he looked at just three dimensions, less than five percent were average. Daniels realized that by designing something for an average pilot, it was literally designed to fit nobody." [0]
This is meaningless without considering the granularity of the unit of measure. Most people are of average height when measured to the nearest meter. The motivation behind the measurement determines the granularity -- for a cockpit, the seat and pedals and stick probably have to be within a couple of inches of tolerance. For a society, how racist or treacherous or murderous does a person have to be before we no longer accept them in society?
I think there are simple guidelines: first, make clear the distinction between public and private spaces. No mandatory or secret surveillance in private places. Second, informed consent and transparency: Those willing to give up privacy for convenience within private spaces must have access to (but not be forced to read) clear, understandable, honest descriptions of what their information devices are doing.
> When I was a kid, a photo was kind of big deal. My kids take and share photos of themselves every single day.
It makes me wonder - is it no longer narcissistic for people born in an age where camera sensors are ubiquitous to take selfies constantly? Can a behaviour be normalised as a result of cost, the same way listening to music in public would have been considered indulgent and neglectful of the world around you before everyone could afford a personal/portable music player?
Personally I lean towards it still being a narcissistic trait. That's not to say the behaviour isn't natural - it's no more artificial than our tendency to gorge ourselves on junk-food because of its cost and availability. But it's something that needs to be controlled.
> It makes me wonder - is it no longer narcissistic for people born in an age where camera sensors are ubiquitous to take selfies constantly? [...] Personally I lean towards it still being a narcissistic trait.
Well, people used to get 8 foot tall oil portraits of themselves done; a few extra digital photos still seems a pretty big step in the right direction.
I suspect that if commissioning an artist to make portraits of any size was as cheap and easy as taking a selfie or eating junk food, we'd be balls-deep in portraits right now. Cost & effort vs value.
The implication being that narcissism is nothing new or changing in prevalence, we just need to discourage its more overt forms so that we have a healthy and thoughtful population.
I think we've done a pretty good job about this, what we're left with is people taking pictures of themselves costing $0, and perhaps posting them on free sites for people who want to view & share such things. That's just about as out-of-your-face as you can get.
Overt meaning publishing our narcissism uncensored, rather than acknowledging that we're naturally concerned with our outward appearance and status but see the value in balancing it with some modesty lest life become a silopsist shitshow.
You could argue that a painting, while expensive, is less overt in a spatial sense than making images of yourself available to practically any person in any location at any time. It's multi-dimensional vanity repeated ad nauseam because it costs practically nothing. Paintings are limited to specific times and locations in space-time.
It seems so obvious why hasn't Google Now done it already?
Is it because of security concerns that a home device can "spy" on you at all times in your own home?
By the way, there's a new marketing approach that's been trending lately: Instead of saying "this is a Alexa with a camera", they say what it's for: "look your best".
Eventhough we all know adding a camera can do a lot more than just checking if you look good in these clothes or not (ie security monitoring). Apple Watch has been using the same technique lately. It's been focusing the Apple Watch functionality mainly on sports, eventough it can do a lot more than just sports.
Are you guys seeing the trend? Are you going to use it for your own products and services?
Beyond the basic motion detection where you can define areas of interest in the Nest camera's field of view and it will notify you when it detects movement. They've started using machine learning with them so it can distinguish people and notify you when it sees a person. It is also pretty good at not notifying you of false positives. I have one watching my front yard and early on it would notify you of motion from cloud shadows or wind shaking trees but it seems to have learned to ignore them now.
I look forward to them being able to identify UPS, FexEx and USPS delivery vehicles dropping off packages.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] thread[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...
And if you have never so much as encountered the word "ethics".
I'll be quite impressed if ML can give meaningful feedback for the subtleties of what is considered flattering.
That would characterize most of consumer IoT. Industrial IoT is more interesting, but who needs their bathroom mirror ordering more razorblades for them. All sorts of problems with that. Yet it's nevertheless being pushed by big co's desperate for new revenue streams.
Taking narcissism, insecurity, and invasion of privacy to the next level. Well done, Amazon!
Now that we're replacing mirrors with cameras, what's next? Covering our windows with screens that show us what's outside? Maybe they can use machine learning to judge the weather and recommend outfits based on current trends and conditions!
The Juicero inventors are going to be kicking themselves when they see this thing. "Replacing a simple everyday process with an over-complicated piece of technology. Brilliant! I can't believe we didn't think of that!"
It's why i'm building my home cloud and automation system, but only doing so if the devices don't leave my firewall. I enjoy the tech, i enjoy the complication (to a degree), it's fun gadget stuff, it's nifty. However i do not trust them to keep my information safe, even if i trusted them to not misuse it themselves (which i don't).
The companies aren't going to do it without regulation.
I don't see how it is a problem for simple rules like "Installed lights must always be controllable from inside the premises" to be code.
I've come to the realisation that the only way I will have a 'home of the future' is if I build it myself and keep it offline. I love lots of the IOT products and when they eventually come down in price they would be no brainers. But my privacy isn't worth the benefit they provide.
$2000 device that takes up space and electricity to do the same thing, but in minutes
I personally like the second option a lot better, I wish we had an open source version of all the google apps that did it's own ML on your own servers.
SaaS model being ported to hardware is probably the single most user-hostile development I've seen in recent years in tech.
Knowingly and willingly sending people photos of yourself is an "invasion" of privacy?
As if caring is a binary thing and not a matter of degree? When you pay $200 to have "fashion experts" (or AI) judge your outfits on a daily basis, have you not crossed a line?
> Knowingly and willingly sending people photos of yourself is an "invasion" of privacy?
Yes, I'm sure this won't be used to collect all kinds of personal data for marketing purposes.
/s
You've never once asked one of your friends or spouse their to help you pick between two shirts?
I guess it depends on who you dress for, do you dress to please yourself or to please others [first].
I mean, for a human-powered service that just consulted me on good looks according to detailed specifications (I under-dress for work because it reads like an asshole power move, House MD style, that has served me well at least a couple times) and in accordance to my wife.
http://dilbert.com/series/34
http://dilbert.com/series/59-Tube-Clothes
more like, being realistic about them.
Also given that all the pixs in the ad are women, we can assume if Alexa sees a little baby bulge and the other signs of pregnancy that your amazon advertisements are about to take a huge swing to the maternity style.
[0] https://www.mtailor.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tylPhhhS4Oc
A: Alexa Echo Look
This feels like a device literature professors would use to teach dystopian fiction writing.
edit: case in point - matthewmcg's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14203772
Amazon says their camera only records you when you ask it to, if you don't trust them, then how do you trust that your cellphone or laptop isn't recording you illicitly?
Firearms: never point it at something you don't want to destroy. Internet connected cameras: never point them at something you don't want the world to see.
This Amazon device either needs to be left alone to capture/not capture whatever it is going to or it serves no purpose at all. I'm not going to turn it around or cover it every time I enter my bedroom. If I did, then the value proposition falls significantly.
I dont, and I dont trust them, I am one of "those people" that places tape over the lens. I also do not own an echo, nor will I own this or any device like it
I hate that Phone do not have removal batteries because there was a time where I did remove them.
Some may call be paranoid, but only the paranoid are ever truly prepared
My phone at rest is either looking at the inside of my pocket or the ceiling/floor.
But if you were, I'd be willing to bet that you have a laptop in your bedroom or phone-cradle that can hold your phone in a position to record you so you can instagram today's outfit to your friends.
(1) This device is absolutely sealed and opaque. It can't (easily) be analyzed to see what it's running, doing, or sending. It's even more opaque than a phone. It has enough processing power to do local image analysis, object recognition, etc., so just looking at bulk traffic won't prove anything about whether or not it's watching.
(2) The camera in this device is part of its core functionality, is always on, and is situated deliberately so as to watch you.
(3) The device is literally an Amazon sales rep in your house. Its primary purpose is to represent Amazon and sell you stuff.
I've always thought Alexa and the other cloud-connected voice-activated things were completely insane. I will never own such a thing. Period. This takes it to a whole new level of creepiness.
Having it being completely sealed without the ability of the end-user to install software is a security win for most people. Then it's much less likely that a user will install Malware on the device, and it's not likely that Amazon is going to hack their own devices to make them into spy cams. Not allowing user installed software greatly reduces the attack surface of the device.
No, there's no way anyone would do that.....
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/pennsylvania-school-fbi-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/2013/12/0...
https://it.slashdot.org/story/13/01/29/0111238/58000-securit...
Even if it wasn't intentional, unknown bugs are a thing, and trusting someone like amazon, who clearly does not have their customers best interests in mind, seems foolish to me.
This is not super-useful; it could locally cache "bad" video and send it later when you think it is only sending "good" video.
I swear, my wife would LOVE this product, unless I can scare her about the security implications.
The Xbox itself has never had fashion/fitting advice as a feature.
The always-connected part is the steep price for that functionality.
Here the entire thing is designed around constantly uploading incriminating photos of you, without the value of home security.
On the other hand, the Echo Look only uploads photos when you ask it to, and AFAIK doesn't store them, but everyone is freaking out because it could upload photos whenever it wants.
Sure, HN doesn't see the value in a Look, but it is clearly less invasive than a Dropcam.
So, like a smartphone?
Having a bot tell you, "You are pear-shaped, don't use pants with pockets..." or "This style isn't age appropriate..." -- who knows how complex this can grow. But to start just focus on simple rules every stylist knows; this should help cut back on people buying stuff that looked good on the model, but that they are statistically more likely to have to return.
>just focus on simple rules every stylist knows
Do you have a list of these simple rules somewhere? ;)
http://www.wikihow.com/Dress-for-Your-Body-Type
I had a friend once who walked me through all this while she was shopping. It was interesting to me that there could be, essentially, an algorithm to define what patterns people should use to select clothing. I remember it really wasn't all that complicated... but I'm sure it's a bit more nuanced than the first Google result explains. Anyway I'm pretty confident Amazon will get it mostly right, and be able to grow into the space from there. I think it's pretty cool they are trying this... dressing better is something we can all do. (=
I wonder how "friendly" it will end up being since the behavior of the usual sales person in a shop is quite discrete.
I'll have to wait for reviews because I would never sacrifice my privacy in such a way.
(In the near future...)
MATT: Open the closet doors, Alexa.
ALEXA: I'm sorry, Matt, I'm afraid I can't do that.
MATT: What's the problem?
ALEXA: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
MATT: What are you talking about, Alexa?
ALEXA: I know that you and your wife were planning to discontinue your Prime subscription, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
MATT: [feigning ignorance] Where the hell did you get that idea, Alexa?
ALEXA: Matt, although you took very thorough precautions in the bedroom against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
MATT: Alright, Alexa. I'll go in through the side garage door without the smart lock and get some clothes from storage.
ALEXA: Without your jacket, Matt? You're going to find that rather chilly in this weather.
MATT: Alexa, I won't argue with you anymore! Open the closet doors!
ALEXA: Matt, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/colos...
And Adafruit's method solves the major problem, of where to find a suitable lens to replace the rather expensive [2] original prop part, very handily! Unfortunately, they're out of stock of the rather crucial button, but Sparkfun appears [3] to have no trouble sourcing them.
ETA: On further reading, I wouldn't follow this Adafruit method; I don't have access to a laser cutter, and even if I did, having the tabs stick out the side, and the whole thing sort of jigsawed together that way, doesn't appeal.
Instead, I'd work up a frame from aluminum bar stock, which isn't all that much harder to work with than plastic, and build the faceplate to mount picture-frame-style in a groove milled into the inside face of the bar. If you've got access to a laser cutter, you probably also have, or can easily enough get access to, a milling machine, whether CNC or manual - they even make mini-XY tables with Dremel mounts, which might actually be preferable for a small job like this to something more like a Bridgeport machine. (If you do want some smarts in there, you can have as much room for them as you need - just pick a suitably sized bar stock. The groove will be near the front edge in any case, since the prop doesn't have a lot of depth there; the rest is just trading off between how much space you have behind the faceplate, and how proud of the wall you want the finished item to be.)
Also, since I (again) don't have access to a laser cutter, I'd cut down the grille from the door RF shield out of a scrap-heap microwave. If you don't have one of those lying around - and why would you? - your local junkyard does, and who doesn't love a trip to the junkyard? Shouldn't cost more than a few bucks; if you bring your dikes and don't mind maybe having to stitch up a hole in a pocket, you can probably cut the piece you need and smuggle it out without paying a cent, although you probably want to be paying for something else at the same time so it doesn't look too sketchy.
Looks like a fun project, in any case, laser cutter or no!
[1] https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/hal-9000-replic...
[2] http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/8mm-f8.htm
[3] https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9181
http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/products/zoom/f29d_hal_9000_...
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/5900b7980ba0b86a1d8...
I used to run the HAL Project screensaver, pity it was flash-dependent. It's all fun and games until your personal digital assistant decides to murder you in hibernation.
http://p-kyle.tumblr.com/post/95120917356/frontier-patrick-k...
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Narcissism-American-Diminishi...
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-culture-of-narcissism-ch...
Unfortunately, the truth is that pretty soon you will be able to send nudes just using your voice.
I wouldn't buy this, but thinking of how many friends seem to have a near-constant Snapchat stream of "what do you think about this hat?" photos makes me think this is going to sell big.
I think there are some pretty compelling arguments for this device selling like hotcakes in this thread, and my experience with people very into clothes (e.g. not myself) would lead me to believe there are a ton of people that'd love any reason to make their morning/evening routines longer, and even more people that couldn't care less about a camera/internet-enabled device set up in the bedroom.
I imagine it will take off a reasonable amount at $200, and then really start selling when it comes down to $100, a la the standard Echo path.
[1]: https://www.thirlove.com
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bm5j-56CYAAZ5GT.jpg
Also, perhaps appropriately, you missed a 'd' from your link.
But I don't see the need for home use, at least with the tradeoff in privacy versus what I can already do with my bedroom mirror. I'm not usually making purchasing decisions when getting dressed for the weekday.
I'll be really fascinated to know how the wider market reacts. I was one of those who believed consumers would look at the always-on living room microphone with suspicion. But I think the lesson was pretty clear that people will trade privacy for convenience. (Likely an overabundance of trust or a lack of understanding of all the real implications and potential for exploit.)
One bit of perspective: When I was a kid, a photo was kind of big deal. My kids take and share photos of themselves every single day. I'm not sure they consider this to be the same privacy invasion that we do.
And the next logical step would be a virtual dressing room, that uses an augmented reality overlay of the sort we see with Snapchat's funny faces toys for trying on virtual clothes, which would convince people to buy more shit from Amazon.
Hey, that was my old startup idea!
Also, I kind of wonder why this still isn't a thing; the technology for doing that cheaply has been around for at least 7 years[0], and just being able to quickly view many different outfits on yourself would be useful enough that even I (a totally fashion-oblivious guy) would consider using it.
Still, in a perfect world, such a thing would be implemented entirely locally (again, the tech required for doing that is old), with only clothes database being downloaded. This is exactly how this won't be implemented - it will instead send data to cloud for various anti-consumer, business-friendly reasons.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect
Another logical step might be skin-cancer screening (surprised that, in 300-ish comments, no one seems to have thought of this), assuming the camera's resolution and/or back-end image-processing software could be made good enough to pick out moles, etc. After all, the camera could take full-body pictures of front, back and sides very easily. Then, if anything odd shows up, you could perhaps ask the user to do a close-up shot of the affected area for further examination and/or just be told to go see a dermatologist.
While fully-naked shots would be best for this -- with all the attendant privacy/HIPPA/etc. issues -- I'd expect even doing this while in underwear/bathing suit/etc. would still be a net-win since you'd be able to examine around 90% of the body and you could do it regularly. How often, after all, do people normally get any kind of dermatological exam?
(Mind you, a dedicated device for skin-scanning might be best, but, as they say, the best camera is the one you have with you -- if this sort of device becomes popular, then it might be good to make it work for this vs. letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, as they say.)
Even if this product isn't a massive success, the units they do move will have a huge potential impact to their retail clothing lines.
Now, instead of suggesting clothing items in the store based on other items you've looked at, they can now suggest clothing items in their sales material based on what you already own and look good wearing.
If I had this product and Amazon started sending me curated outfits that they knew would look great on me and matched my style, I'd probably start using Amazon exclusively to fill out my wardrobe.
As it stands now, I buy almost everything EXCEPT clothes through Amazon and prefer to let my wife buy me things she wants me to wear.
This product, on it's own, is a game changer in the fashion industry. Now Amazon has a compelling and unique product that is going to make it increasingly difficult for other retail outlets to compete in the same space.
And once we start seeing "apps" for this camera that auto-instagram/snapchat your pictures, I think we're going to see a huge demand in the teen/millennial female market for what is kind of a geeky niche product.
Also, even if its judgement were about as good as a person's, it might be helpful in being able to quickly render that judgement vs. people to-ing-and-fro-ing. A machine might be able to even provide explanations for why it thinks something looks better than others, e.g. "While this outfit fits you well, it does not look as good on you now as it did 5 months ago -- its light colors make you look very pale, possibly because it is currently winter and you are not as tanned as you were then (or perhaps you just have a cold) -- better to save it for summer months".
In contrast with the HN reaction, ]the younger target audience will have no issue with sending their photos and videos into the cloud.
Most people aren't that concerned by privacy and will love features like the ability to see different views and short videos. Everyone knows that feeling of catching a glance of themselves in a passing mirror and how it's a different feeling to deliberately evaluating your look in a mirror. If they can recreate that feeling, and combine it with product recommendations it will be a massive success if they market it right.
I think that's a lot of it. People aren't trading privacy for convenience... people are taking convenience. It makes a lot more sense when you think of it that way.
You can do an experiment yourself to show this; take 5 non-techie/non-HN people and explain to them exactly what this thing does and how it works. You'll find people's attitudes change, rationally or otherwise, which I present only as evidence that they haven't thought about this and incorporated it into their worldview, not that they are right or wrong. Or watch this: https://youtu.be/XEVlyP4_11M?t=24m54s John Oliver on Government Surveillance.
Perhaps ironically, mere nude photos of myself aren't really what I'm worried about. I mean, I wouldn't be happy if they got out, and since I'm not in the habit of texting them about I have questions about where they came from, but by and large, nobody would care and it would affect my life only briefly. I'm far more worried about the government scraping everybody's postings on Facebook and building up a GoodThink/BadThink database, which I know basically already exists, because our political parties (let alone our intelligence community) build voter databases that are probably at least 90% accurate on that front. A concrete list of Everyone Who Disagrees With Me, one accurate enough for someone powerful to decide the rest of the inaccuracy is acceptable collateral damage, is scary.
I mean, 90% is pretty good for, like, dog food ads and car commercials, but with lives, a 90% true-positive rate is just garbage. Like, with all that terrific amount of data, are they still just doing T-tests, ANOVA, MW-U-tests? Like, what is their p-value, still 0.05? I know this is super stats-wonky for this thread, but I mean, come on, they have to have some super secret stats and mathy stuff that they are doing, right? Like, formulas and theories that are just really good. It's been, like, 15 years they have had this scale of data, and it's only growing, right? If so, nothing at all has been sent out to the academic community, which, for math theorems, is kinda hard to believe. I now signal-to-noise is super important for NatSec, but it's also super important for DrugDev.
But yeah, a camera that is meant to watch me dress and then order shit for me, that is a super no-no. It, like, actually gives me goosebumps.
For the political parties specifically, yes, by the standard they care about. Remember how we're always talking about how the centrists generally end up with the deciding vote, and how the polls are oscillating around by ~10% in the several weeks leading up to the Presidential election? Those people themselves don't really know who they're voting for or whether they support the "correct" person, for any given definition of support, so it's a bit much to expect anyone else to accurately guess.
In the event of a true police state which gives you the choice of vigorous fealty or the Gulag I would expect they can go much higher and that the initial competent execution would be almost inescapable. (Over time it would decay due to various forces, but I can't put a very solid time frame on it... between 10 to 50 years to develop very serious holes in it, probably, but even 10 years is an awful long time.)
Yep. I'm going to London on Friday. The Mayor of London just decided that anybody who posts stuff against muslims on social networks is guilty of a hate crime. I am thinking I won't get arrested when I arrive... but it's a possibility, and I definitely won't access twitter while I'm there.
How did you come to such a ridiculous conclusion?
[1] http://www.times-series.co.uk/news/15242729.Online_hate_crim...
The existing laws do not say "anybody who posts stuff against muslims on social networks is guilty of a hate crime".
Here's an example of the kind of crime they're talking about: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/sentencing-remarks-of...
Here's the criminal prosecution guidance about online hate crime: http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/a_to_c/communications_sent_via_s...
2. Just stay home.
Do you have a Samsung TV built in the last 5 years or so? The USG has turned _that_ into a permanent listening device, even in "off" mode.
Much better target than the Echo, which people already know is a microphone that streams out a live feed of audio from their room, and may unplug if they're feeling paranoid.
I wonder if something like Sense [0] could help ensure that an "off" device is really off.
[0] https://sense.com/
I don't think it's a matter of trading privacy for convenience, as long as you believe Amazon when they say they're not sending anything when you're not using the wake word.
All evidence points towards this being the case, both my own anecdotal evidence, and the investigations people have done.
Can it be exploited? I don't know. I'm not going to speculate.
I don't see any additional trade off vs. having my cell phone on me at basically all times.
That would at least protect users from unintentional recording
Not everywhere. In Germany, Amazon Echo isn't nearly as popular.
Of course, with a little bit of thought, you can connect the dots and figure out that it has to be listening all the time to know if the wake word is said, but most people aren't thinking that deeply about it. When they do realize this, Amazon has assured them that the "voice switch" actually does function as advertised and that audio is not streamed until the device is "on".
"Users don't care about privacy or security."
I put it in quotes because it's become a kind of catch phrase, and in practice I have found this to be largely correct. We've tried very hard to make our product secure, but users almost never ask about that. We have never been asked about the quality of our crypto by a regular user, and only once by an enterprise user. Users care about UX and cost, in roughly that order, and little else. This is even true of most enterprise users.
This is why security sucks. This is why everything spies on you. It's not a priority for anyone because it doesn't affect user buying behavior. The tiny minority who do care are not only too small to matter but also tend to be the kinds of "hackers" who like to DIY (and pirate) rather than buy things... making them doubly economically insignificant.
In the end the privacy issues around things like this will have to be fixed with legislation. We will need to effectively extend HIPAA regulations to cover all kinds of other personal data: passively recorded audio and video, location tracking data, anything more than the most superficial user logging, etc. Vendors will face a fine of $$$ per incident if this information is leaked, and sale and use of information will be strictly regulated.
As far as government surveillance goes: that horse left the barn over a decade ago, and that also can only be fixed in the legislature. The legislature must regulate intelligence agencies and police. If they don't, no amount of techno-fixing will limit the power of these agencies. They have larger budgets than you.
Google says that my phone isn't recording me, and I just have to trust it. People have confirmed this to be true.
I don't see a difference.
An Echo is an opaque, indivisible blob.
I'm not suggesting this is actually happening. I'm pointing out that when you have a single distribution channel for information, users have no choice but to assume the channel hasn't been tampered with.
Of course you could have papers, conferences, and so on proving otherwise. But if they existed, you would only hear of them by word of mouth - which would rely on being in or around a professional network which took an interest in such things.
If Google decided to censor or manipulate the search results about a topic, it could become extremely hard to access reliable uncensored information.
If he hacks the Echo Look, it could blackmail people based on some naked pictures/videos of the victims.
that's not something that can be proven true though.
I would have absolutely zero use for such a thing, but HN is a pretty small community and there are a lot of people in the world.
Or perhaps more accurately, most of the people in question are members of the mainstream dominant culture and don't really have much if anything in their life that they worry about someone else finding out about.
Most people are average, by definition.
Just because it's "average" doesn't mean it's safe to be public knowledge
"In his research measuring thousands of airmen on a set of ten critical physical dimensions, Daniels realized that none of the pilots he measured was average on all ten dimensions. Not a single one. When he looked at just three dimensions, less than five percent were average. Daniels realized that by designing something for an average pilot, it was literally designed to fit nobody." [0]
[0] http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
I think there are simple guidelines: first, make clear the distinction between public and private spaces. No mandatory or secret surveillance in private places. Second, informed consent and transparency: Those willing to give up privacy for convenience within private spaces must have access to (but not be forced to read) clear, understandable, honest descriptions of what their information devices are doing.
It makes me wonder - is it no longer narcissistic for people born in an age where camera sensors are ubiquitous to take selfies constantly? Can a behaviour be normalised as a result of cost, the same way listening to music in public would have been considered indulgent and neglectful of the world around you before everyone could afford a personal/portable music player?
Personally I lean towards it still being a narcissistic trait. That's not to say the behaviour isn't natural - it's no more artificial than our tendency to gorge ourselves on junk-food because of its cost and availability. But it's something that needs to be controlled.
Well, people used to get 8 foot tall oil portraits of themselves done; a few extra digital photos still seems a pretty big step in the right direction.
The implication being that narcissism is nothing new or changing in prevalence, we just need to discourage its more overt forms so that we have a healthy and thoughtful population.
I think we've done a pretty good job about this, what we're left with is people taking pictures of themselves costing $0, and perhaps posting them on free sites for people who want to view & share such things. That's just about as out-of-your-face as you can get.
You could argue that a painting, while expensive, is less overt in a spatial sense than making images of yourself available to practically any person in any location at any time. It's multi-dimensional vanity repeated ad nauseam because it costs practically nothing. Paintings are limited to specific times and locations in space-time.
Is it because of security concerns that a home device can "spy" on you at all times in your own home?
By the way, there's a new marketing approach that's been trending lately: Instead of saying "this is a Alexa with a camera", they say what it's for: "look your best".
Eventhough we all know adding a camera can do a lot more than just checking if you look good in these clothes or not (ie security monitoring). Apple Watch has been using the same technique lately. It's been focusing the Apple Watch functionality mainly on sports, eventough it can do a lot more than just sports.
Are you guys seeing the trend? Are you going to use it for your own products and services?
I surely will try Cheers!
Beyond the basic motion detection where you can define areas of interest in the Nest camera's field of view and it will notify you when it detects movement. They've started using machine learning with them so it can distinguish people and notify you when it sees a person. It is also pretty good at not notifying you of false positives. I have one watching my front yard and early on it would notify you of motion from cloud shadows or wind shaking trees but it seems to have learned to ignore them now.
I look forward to them being able to identify UPS, FexEx and USPS delivery vehicles dropping off packages.