Amusing that the story about unwanted side effects of information unwittingly exfiltrated contains numerous identical requests for me to disable my "ad blocker".
Agree. It's the same with anything, when push comes to shove and it means getting by or laying off writers etc the NY Times is going to fall back on basically the same behavior these cough drop or chicken noodle soup or whatever co's are using this health data: targeted advertising, whether that's displaying ads on its site or advertising elsewhere to try and get subscribers.
"Amazon has submitted a patent application, recently granted, outlining how the company could recommend chicken soup or cough drops to people who use its Echo device if it detects symptoms like coughing and sniffling when they speak to it, according to a report by CNET. It could even suggest a visit to the movies after discerning boredom. Other patents submitted by the company have focused on how it could suggest products to people based on keywords in their conversations."
Really glad I don't own one of these things. I don't know if Brave New World or 1984 was right. Looks like the future decided to split the difference.
Wasn't it just party members who had telescreens? Most people (i.e the proles) posed no threat to the Inner Party and therefore weren't monitored that closely.
The proles were less monitored, but there were telescreens hidden everywhere in the city just in case.
Besides why have telescreens, when children ratting out their parents are the most effective soln.? That’s what scares me the most of the next twenty years.
Because such tactics were already successfully used in the past -- WW2 Germany, and post-WW2 Soviet Union. And they were quite effective, too. Seeing as the world is moving into another dystopian era, the same mechanisms can be employed again, this time enhanced by the electronic surveilance too.
Even just a single fraction of it -- a mandatory (at least where I live) cellphone, with permanent location tracking by the service providers is scary enough right now.
It's been a few years since I read it but I remember them going to the woods where they hoped they would be out of the reach of microphones, so I assume monitoring devices were fairly ubiquitous.
Or they're looking for telescreen-free areas in places where they're supposed to be: party members slumming it in prole areas would not be normal and proper (at least beyond basic black market stuff)
Yes, the "proles" mostly live in poverty, and while they can purchase telescreens they're not explicitly kept down, being mostly kept in poverty and entertained.
The party keeps an eye on the behaviour of the masses (and will take out possible leaders arising) but there is no individual oversight.
I regularly do this. Nobody has had an issue with it, and most have voiced their own concerns about the devices they own after I brought it up. Some of them have taken to unplugging them in advance when they know I'm coming by, and others have decided to ditch them entirely out of concern for their own privacy.
That said, my friends and family all know my stance on privacy-invasive tech, so none of them were surprised by my requests.
It's already acceptable to ask people to put their cell phones away in social situations. "Please turn off the monitoring device in the house" is not a large leap.
A software control prevents your iphone from spying on you, and a software control prevents your echo from spying on you.
In both cases you aren't really sure it's the case, you wouldn't know if it were suddenly disregarded or circumvented, and you're just trusting in the good behavior of your chosen provider.
I see your point, but it's conflating a couple of issues. The comment I'm responding to was saying that a smartphone isn't a spy device because it doesn't listen to you, and the Echo does. My point is they're both spy devices, just opaquely crippled to varying degrees.
To the other point, I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with the patents, but it's at least an Echo simply gleaning more from a voluntary engagement with it. I think the general feeling is an Echo is "spying" when it engages itself to listen to your home.
Of course, I have no way to know if my echo is doing that, or if it were to start, and it's out of my hands to prevent it. The same with a smartphone.
If Amazon wanted to spy, probably a smart tactic would be to deliberately "flaw" the wake word recognition such that it could plausibly be a bug, but the result is activating very often randomly. They already kind of do that, it would just need to be more frequent.
You also don't know that you're not being tailed by a PI, that your neighbors are not focusing a mic on your home, or that your dentist isn't on the lizard-peoples' payroll.
However, we all make certain risk tradeoffs based on numerous things, including proxy signals. For instance, I would be intensely surprised to find out my downstairs neighbor was recoding me, based on multiple years of interactions. Likewise, I find the signal Apple sends ("We need a US-based GDPR") about privacy rather more compelling than the signal Amazon sends ("scour the mic for hints about product we can shift").
I mean, sure, while both $huge_bank and your hypothetical deadbeat relative might both steal your money, I bet I know which one you choose to to leave your money with.
> You also don't know that you're not being tailed by a PI, that your neighbours are not focusing a mic on your home, or that your dentist isn't on the lizard-peoples' payroll.
Totally tangential, so feel free to disregard:
This statement reminded me of my experience during my brother's TS clearance (Canada). CSIS readily had accurate data (in surprising detail) about my time spent during a short period they must have observed his family members to use during an interview with him. It was pretty fascinating, mildly disconcerting— but in this case didn't bother me (in the context, I understood why. I certainly wasn't interesting at the time). They only could have captured the data they had by a combination of tailing (however brief or otherwise more expensive much more technical means) and bank records. I was of course none the wiser.
Advertisers are another matter. I have a Google Home Mini. It remains unplugged 100% of the time we're not using it. My phone can always go in another room. If we decide to turn it on to play with it (search something benign or play trivia) then we'll have it on. It's good for that kind of thing, and those are useful enough we don't mind letting Google have the little data that might produce.
There is a huge difference between “my phone is probably not listening to me” and “my home surveillance device, built for the sole purpose of recording as much as possible about me, in order to manipulate my buying habits—is definitely listening to me.”
Your phone is always listening for the command "ok, Google" or "Siri" in the exact same way the echo is listening for "Alexa". So there's not a huge difference. They are the same thing.
You know how my phone is configured? Mine doesn’t respond to any of those phrases, so I conclude there is a small, but nonzero chance that it is listening to everything I do. Conversely, the sole purpose of an Echo is to listen to its environment and take actions based on what it hears. There is a high probability that it is listening at all times. You don’t see the difference?
No, because much like your phone the Alexa can be muted and entirely controlled from the very device you have deemed "safe". You don't need voice commands, they just happen to make it better than a typical bluetooth powered speaker.
Still doesn't change the fact that placement of the Alexa is stationary, so your phone (regardless of how low the probabilities are) is still a considerably more "high risk" device in terms of what it could pick up than an Alexa.
To me this just sounds like another person in a whole line of them that screams about privacy unless they have to give up something that's extremely valuable to them. The Alexa isn't valuable to you. Your phone sure is.
You've just persuasively reworded "both my phone and my echo are currently configured to not spy on me and the vendor assures me of this"
At the base of the claim that Amazon is listening to what your echo can hear is the assumption that they're lying, and at the base of the claim that your iphone isn't listening to you is the assumption that Apple is not.
Are you saying there is an equal probability that an iPhone is recording everything and that an Echo is recording everything? Just because the two things might be happening doesn’t mean they are equally likely.
I think you're responding to the point you want me to be making instead of the one I am. I'm saying they're both very capable, switched-off spy devices, without assigning a trust metric to any provider.
Personally, I wouldn't put it past either company to massively violate my trust if the incentive stars aligned just right, and I think it's silly to pretend otherwise.
The problems of putting a surveillance device in your home and carrying one in your pocket are roughly equivalent, and the rest is a debate about which huge collection of people with a wide array of beliefs and ethics is gooder
I think we can agree that the problems are similar but the risk is very different. Just like plane crashes and car crashes have similar problems but different probabilities/risk.
That's reasonable. Amazon may decide on its own before Apple, their motives are closer today, but I think it's unlikely for either. It'd have to be one hell of a prize to risk what they'd be risking.
A more likely path is law enforcement's habit of putting them in the PR hell of "we could have saved Little Tiny Baby X if these companies weren't so hell bent on protecting perverts and terrorists". Once you have the device, it's only a matter of someone making a sympathetic enough public case that they need access to it.
On that front, I think Apple is taking more proactive steps to keep themselves out of the situation, I'm just not sure it's possible to avoid it completely.
Obfuscating the data would be no more difficult than obfuscating tor traffic by delaying, stuffing, and merging packets. Has anyone done a long term packet analysis of an echo, home, iPhone, pixel, or galaxy?
As far as I know, the hotwords are static because the detector uses a neural network pretrained specifically for those words. Training a new network for a custom hotword would require way too much training data. While it would be possible to instead use a generic network that decodes any type of speech – like it does when in full speech-to-text mode – and then use the outputted representation to compare to a custom hotword, that would be far more compute and power intensive, whereas the specialized network is relatively small. (The specialized network is also probably more accurate.) At least on battery-powered devices, more power usage for something that‘s always running is a dealbreaker. The same pressure doesn’t necessarily apply to home devices that are always plugged in, but all of the major in-home voice assistants also run on phones, and the providers probably prioritize a uniform user experience across devices.
Disclaimer: I could be completely wrong, and/or the situation could change over time due to improved hardware and software. There was a rumor earlier this year that the Google Assistant might add custom hotword support in the future:
My iPhone most certainly is listening right now. "Hey Siri, turn on the living rooms lights", and look Ma, no hands. I've got these things littering the house between a couple iPads, iPhones, watches, and two HomePods, all of which are happy to do my bidding simply by speaking to them.
Perhaps I have misunderstood you, but I fail to see the difference between my phone and an Echo. Now the difference to me is that Apple claims (claims that appear to be backed by evidence) that they won't sell me out. But as far as listening, I believe they function in similar manners.
Apple's is recognizing specifically "hey siri" at all times - it isn't otherwise listening. Perhaps you find the distinction uncompelling, but there you go!
You can also do data analysis locally, reducing the information down to something you can believably argue does not contain the information of what is said (like spectral analysis etc.) and then periodically upload that. You can claim that your product is not 'listening' in the classic sense.
Agree with the first part (I'm not certain how they actually do it), but the latter does not follow. It's still listening, even if it's not actually sending the data elsewhere for processing.
You'd be correct: they do the exact same thing. But people need to justify their opinions when they are inconsistent with reality, so here we are. Android and iPhones both have always on mics. But nobody is dropping their phone.
I don't see a conflict if people admit the potential invasion of pirvacy is worth the utility of a phone, but not the utility of an Echo device. But apparently that alone isn't good enough.
The distinction for me is that Google is an advertising company, and Amazon a retailer; they both stand to make non-trivial amounts of money by listening, storing, and analyzing every little bit of audio they can from your devices.
So far at least, Apple claims to be privacy focused and makes money hand over fist by selling essentially luxury goods. Aside from selling your data to some third party (which seems unnecessary for a trillion dollar company), there's not much Apple could do with it.
TL;DR Personally, I have more trust in Apple not to "spy" because they seem to have nothing to gain from it. Amazon and Google have plenty to gain from spying.
I never said they were streaming audio. They can, however, pick up more audio than is required, and listen for things other than the commands being spoken. Just because someone says "OK Google, whats the weather?" doesn't mean there isn't a conversation going on in the background that they can pick up on.
Google purchasing MasterCard purchase transactions so they can link to their profile of users is a great example of them having zero respect of your privacy.
> Just because someone says "OK Google, whats the weather?" doesn't mean there isn't a conversation going on in the background that they can pick up on.
And filtering out the background conversation is a difficult problem in machine learning, but one that has to be accomplished in order to make the service work correctly.
We don't store the audio, much less the filtered-out noise, but I don't imagine there's any way I can prove that. Maybe an appeal to cost? There's way too much data to do that, even if we wanted to.
The parser output (text) is stored, mind you. You can find that on the Google dashboard.
Storing the data no, but text output as you’ve mentioned, or even passing it into some algorithm that update your profile with some signal that “may be interested in...” is entirely possible with minimal data requirements.
And I’m not saying Google or Amazon are doing this today. If not then it may be one bad earnings call away for some engineer to say “well....we could...”.
Anything is possible in the pursuit of profits. I’d Google is willing to buy users offline credit card transactions to link to their profiles, it’s clear they will slurp up all data available for them. Why not that listening device in people’s home? “Overheard user X saying they signed up at google-ads-customer.com” “overheard user Y saying google-ad-customers service is fantastic”
> Google purchasing MasterCard purchase transactions so they can link to their profile of users is a great example of them having zero respect of your privacy.
You signed the paperwork that gave MasterCard the right to sell your data and your bitching about the company that bought it? For real?
It blows me away just how many people are willing to use services where they are the product (and that's MasterCard and Visa these days too) and then whine when they get sold. Google is just doing what it can to remain competitive. Don't sign anything that means signing away your identity and stop whining.
The conversation is about Googles lack of respect, not Mastercards.
For Maastercard, hiding “we can sell your data” in a 8+ page contract full of small print legalese that’s designed for people to skip over is hardly fair notice. Should people read and understand it? Yes. But most don’t.
Also, it’s silly to say that “you’re the product” with Visa and MasterCard. Most cards have a fee associated (with the norm for any rewards card being around $80-120 in Canada) and they have a insane 20% interest on purchases. That’s vastly different than using Facebook for free.
The privacy quip was directed to Google. Just because they -can- do something, doesn’t mean they should.
The third most valuable company in the world hardly needed to purchase offline purchases to further profile people who don’t know they’re being profiled “to remain competitive”.
It's not that I think they're really that different, but one is very optional and the other is so hard to live without these days. I'm absolutely not happy about the inclusion of those features in phones but the alternatives to having a smartphone are slim and difficult to live with.
What can I say? Does a smartphone make me a hypocrite?
You make an extremely valid point, though. What I would actually like (and what seems really hard to find) is a dumb phone with a 4G hotspot and which does not run Android in any way, shape or form.
To each his own, I guess, but is the exchange of a little bit convenience to a potential privacy nuclear device really worth it?
Does a smartphone make me a hypocrite?
To me, it does. Not to pick on you personally, but 99% of the people freaking out about the Echo own smartphones and carry them around all the time. For the convenience. It makes no sense, unless you realize that the person has just drawn their arbitrary convenience-privacy tradeoff line differently than the Echo owners have.
Smartphones generally don't contain multiple directional microphones that give them the ability to pick individual voices out in a noisy room. They also don't have the advantage of being plugged directly into a wall 24/7, and so any audio surveillance being done would have to take battery life into account, as well as put consideration into the possibility of the device heating up and tipping the surveillance target off that something strange was going on.
Further, despite being generally pretty locked down to the average consumer, smartphones are far less of a black box than the echo/home/etc.
Both are a concern, but technically skilled users are at least able to take steps to reduce the potential for their phones to spy on them. The only way to reduce any spying potential with the echo/home/etc, is not to have one at all.
iPhones have had 4 mics since the 6s, and that is enough to do some beam forming and target individual voices. Phones with 3 mics such as Pixel phones, iPhones starting with 5, and various phones from other manufacturers, can have some basic beam forming capabilities for picking out voices.
There are no real alternatives to a smartphone (this is paramount). Not living with a smartphone is a real social handicap on many levels. You also still have some control over it (compared to an Echo).
An Echo is just the tiniest subset of a smartphone but with some serious privacy risks, all of a very minuscule benefit in convenience. A gimmick most would probably say, the killer app to this day seems to be a kitchen timer. To compare that with a smartphone where tons of every day things can be quite inconvenient without one.
I get your point and on principle I agree. But the line most definitely isn't arbitrary set (even if you do find some practical use for an Echo). The difference is astronomical. That's not to say the current state of affair is depressing and we ought to really try to improve it.
If you say that the relatively low utility of an Echo means it’s not worth the potential downsides, that’s perfectly reasonable.
If you say that people who buy an Echo are insane for willingly putting a spy device in their house, that’s hypocritical and irrational if you have a smartphone.
I think there’s a useful discussion to have in the former case, but alas most of the conversation involves the latter.
Not hypocritical at all - phones would burn out charge in an hour if they were listening all the time. And anyway the listening feature of a phone is incidental, and they can be useful with it turned off.
Echo's only feature is listening and reporting. Its a different device in kind
Phones last several hours when actively doing real-time voice communication. The power draw for passive surveillance would be way lower. Many phones support constant background listening with wake-word activation just like the Echo, with minuscule impact on battery life.
If your phone has a spying feature, are you sure it can be turned off? How do you know?
Because you asked it to. If it didn't that'd be actionable, right? Whereas an Echo is explicitly useless unless its always listening.
So the 'feature' would have to be illegal/surreptitious and exposing it would be big news
Echo, like phones, uses low-power, always-on algorithms to listen for a specific phrase. Only when it hears that phrase does it actually start recording and sending your audio back home.
Are you worried about that low-power, always-on part listening to you? If so, then avoiding the Echo while carrying a phone with the feature switched off is sensible. But I don’t see why this would be worth worrying about, since the data stays local and isn’t saved.
If you’re worried about the device secretly recording you and sending that data to someone else, then the two are equivalent in their threats.
Not only that, but a cybersecurity researcher claims to have created a proof-of-concept for this very kind of low-power listening that you claim doesn't exist (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549).
That's for you to decide, I think. In terms of privacy, we decide what we're willing to give up. The usefulness of an Echo may be worth sometimes seeing ads for chicken soup to some. Some might even think of it as a feature!
If you don't want to know online advertisers to know when you're sick, you're going to be more mindful of just your cell phone and any nearby Echos. Don't have your friends tag you in posts on social media asking how you're doing (this one is completely out of your control), don't search for drug stores or which medicine you need to combat your symptoms, etc. I get the point is to limit your profile as much as possible, but this case seems unreasonably high on the effort to payoff ratio.
It runs KaiOS, which is a fork of Firefox OS IIRC. It's basically a dumb phone, but with some critical "smart" features like wifi hotspot, contacts/calendar sync, etc. It was a breath of fresh air for me.
This is an intriguing choice that I have kept an eye on for a while. However, the source is mostly open-source with some partner bits closed source [1]. Still a great choice, particularly since it has tethering available.
Yeah it's tough. I have an Android phone. I keep location services off on my phone unless I'm actively using maps or navigating. I have turned off location history, have no data plan (WiFi and voice only) and I have disabled the "Hey Google" listener. I use Firefox instead of Chrome browser on the phone, with uBlock Origin. But I'm still undoubtedly leaking some breadcrumbs.
Isn't there also a thing about being trackable because you block everything out? Like it makes you unique and identifiable compared to the normal heard who don't block anything?
I have one device that potentially spies on me. Therefore it is logical that I should also get tons of other devices that spy on me -- or else I will be a hypocrite, no? Also I should refrain from any criticism directed against the spying features that companies put into their products these days. That would also be hypocritical because I have this one device that can spy on me....
I thought the question was valid: you looked down on people who would buy a device that spies on them, yet you bought a device that spies on you.
The point was that the vast majority of people, even us techies, are willing to sacrifice some privacy for the benefits these devices bring us.
(And yes, sometimes these benefits are the direct result of spying. When I shop on Amazon, I often look at the section "Customers who looked at X ultimately bought Y." Thank you, Amazon, for spying on those customers, and recommending a better product.)
This doesn't necessarily mean that product Y is better suited for you in particular it may just mean people might have been artificially funneled into purchasing it either through wide advertising reach or through models such as this. It's certainly useful in some regards but it's not a catch-all and a lot of that is simply because of wide reach advertising, better marketing, and in the case of Amazon many products may just have artificial reviews. You still have to consider the alternative that what you are being recommended, even the "Customers who looked at" doesn't automatically mean there isn't bias or artificial incentives that push people in one direction over another. There's a reason Thaler won the nobel prize in economics for his work on "nudge" theory.
Not only that, but a smartphone provides a spectrum of functionality and any "smart agent" function is just one of many. Many of us turn those features off, meaning that—unless the phone has been rooted or is not doing what its manufacturer claims—it is not even listening for wake words. But a smartphone with this feature disabled still provides its remaining suite of functions.
These in-home "smart speakers" exist only to be agents listening for wake words.
I am not sure why use of a smartphone is painted as hypocrisy when countering the argument that consumers should be cautious about installing smart speakers in their homes. Clearly most people who are cautioning against the use of smart speakers turn off the listening agent features on their smartphones and recommend that others do that as well.
> in the novel, 1984 you didn't have a choice if you want a televisor in your home, or not.
This makes a lot of sense I recently heard a comparison between Orwell and Huxley that stated that they differed mostly on how they believed control would be taken.
In the case of Orwell, he believed that control could be punished into the population and that they'd comply for fear of being punished again. Though, Skinner had evidence that this wasn't really feasible.
In the case of Huxley, he believed that it could be rewarded into the population to the point where the population would crave it and seek it out.
Feels like Huxley had the right idea. People are paying really good money to buy these spy devices to put into their homes.
To be fair, I don't think it's worth discussing which of these paths we will take.
What's worth discussing, although - is the fact that these two (opposing and heavily developed) points of view both will degenerate the society towards the same authoritarian state.
Imagine a world where the government uses terrorism as a justification for it's surveillance programs and the companies are pushing the surveillance devices for customer satisfaction? Wait a minute...
The solution space is much wider and is thus more probable.
> What beggars believe is that in the novel, 1984, you didn't have a choice if you want a televisor in your home, or not.
Actually that was true of government workers and perhaps all of the middle classes but not the workers (“proles”). A key plot element of the story is Winston and Julia heading into the parole areas to (in vain) evade the oversight of Big Brother.
The implication is that under such regimes the workers supposedly believe in the regime (and in the idea that they control it, rather than the other way around) so strongly that oversight is unnecessary. It’s related to why trade unions are illegal in China (and were in the Soviet Union): they are “unnecessary” as the whole government is supposedly the worker’s party.
Orwell was a committed socialist (despite/because of) his colonial service and some of his sneers at “sandal-wearing vegetarians in bad suits” in Wigan Pier. But by the end of WWII he had realized that the socialist regimes were in many ways quite similar to the fascist ones and so his last two novels were reactions to that. But all his writing was from a Fabian socialist-idealist perspective.
You know amazon’s only objective is to sell you goods from their site. No matter what they do and what they say, sooner or later they always will gravitate towards that. So I don’t ever will believe them. Just like I don’t trust google. When times are tough and they have to make a choice the decision is easy for them and their board, it’s never in the user’s favor.
Also this would apply to basically any entity you make a commercial transaction with. The grocery store, your dentist, car repairs, bank, hair dresser, highway tolls, tooth brush sites, opticians. Is it still relevant to explicitly warn yourself "in the end they won't work in my favor" when that's basically living your life as a consumer.
Yes-- For example, there are plenty of scams related to car repair. Some scams result in the customer paying too much for work that's unnecessary/never actually done, and some scams break things to make more work in the future. And then there are the "honest mechanics" who you generally find by literal word of mouth
Likewise, some banks scam customers by charging fees for some things (overdraft, minimum balance etc) and then deliberately structure transactions to make a customer's account enter a fee state. For example, running all withdrawals from a 24 hour period before running all the deposits from that time period so the account is temporarily overdrawn.
Et cetera.
The globally actionable advice might be to keep one's eyes open for signs of scamming, and to keep one's affairs such that damage is minimized + you have alternatives when you confirm that you are being scammed
"Jim, I have detected signs of Dextromethorphan abuse in one of your children. No need to worry, Jim. Help is already on the way, the door will be unlocked automatically via Amazon Key..., your children will be returened, clean..."
"Jim, it appears you have been yelling at your child. We have contacted child services, submitted for a warrant to enter your home automatically to allow lawful entry into your home to remove your child for further investigation."
All it takes is for parts of child services to be privatized like the prisons currently are and we arrive at:
"Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr."
There's a select set of government entities that are so inefficient, bad at what they do and citizen/consumer unfriendly that an evil corporation would be an improvement over the status quo because existing status quo sets the bar on the floor and the evil corporation at least has an incentive to be equally terrible in an efficient way. I put child services, the ATF, DMV (or whatever your local acronym is) and probably a couple others I'm not thinking of in that category.
For some people this is actually useful to have something intelligent figure out what might be useful/helpful. The downside however, is that there isn't an incentive for utility - just whatever is sold to the highest bidder. Recommendations aren't necessarily an evil thing even given context, but the issue is bias and creating the wrong incentives. I like that systems are intelligent enough to know whether product X is best matched up with products Y and Z based on my personal preference, but what I don't like is when that process becomes overly intrusive and recommends things not because of utility but because I've been "nudged" to buy something that some advertiser managed to bid for the widest reach.
> actually useful... however, is that there isn't an incentive for utility
I hope this is something we start recognizing more broadly. Even the 'scary' features of these things could be useful and preserve privacy.
I can think of a half-dozen IoT, voice control, or "Smart Home" features I would really like to have. But in practice, not only am I unwilling to make the privacy tradeoff, the existing solutions are made noticeably lower-quality by their monetization and data gathering. As a basic example, IoT products should (obviously!) work offline for all functionality that doesn't actually need an internet connection. But even a Chromecast won't function on a local network unless it's allowed to call home constantly. People sell lightswitches that cease functioning without a nonstop internet connection. That's insane.
Worse, my ideal use cases would all involve heavy integration between devices. When that's available at all, it's based on attempts at ecosystem lock-in. Not only does that give one company extensive data, it destroys any market competition or ability to choose the products and features I want. Even the crudest tools for integrating for this stuff don't work. IFTTT is "user friendly", but half the supported components can't be used as triggers/inputs without joining their developer program.
The monetization and privacy issues with this stuff aren't just a cost for the service, the way TV ads are. They actively destroy value. I would pay a massive premium for no-data-gathered hardware with robust APIs, but without wiring my own devices from scratch, I can't.
More like "we notice you cough and our home smart smoke detector also detected smoke we now have data points suggestion you are a smoker" let us sell this data to health insurance companies so they can adjust your monthly premium accordingly. Just like those who install devices in their car for insurance companies to reward good driving, those who let us monitor them will be rewarded with better credit(social score).
Until these devices become mandatory, hard requirement by every government to detect and quarantine people carrying a disease spreading virus during an epidemic.
Or the insurance company insisting you install one at home, to screen you if you are a smoker.
“Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” by Jerry Mander.
I’m on my phone right now so can’t really give a good overview of it. But. Suffice it to say, it’s eye opening and 100% relevant. Highly recommend reading.
FWIW, my family has had an Echo for almost a year and we've come to realize it's really just a fancy radio. The microphone is disabled most of the time (except when we're requesting a song), the ordering functionality is disabled because we would never order anything that way, and the various apps and integration we've tried are all more difficult to use than simply doing things "manually". Meanwhile, it's nice to have a DJ in the house.
Amazon is probably a bit frustrated with us and other families like us. Even the songs we listen to are generally a bit old and probably don't indicate very many preferences that advertisers would want to target.
> The data showed Clorox which ZIP codes around the country had increases in fevers.
No, all it did was show you wealthy areas where people buy stupid crap.
These are really stupid devices. I have the thermometer in my hand when I take the reading, I can just glance at it to see the reading, why do I need it to sync to my phone?
> I have the thermometer in my hand when I take the reading, I can just glance at it to see the reading, why do I need it to sync to my phone?
For persons with an uterus, reading a thermometer can be used both for getting pregnant (=have sex on the day where a slight increase in vaginal temperature indicates that an egg is released) and for preventing pregnancies... and the latter case is where the phone sync comes in handy. The pregnancy-prevention apps work by profiling the dates and volumes of periods, plus sex drive, plus temperature, to determine a window in which unprotected sex is risky (IIRC, it's seven days prior to egg cell release + 1 or 2 days after).
We went to a gynaecologist to figure out what the best day was to get pregnant (ie. most fertile). Turns out with a different than standard monthly cycle, you gotta time it a bit different as well. Who'd have guessed? After that, it was a hit within a month. Now, our gynaecologist has to respect our privacy...
Right?! I've always wondered that about this smart stuff. Like the smart water bottle that counts how many bottles of water you've had. Can't you just keep a tally? Like you said, this stuff is just bullshit that rich people buy when they have nothing better to do with their money.
I also really like your point about the data being skewed because of the price!
For me the key is transparency of collection and use (which some will quickly point out is very GDPR-like).
I’m OK to anonymously share my car’s position and speed of in return I get live traffic data from others doing the same. I’m less cool about people collecting my data without me knowing (or burying it deep in unreadable T&Cs) and then selling that for uses that I’m not aware of or didn’t approve.
When you visit a free website or use a free service I get the “your the product” mantra, but for products I buy and put in my home... no.
> (which some will quickly point out is very GDPR-like)
I hope not. Knowing what data is collected and when is rarely argued against by anyone. Requiring the ability to provide it, provide services without it, large penalty maximums, explicit opt-in requirement, vagueness, non-enforceability, etc (etc, etc, etc) are often what people complain about wrt overreach.
This is needed, otherwise there is no real reason to actually protect personal data. Equifax losing the personal data for 50% of Americans should have resulted in major penalties due to the nature of their security.
The other requirements raise the cost of storing this data closer to the damage that can be done by the loss/theft of that data (from the perspective of the data subject).
I'd like to see America regulate chemicals too as they are in Scandinavia, such as requiring evidence proving their safety, but legislation such as TSCA grandfathered in thousands of compounds with zero safety data. If you think you're going to get a crumb from the klepto-plutocrats' table, I think you're gonna need a straight-jacket and a padded room.
People are still dumb enough that they willingly hand over their contact details for a "prize" car or something that no one ever wins in order for some company to sell their details to be nonstop marketed to. And post-Equifax, it's easier than ever to steal a person's identity by opening accounts in their name without them figuring out until collections come calling.
When/if political winds shift far enough, then it might be possible for Americans to gain identity protections as stringent as Germany's. Until then, Americans will continue being screwed and lied to, and it's their fault for being too compliant and not demanding better leadership.
Not with Ajit Pai and the rest of the cronies dynamiting government. This is just wishful thinking so long as billionaires run the politics in America. Changing that, which means tempering the timeless interests of the rich aristocracy to control everything for their exclusive benefit, is a precondition to any meaningful, major overhaul that doesn't benefit them. Otherwise, suggesting such would be waiting for Godot.
Sharing such data contains the information where your car is parked (because that's where it starts moving). It contains more metadata than you may think. It contains information such as your home location (and therefore can be correlated to you), your neighbourhood, your work address, how long and often you work, where you do your groceries, how long you spend with aunt Tillie on Saturday morning. Such data is not anonymous, just like an IP address is PII (in the EU, at least, YMMV).
Not necessarily - it could just change your anonymous ID frequently enough that it would be impossible to know which vehicle did what. If you can't track a single car then you don't know if a car started and another parked where it used to be or if a car just drove past a parked car (assuming the data is not unreasonably precise).
How frequently do you propose? If it would change your 'anonymous' ID e.g. daily then all it has to do is look at the other data where cars seemingly move to and from the very same home address to the very same work address with a strange pause at work for ~8 hours and a strange pause between ~10 PM and ~7 AM due to sleep.
The device discussed in the article also knows our own SSID and surrounding SSIDs (supposedly it has WLAN to communicate) and can therefore also figure out where you live using e.g. Wigle [1].
A way to actually anonymise the data would be to use hashes and only use those instead.
An interesting anonymization - useless for instant traffic updates, though - would be to fuzz the location based on vehicle speed. When you're moving quickly, very precise data would be shared, but when you're stopped, uncertainty would be increased - that way, where you're parked every night would be much less precise than the highway you take to work.
This wouldn't do much good in more rural areas, of course - you could probably zero in on exactly where my parents park their car with a month's worth of data even if you add a mile-wide fuzz to every parked check-in.
I guess depends on the application. Consistent offset would allow measurement of distances, but that does leak some information, so perhaps all-random is better for many uses.
This is what pisses me off about paying for my internet connection, cellular plan, or television plan: everyone says "if you're not paying, then you are the product, not the customer"
But in all of these, one is paying, and then the argument switches to "your paying for access to the service, which is a cesspool of ads, PII exploitation and sentiment manipulation and if you don't like that, the go fuck yourself - you chose to be online"
So, here is a personal RFS: an ISP that gives me a prefiltered pipe which I pay for.
Ads consume data, if I am paying for N gigs of data per month, then I shouldn't be required to pay the data back haul for shit I would want to block at the client anyway.
That's like paying by the pound for ten pounds of steak at the butcher because my 8 ounce steak is sold to me in a 9.5 pound box if trash.
I challenge common networks to be the first to offer a prefiltered connection, where I manage the filter as far upstream to me as possible, so the data consumption on the last mile is purely desired content. And that all inbound ads and outbound trackers are nixed at the ISP. And offer this ideally as a default package option nearly the same price...
Sure, if they can have you pay _and_ sell or monetize your data and habits on the side, so much the better.
People paid for their Vizio TVs, and that didn't (and largely still doesn't) stop them from "being the product" when Vizio decided to collect and sell viewing data.
In the ISP space it similarly goes well beyond them just being a pipe for all the ad-supported tracking garbage you're downloading, they of course want to get directly in on the action as well.
>People paid for their Vizio TVs, and that didn't (and largely still doesn't) stop them from "being the product" when Vizio decided to collect and sell viewing data.
Ironically, I was on the team that helped make that possible at Vizio.... Another reason why I am very opposed to this.
To sum up something I've been thinking about: the panoptic dystopia of our future is evidently not Orwellian, but Molochian (shameless self-promotion: [1]). We aren't forced to install telescreens in our homes; we live within social and psychological incentive structures that subtly nudge us toward willingly having and using them. The network effects enmesh us all within the stickest of webs.
Thanks! It's kind of a blog [1] that mostly consists of me writing down various things that I think about, that I try to format in a presentable way.
I write everything in a notes app called Notion, and it happens to provide zero-effort publishing in a relatively nice way (although a semi-major pain point for me is that it doesn't really provide nice features for the reader, e.g. RSS subscription, or public comments).
A “new version of notion is ready” pop up that can’t be dismissed without clicking “update” makes your link unreadable. I have no idea what Notion is or why a website would need me to click “update” on a pop-up.
This use of data seems reasonable if the company is truly following the constraints described. The way I read it fever rates were sold to advertisers with zip code granularity. Advertisers could then target markets, but not individuals.
It doesn't sound like users would experience creepy invasions of privacy like "I took my temperature and then every website I visited had a NyQuil ad." Instead, there would generally be more ads in one city versus another.
It would be interesting to read their privacy policy, and then note if it has something like:
"We reserve the right to change the terms of this agreement at any time and only have to provide you notice."
That way, before the product is big, they can make those claims, but as soon as it has an entrenched niche, they can do the privacy bait and switch and collect all they want.
By using this Site or Application, you consent to the use
of information that you provide to us in accordance with
this Privacy Policy. We do update this Privacy Policy from
time to time so please review this Privacy Policy
regularly. If we materially alter our Privacy Policy, we
will notify you of such changes by contacting you through
your user account or by posting a notice on our Site or in
the Application. Your continued use of the Site or
Application will be deemed your agreement that your
information may be used in accordance with the new policy.
If you do not agree with the changes, then you should stop
using the Site or Application, and you should notify us
that you do not want your information used in accordance
with the changes.
"If you do not agree with the changes, then you should stop using the Site or Application, and you should notify us that you do not want your information used in accordance with the changes."
I interpret that to mean "If you don't like what we are doing now, your device is a brick, too bad." I wonder if there is a legal way to fight back at that.
How is it enforceable to have a contract that says in it, "this contract can completely change."
Well, if the damn contract changes, don't you need a new contract?
If a landlord and a tenant together sign a contract about leasing a residential space, in almost any Common Law jurisdiction at least, and a landlord puts something to the effect of, "the rental price can change at any time and without notice for the duration of this Agreement," well it's an unenforceable clause. A judge would come down hard on the landlord for this, even if the tenant were being sued for an unrelated reason, because it violates the law.
Now, why can't such laws be passed to squeeze TOCs to the same effect?
Get out of here with, "The Terms of this Agreement can change at any time." Such a set of Terms is completely absurd.
On a theoretical level, I agree with you, it is completely absurd. But look at the other reply, their terms of service say just that. Even more so, that has been done many of other times.
"Apple may update its Privacy Policy from time to time. When we change the policy in a material way, a notice will be posted on our website along with the updated Privacy Policy."
> Now, why can't such laws be passed to squeeze TOCs to the same effect?
I implied it in another comment, but I would love to see a law that "freezes" a term of agreement and makes it impossible for one side to say "agree or be locked out".
Really? What if someone who bought this "smart thermometer" no longer wants to share this information? What if this data concerns a child? What if, somewhere in the future, this business gets into financial problems, or gets bought, and decides to stretch its morals a bit and sell this data non-anonymously?
I think this is a very slippery slope. It seems reasonable now, until it's not.
It's much worse: it's health data. It shows how often and when you were ill. Employers may want to check that before hiring you. Insurers might want to use this data to decide on eligibility and calculate your premium. Or that, but in the future for your child, who never had a choice...
This just throws gasoline on a raging inferno... But here in Indiana, I can legally walk into election central and ask for the voter registration of everybody in the county.
The data contains: Full legal name, address, phone#, email, and Drivers license OR last 4 of SSN.
This would be a breach notification anywhere else.
I think the downvotes are because people might consider this off topic.
Though, realistically the damage has already been done. It no longer matters if your SSN is stolen. A very sizable percentage of adults above a certain age already have this data purchasable for $10 a pop.
A credit freeze is your best option against identity theft.
I think we need to rethink SSNs being used in the way they are today. They were never designed to be your national identity number. We can do better.
> Kinsa sells its data to other companies under the name Kinsa Insights. While Mr. Singh declined to share the names of other customers, citing confidentiality agreements, ...
They (claim) they don't sell the names of their Thermostat users either, it's all anonymized data. Where's the irony?
> It has promoted the usefulness of its “illness data,” which it says is aggregated and contains no identifying personal information before being passed along to other companies.
> One model of Kinsa’s thermometer plugs straight into phones, while another child-friendly version looks like Elmo from “Sesame Street.”
Elmo, a close relative of Joe Camel.
> The company said that most app users opt to share their location and that Kinsa does not link the information to phone numbers or email addresses.
For now. The'll either do it later, or they'll be acquired by BigCo, or if they simply fold then that data will be an asset to sell during liquidation.
I'll admit I'd be very interested in a data broker system that would capture my data and sell it to interested parties that I then can profit on. The amount of data each person generates grows and grows per year, even a small dollar amount would be beneficial I think.
There are several such products being built in the 'crypto' space. Civic intends to allow you to benefit from selling PII for authorization. Datawallet something similar. BAT intends to let you make money by looking at ads (or, to be paid for the data you hand over to advertisers). There are much more following this model of paying for data.
Whether one or more will succeed, wether they need blockchains and cryptocurrencies: the future will tell.
Something interesting is that the more money you have, the more you're worth to advertisers, and the more money you could earn from your data. But the data you least want to share (I have disease X, I was just in a car accident, etc) would by far be the most valuable.
No, just watch the network -- I would bet $100 that the traffic is not secure. Once you figure out the protocol, write a little python script to send it random temperatures and locations.
I like the sentiment, but unfortunately predefining a set of categories doesn't prevent the issues. Even without access to a specific attribute like "wealth" or "race", the learning algorithms used here can still be used to target poor people, minorities, etc. by leveraging correlations within the dataset. Without these features, the bias just gets dispersed through other correlated variables, and makes it harder to detect that an algorithm is disproportionately targeting poor people.
Additionally, even a modest list of attributes can be sufficient to uniquely identify someone.
I think limiting collection is a good thing in general, but to meet your stated goals, we unfortunately have to do more.
"Companies should simply not be _allowed_ to target people based on categories like..."
But what if they just use good enough proxies for those categories? e.g. "X% of people who chose these 3 hobbies have a household income of..." you are just making it so they can't leave a paper trail that points to them saying some words along those lines. They can still come up with the theory in their head and test it and end up saying "we don't target people based on household income, we just advertise to people who chose these three hobbies."
There's a fantastic little blurb about Tim Cook arguing in favor of privacy regulations:
“Today that trade has exploded into a data industrial complex. Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency,” he said.
“These scraps of data ... each one harmless enough on its own ... are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold.”
He said algorithms, a major tool for competitors, were turning harmless preferences into hardened convictions.
“If green is your favorite color, you may find yourself reading a lot of articles — or watching a lot of videos — about the insidious threat from people who like orange,” Cook said.[1]
I love this, almost to the point that I want to move off of the EvilCorp Pixel 2 and onto something that doesn't resell my personal data. It seems Apple is on a higher moral high ground.
Unless you're going to also stop using Tweedledum corp's browser and search, I'd not bother. And if you are then just use, say, Firefox and duckduckgo and ublock origin on your current os.
I use Firefox and DDG on my EvilCorp Pixel. I suspect there's a lot more than that - for example, it seems widely accepted that it funnels GPS data out even if you're not using a GPS-dependent app like GMaps in the foreground.
Is that related to re-selling personal, intimate data (like where you are and what you like) to third parties? If not, why mention it in the context of privacy?
I'm not an Apple user and I don't even think the iPhone UI is particularly great (no . and ? keys on the keyboard? No notification drop-down I can quickly, in one-stop-shop fashion, remove notifications without that silly number on the icon remaining?). But we're talking about privacy.
If you're downloading an app to use something like a thermometer, you're inviting advertisers into your business and this shouldn't offend anybody. What problem does a,"smart thermometer" solve that an abled-adult's memory does not? Is installing an app and setting up an account more convenient than using a pen? "Gee golly, I sure wish there was a gadget that'd help me remember three numbers so I could approximate a pattern!" Said nobody.
This makes me sick. Now I need to take my temperature.
I can't wait for the toilette paper that transmits my poop analysis in real time directly to the good and helpful corporation.
For my own good. Who wouldn't want such close attention to their well being.
And it would only cost 10x more and will be mandated for insurance eligibility.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadReally glad I don't own one of these things. I don't know if Brave New World or 1984 was right. Looks like the future decided to split the difference.
But people put an always on spy device connected to Amazon (or Google, or Facebook [honest, we won't spy on you, maybe]) into their homes.
To each his own, I guess, but is the exchange of a little bit convenience to a potential privacy nuclear device really worth it?
Besides why have telescreens, when children ratting out their parents are the most effective soln.? That’s what scares me the most of the next twenty years.
Explain, please.
Sometimes the truth they say can get ppl in trouble.
Even just a single fraction of it -- a mandatory (at least where I live) cellphone, with permanent location tracking by the service providers is scary enough right now.
The party keeps an eye on the behaviour of the masses (and will take out possible leaders arising) but there is no individual oversight.
That is the last thing I would ever want, the revulsion I felt at the idea was visceral.
There's probably yet another of Zuck's apology tours coming in 2019.
That said, my friends and family all know my stance on privacy-invasive tech, so none of them were surprised by my requests.
Do you not walk around with one in your pocket most of the time? (I don't have one of these devices either, just playing devil's advocate)
In both cases you aren't really sure it's the case, you wouldn't know if it were suddenly disregarded or circumvented, and you're just trusting in the good behavior of your chosen provider.
To the other point, I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with the patents, but it's at least an Echo simply gleaning more from a voluntary engagement with it. I think the general feeling is an Echo is "spying" when it engages itself to listen to your home.
Of course, I have no way to know if my echo is doing that, or if it were to start, and it's out of my hands to prevent it. The same with a smartphone.
If Amazon wanted to spy, probably a smart tactic would be to deliberately "flaw" the wake word recognition such that it could plausibly be a bug, but the result is activating very often randomly. They already kind of do that, it would just need to be more frequent.
However, we all make certain risk tradeoffs based on numerous things, including proxy signals. For instance, I would be intensely surprised to find out my downstairs neighbor was recoding me, based on multiple years of interactions. Likewise, I find the signal Apple sends ("We need a US-based GDPR") about privacy rather more compelling than the signal Amazon sends ("scour the mic for hints about product we can shift").
I mean, sure, while both $huge_bank and your hypothetical deadbeat relative might both steal your money, I bet I know which one you choose to to leave your money with.
Totally tangential, so feel free to disregard:
This statement reminded me of my experience during my brother's TS clearance (Canada). CSIS readily had accurate data (in surprising detail) about my time spent during a short period they must have observed his family members to use during an interview with him. It was pretty fascinating, mildly disconcerting— but in this case didn't bother me (in the context, I understood why. I certainly wasn't interesting at the time). They only could have captured the data they had by a combination of tailing (however brief or otherwise more expensive much more technical means) and bank records. I was of course none the wiser.
Advertisers are another matter. I have a Google Home Mini. It remains unplugged 100% of the time we're not using it. My phone can always go in another room. If we decide to turn it on to play with it (search something benign or play trivia) then we'll have it on. It's good for that kind of thing, and those are useful enough we don't mind letting Google have the little data that might produce.
Still doesn't change the fact that placement of the Alexa is stationary, so your phone (regardless of how low the probabilities are) is still a considerably more "high risk" device in terms of what it could pick up than an Alexa.
To me this just sounds like another person in a whole line of them that screams about privacy unless they have to give up something that's extremely valuable to them. The Alexa isn't valuable to you. Your phone sure is.
At the base of the claim that Amazon is listening to what your echo can hear is the assumption that they're lying, and at the base of the claim that your iphone isn't listening to you is the assumption that Apple is not.
Personally, I wouldn't put it past either company to massively violate my trust if the incentive stars aligned just right, and I think it's silly to pretend otherwise.
The problems of putting a surveillance device in your home and carrying one in your pocket are roughly equivalent, and the rest is a debate about which huge collection of people with a wide array of beliefs and ethics is gooder
A more likely path is law enforcement's habit of putting them in the PR hell of "we could have saved Little Tiny Baby X if these companies weren't so hell bent on protecting perverts and terrorists". Once you have the device, it's only a matter of someone making a sympathetic enough public case that they need access to it.
On that front, I think Apple is taking more proactive steps to keep themselves out of the situation, I'm just not sure it's possible to avoid it completely.
One can check if a device is compromised or not behaving as expected fairly easily by monitoring network traffic.
Disclaimer: I could be completely wrong, and/or the situation could change over time due to improved hardware and software. There was a rumor earlier this year that the Google Assistant might add custom hotword support in the future:
https://9to5google.com/2018/01/29/google-app-7-20-assistant-...
Main source: Apple’s article about “Hey Siri”:
https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html
My phone probably doesn't listen to me right now, but what exactly do I know?
Even if you turn Siri off, it is up to Apple whether or not to really stop listening.
Perhaps I have misunderstood you, but I fail to see the difference between my phone and an Echo. Now the difference to me is that Apple claims (claims that appear to be backed by evidence) that they won't sell me out. But as far as listening, I believe they function in similar manners.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html
As for the distinction, doesn't really matter to me, I'm in the "no way in hell is Amazon getting one of those in my house" camp. :-)
I don't see a conflict if people admit the potential invasion of pirvacy is worth the utility of a phone, but not the utility of an Echo device. But apparently that alone isn't good enough.
So far at least, Apple claims to be privacy focused and makes money hand over fist by selling essentially luxury goods. Aside from selling your data to some third party (which seems unnecessary for a trillion dollar company), there's not much Apple could do with it.
TL;DR Personally, I have more trust in Apple not to "spy" because they seem to have nothing to gain from it. Amazon and Google have plenty to gain from spying.
Google purchasing MasterCard purchase transactions so they can link to their profile of users is a great example of them having zero respect of your privacy.
And filtering out the background conversation is a difficult problem in machine learning, but one that has to be accomplished in order to make the service work correctly.
We don't store the audio, much less the filtered-out noise, but I don't imagine there's any way I can prove that. Maybe an appeal to cost? There's way too much data to do that, even if we wanted to.
The parser output (text) is stored, mind you. You can find that on the Google dashboard.
And I’m not saying Google or Amazon are doing this today. If not then it may be one bad earnings call away for some engineer to say “well....we could...”.
Anything is possible in the pursuit of profits. I’d Google is willing to buy users offline credit card transactions to link to their profiles, it’s clear they will slurp up all data available for them. Why not that listening device in people’s home? “Overheard user X saying they signed up at google-ads-customer.com” “overheard user Y saying google-ad-customers service is fantastic”
You signed the paperwork that gave MasterCard the right to sell your data and your bitching about the company that bought it? For real?
It blows me away just how many people are willing to use services where they are the product (and that's MasterCard and Visa these days too) and then whine when they get sold. Google is just doing what it can to remain competitive. Don't sign anything that means signing away your identity and stop whining.
For Maastercard, hiding “we can sell your data” in a 8+ page contract full of small print legalese that’s designed for people to skip over is hardly fair notice. Should people read and understand it? Yes. But most don’t.
Also, it’s silly to say that “you’re the product” with Visa and MasterCard. Most cards have a fee associated (with the norm for any rewards card being around $80-120 in Canada) and they have a insane 20% interest on purchases. That’s vastly different than using Facebook for free.
The privacy quip was directed to Google. Just because they -can- do something, doesn’t mean they should.
The third most valuable company in the world hardly needed to purchase offline purchases to further profile people who don’t know they’re being profiled “to remain competitive”.
You can buy a non-smart phone right now. It's not hard to live without one, it's a choice that you are now downplaying because it fits your narrative.
This has gone wrong when erroneous connections were made, and IMO, Amazon are overly aggressive about enabling this feature.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
You make an extremely valid point, though. What I would actually like (and what seems really hard to find) is a dumb phone with a 4G hotspot and which does not run Android in any way, shape or form.
Any suggestions
Does a smartphone make me a hypocrite?
To me, it does. Not to pick on you personally, but 99% of the people freaking out about the Echo own smartphones and carry them around all the time. For the convenience. It makes no sense, unless you realize that the person has just drawn their arbitrary convenience-privacy tradeoff line differently than the Echo owners have.
Further, despite being generally pretty locked down to the average consumer, smartphones are far less of a black box than the echo/home/etc.
Both are a concern, but technically skilled users are at least able to take steps to reduce the potential for their phones to spy on them. The only way to reduce any spying potential with the echo/home/etc, is not to have one at all.
An Echo is just the tiniest subset of a smartphone but with some serious privacy risks, all of a very minuscule benefit in convenience. A gimmick most would probably say, the killer app to this day seems to be a kitchen timer. To compare that with a smartphone where tons of every day things can be quite inconvenient without one.
I get your point and on principle I agree. But the line most definitely isn't arbitrary set (even if you do find some practical use for an Echo). The difference is astronomical. That's not to say the current state of affair is depressing and we ought to really try to improve it.
If you say that the relatively low utility of an Echo means it’s not worth the potential downsides, that’s perfectly reasonable.
If you say that people who buy an Echo are insane for willingly putting a spy device in their house, that’s hypocritical and irrational if you have a smartphone.
I think there’s a useful discussion to have in the former case, but alas most of the conversation involves the latter.
Echo's only feature is listening and reporting. Its a different device in kind
If your phone has a spying feature, are you sure it can be turned off? How do you know?
Echo, like phones, uses low-power, always-on algorithms to listen for a specific phrase. Only when it hears that phrase does it actually start recording and sending your audio back home.
Are you worried about that low-power, always-on part listening to you? If so, then avoiding the Echo while carrying a phone with the feature switched off is sensible. But I don’t see why this would be worth worrying about, since the data stays local and isn’t saved.
If you’re worried about the device secretly recording you and sending that data to someone else, then the two are equivalent in their threats.
That's for you to decide, I think. In terms of privacy, we decide what we're willing to give up. The usefulness of an Echo may be worth sometimes seeing ads for chicken soup to some. Some might even think of it as a feature!
If you don't want to know online advertisers to know when you're sick, you're going to be more mindful of just your cell phone and any nearby Echos. Don't have your friends tag you in posts on social media asking how you're doing (this one is completely out of your control), don't search for drug stores or which medicine you need to combat your symptoms, etc. I get the point is to limit your profile as much as possible, but this case seems unreasonably high on the effort to payoff ratio.
It runs KaiOS, which is a fork of Firefox OS IIRC. It's basically a dumb phone, but with some critical "smart" features like wifi hotspot, contacts/calendar sync, etc. It was a breath of fresh air for me.
Just, thank you!
Edit: Review link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/16/nokia-811...
https://support.kaiostech.com/support/solutions/articles/350...
Apart from the fact that it seems to be exactly what I'm looking for it's also reasonably cheap at ~90$.
Google doesn't even respect thoses settings so you're screwed anyway.
The point was that the vast majority of people, even us techies, are willing to sacrifice some privacy for the benefits these devices bring us.
(And yes, sometimes these benefits are the direct result of spying. When I shop on Amazon, I often look at the section "Customers who looked at X ultimately bought Y." Thank you, Amazon, for spying on those customers, and recommending a better product.)
These in-home "smart speakers" exist only to be agents listening for wake words.
I am not sure why use of a smartphone is painted as hypocrisy when countering the argument that consumers should be cautious about installing smart speakers in their homes. Clearly most people who are cautioning against the use of smart speakers turn off the listening agent features on their smartphones and recommend that others do that as well.
This makes a lot of sense I recently heard a comparison between Orwell and Huxley that stated that they differed mostly on how they believed control would be taken.
In the case of Orwell, he believed that control could be punished into the population and that they'd comply for fear of being punished again. Though, Skinner had evidence that this wasn't really feasible.
In the case of Huxley, he believed that it could be rewarded into the population to the point where the population would crave it and seek it out.
Feels like Huxley had the right idea. People are paying really good money to buy these spy devices to put into their homes.
What's worth discussing, although - is the fact that these two (opposing and heavily developed) points of view both will degenerate the society towards the same authoritarian state.
Imagine a world where the government uses terrorism as a justification for it's surveillance programs and the companies are pushing the surveillance devices for customer satisfaction? Wait a minute...
The solution space is much wider and is thus more probable.
Actually that was true of government workers and perhaps all of the middle classes but not the workers (“proles”). A key plot element of the story is Winston and Julia heading into the parole areas to (in vain) evade the oversight of Big Brother.
The implication is that under such regimes the workers supposedly believe in the regime (and in the idea that they control it, rather than the other way around) so strongly that oversight is unnecessary. It’s related to why trade unions are illegal in China (and were in the Soviet Union): they are “unnecessary” as the whole government is supposedly the worker’s party.
Orwell was a committed socialist (despite/because of) his colonial service and some of his sneers at “sandal-wearing vegetarians in bad suits” in Wigan Pier. But by the end of WWII he had realized that the socialist regimes were in many ways quite similar to the fascist ones and so his last two novels were reactions to that. But all his writing was from a Fabian socialist-idealist perspective.
Also this would apply to basically any entity you make a commercial transaction with. The grocery store, your dentist, car repairs, bank, hair dresser, highway tolls, tooth brush sites, opticians. Is it still relevant to explicitly warn yourself "in the end they won't work in my favor" when that's basically living your life as a consumer.
Likewise, some banks scam customers by charging fees for some things (overdraft, minimum balance etc) and then deliberately structure transactions to make a customer's account enter a fee state. For example, running all withdrawals from a 24 hour period before running all the deposits from that time period so the account is temporarily overdrawn.
Et cetera.
The globally actionable advice might be to keep one's eyes open for signs of scamming, and to keep one's affairs such that damage is minimized + you have alternatives when you confirm that you are being scammed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIuf1V1FhpY
"Your kids are starving. Carl's Jr. believes no child should go hungry. You are an unfit mother. Your children will be placed in the custody of Carl's Jr."
You will enjoy this debate about that exact question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31CcclqEiZw
Fantastic oratory, excerpts acted out by famous actors, intriguing ideas. Marvelous production.
I hope this is something we start recognizing more broadly. Even the 'scary' features of these things could be useful and preserve privacy.
I can think of a half-dozen IoT, voice control, or "Smart Home" features I would really like to have. But in practice, not only am I unwilling to make the privacy tradeoff, the existing solutions are made noticeably lower-quality by their monetization and data gathering. As a basic example, IoT products should (obviously!) work offline for all functionality that doesn't actually need an internet connection. But even a Chromecast won't function on a local network unless it's allowed to call home constantly. People sell lightswitches that cease functioning without a nonstop internet connection. That's insane.
Worse, my ideal use cases would all involve heavy integration between devices. When that's available at all, it's based on attempts at ecosystem lock-in. Not only does that give one company extensive data, it destroys any market competition or ability to choose the products and features I want. Even the crudest tools for integrating for this stuff don't work. IFTTT is "user friendly", but half the supported components can't be used as triggers/inputs without joining their developer program.
The monetization and privacy issues with this stuff aren't just a cost for the service, the way TV ads are. They actively destroy value. I would pay a massive premium for no-data-gathered hardware with robust APIs, but without wiring my own devices from scratch, I can't.
Until these devices become mandatory, hard requirement by every government to detect and quarantine people carrying a disease spreading virus during an epidemic.
Or the insurance company insisting you install one at home, to screen you if you are a smoker.
I’m on my phone right now so can’t really give a good overview of it. But. Suffice it to say, it’s eye opening and 100% relevant. Highly recommend reading.
Amazon is probably a bit frustrated with us and other families like us. Even the songs we listen to are generally a bit old and probably don't indicate very many preferences that advertisers would want to target.
No, all it did was show you wealthy areas where people buy stupid crap.
These are really stupid devices. I have the thermometer in my hand when I take the reading, I can just glance at it to see the reading, why do I need it to sync to my phone?
"Log in with facebook to see your temperature"
I wonder if there's a "share temperature on Facebook" button in the app?
For persons with an uterus, reading a thermometer can be used both for getting pregnant (=have sex on the day where a slight increase in vaginal temperature indicates that an egg is released) and for preventing pregnancies... and the latter case is where the phone sync comes in handy. The pregnancy-prevention apps work by profiling the dates and volumes of periods, plus sex drive, plus temperature, to determine a window in which unprotected sex is risky (IIRC, it's seven days prior to egg cell release + 1 or 2 days after).
I also really like your point about the data being skewed because of the price!
I’m OK to anonymously share my car’s position and speed of in return I get live traffic data from others doing the same. I’m less cool about people collecting my data without me knowing (or burying it deep in unreadable T&Cs) and then selling that for uses that I’m not aware of or didn’t approve.
When you visit a free website or use a free service I get the “your the product” mantra, but for products I buy and put in my home... no.
I hope not. Knowing what data is collected and when is rarely argued against by anyone. Requiring the ability to provide it, provide services without it, large penalty maximums, explicit opt-in requirement, vagueness, non-enforceability, etc (etc, etc, etc) are often what people complain about wrt overreach.
This is needed, otherwise there is no real reason to actually protect personal data. Equifax losing the personal data for 50% of Americans should have resulted in major penalties due to the nature of their security.
The other requirements raise the cost of storing this data closer to the damage that can be done by the loss/theft of that data (from the perspective of the data subject).
- Require companies to register before collecting personally identifying information (what, why, from whom, etc).
- Specify how & when privacy policies are distributed.
- Audit companies to ensure they adhere to their own privacy policies.
People are still dumb enough that they willingly hand over their contact details for a "prize" car or something that no one ever wins in order for some company to sell their details to be nonstop marketed to. And post-Equifax, it's easier than ever to steal a person's identity by opening accounts in their name without them figuring out until collections come calling.
When/if political winds shift far enough, then it might be possible for Americans to gain identity protections as stringent as Germany's. Until then, Americans will continue being screwed and lied to, and it's their fault for being too compliant and not demanding better leadership.
The device discussed in the article also knows our own SSID and surrounding SSIDs (supposedly it has WLAN to communicate) and can therefore also figure out where you live using e.g. Wigle [1].
A way to actually anonymise the data would be to use hashes and only use those instead.
[1] https://wigle.net/
This wouldn't do much good in more rural areas, of course - you could probably zero in on exactly where my parents park their car with a month's worth of data even if you add a mile-wide fuzz to every parked check-in.
Are you old enough to have bought or subscribed to physical newspapers or magazines? We were the product back then too.
But in all of these, one is paying, and then the argument switches to "your paying for access to the service, which is a cesspool of ads, PII exploitation and sentiment manipulation and if you don't like that, the go fuck yourself - you chose to be online"
So, here is a personal RFS: an ISP that gives me a prefiltered pipe which I pay for.
Ads consume data, if I am paying for N gigs of data per month, then I shouldn't be required to pay the data back haul for shit I would want to block at the client anyway.
That's like paying by the pound for ten pounds of steak at the butcher because my 8 ounce steak is sold to me in a 9.5 pound box if trash.
I challenge common networks to be the first to offer a prefiltered connection, where I manage the filter as far upstream to me as possible, so the data consumption on the last mile is purely desired content. And that all inbound ads and outbound trackers are nixed at the ISP. And offer this ideally as a default package option nearly the same price...
People paid for their Vizio TVs, and that didn't (and largely still doesn't) stop them from "being the product" when Vizio decided to collect and sell viewing data.
In the ISP space it similarly goes well beyond them just being a pipe for all the ad-supported tracking garbage you're downloading, they of course want to get directly in on the action as well.
Ironically, I was on the team that helped make that possible at Vizio.... Another reason why I am very opposed to this.
[1] https://www.notion.so/The-Bottom-Up-Surveillance-State-8ea9a...
I write everything in a notes app called Notion, and it happens to provide zero-effort publishing in a relatively nice way (although a semi-major pain point for me is that it doesn't really provide nice features for the reader, e.g. RSS subscription, or public comments).
[1] https://www.notion.so/eff0rtfu11-39e0544567de4a1887b2614e84c... (I've also added a link to the bottom of that post.)
It doesn't sound like users would experience creepy invasions of privacy like "I took my temperature and then every website I visited had a NyQuil ad." Instead, there would generally be more ads in one city versus another.
"We reserve the right to change the terms of this agreement at any time and only have to provide you notice."
That way, before the product is big, they can make those claims, but as soon as it has an entrenched niche, they can do the privacy bait and switch and collect all they want.
I interpret that to mean "If you don't like what we are doing now, your device is a brick, too bad." I wonder if there is a legal way to fight back at that.
Well, if the damn contract changes, don't you need a new contract?
If a landlord and a tenant together sign a contract about leasing a residential space, in almost any Common Law jurisdiction at least, and a landlord puts something to the effect of, "the rental price can change at any time and without notice for the duration of this Agreement," well it's an unenforceable clause. A judge would come down hard on the landlord for this, even if the tenant were being sued for an unrelated reason, because it violates the law.
Now, why can't such laws be passed to squeeze TOCs to the same effect?
Get out of here with, "The Terms of this Agreement can change at any time." Such a set of Terms is completely absurd.
Take Apple https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
"Apple may update its Privacy Policy from time to time. When we change the policy in a material way, a notice will be posted on our website along with the updated Privacy Policy."
> Now, why can't such laws be passed to squeeze TOCs to the same effect?
I implied it in another comment, but I would love to see a law that "freezes" a term of agreement and makes it impossible for one side to say "agree or be locked out".
Really? What if someone who bought this "smart thermometer" no longer wants to share this information? What if this data concerns a child? What if, somewhere in the future, this business gets into financial problems, or gets bought, and decides to stretch its morals a bit and sell this data non-anonymously?
I think this is a very slippery slope. It seems reasonable now, until it's not.
It's much worse: it's health data. It shows how often and when you were ill. Employers may want to check that before hiring you. Insurers might want to use this data to decide on eligibility and calculate your premium. Or that, but in the future for your child, who never had a choice...
The data contains: Full legal name, address, phone#, email, and Drivers license OR last 4 of SSN.
This would be a breach notification anywhere else.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bloomington/comments/9qqvmz/tilin_i...
Edit: seriously, why the downvotes? We're talking about a legal breach that leaks PII if you choose to exert your right to vote.
Buying listening posts is voluntary. Voting shouldn't leak your PII.
Feels more like you are starting a fire next to another one rather than talking about the currently one ablaze. (To expand on your analogy)
Though, realistically the damage has already been done. It no longer matters if your SSN is stolen. A very sizable percentage of adults above a certain age already have this data purchasable for $10 a pop.
A credit freeze is your best option against identity theft.
I think we need to rethink SSNs being used in the way they are today. They were never designed to be your national identity number. We can do better.
The irony.
> It has promoted the usefulness of its “illness data,” which it says is aggregated and contains no identifying personal information before being passed along to other companies.
Elmo, a close relative of Joe Camel.
> The company said that most app users opt to share their location and that Kinsa does not link the information to phone numbers or email addresses.
For now. The'll either do it later, or they'll be acquired by BigCo, or if they simply fold then that data will be an asset to sell during liquidation.
Whether one or more will succeed, wether they need blockchains and cryptocurrencies: the future will tell.
I say the EU makes a list of categories that you are allowed to categorize users in:
- Age (only year, no month or day this is not relevant).
- Sex
- City or geographic area with at least 500,000 people.
- 5 items selected from a list of hobbies / preferences..
etc.
Companies should simply not be _allowed_ to target people based on categories like being ill, being poor, being terminal, being depressed etc...
And here's the kicker: if every company is held to these same standards no one company has a disadvantage.
Well, except the entire ads industry scene which is now set in anarchy.
Additionally, even a modest list of attributes can be sufficient to uniquely identify someone.
I think limiting collection is a good thing in general, but to meet your stated goals, we unfortunately have to do more.
But what if they just use good enough proxies for those categories? e.g. "X% of people who chose these 3 hobbies have a household income of..." you are just making it so they can't leave a paper trail that points to them saying some words along those lines. They can still come up with the theory in their head and test it and end up saying "we don't target people based on household income, we just advertise to people who chose these three hobbies."
“Today that trade has exploded into a data industrial complex. Our own information, from the everyday to the deeply personal, is being weaponized against us with military efficiency,” he said. “These scraps of data ... each one harmless enough on its own ... are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold.” He said algorithms, a major tool for competitors, were turning harmless preferences into hardened convictions. “If green is your favorite color, you may find yourself reading a lot of articles — or watching a lot of videos — about the insidious threat from people who like orange,” Cook said.[1]
I love this, almost to the point that I want to move off of the EvilCorp Pixel 2 and onto something that doesn't resell my personal data. It seems Apple is on a higher moral high ground.
1 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-privacy-apple/apple-bo...
I'm not an Apple user and I don't even think the iPhone UI is particularly great (no . and ? keys on the keyboard? No notification drop-down I can quickly, in one-stop-shop fashion, remove notifications without that silly number on the icon remaining?). But we're talking about privacy.
I can't wait for the toilette paper that transmits my poop analysis in real time directly to the good and helpful corporation. For my own good. Who wouldn't want such close attention to their well being. And it would only cost 10x more and will be mandated for insurance eligibility.