> ... another joked: “Can someone explain to me why this is ‘scary’? I’m not interesting enough to care if they have my contacts or audio.”
I used to try to explain to people why they should care about companies and governments vacuuming up vast amounts of data indiscriminately, and I get back "It improves my search results ... why should I care?"
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
I really dislike this comparison. I see it everywhere in privacy communities and I think it should die. That comparison doesn't give anything to the other person. Amazon provides a service whilst violating privacy. The person gets something out from having their privacy violated. Hence the reply "it improves my search results". Your comparison would mean they have their privacy violated, they lose access to their phone for a day, and they get nothing to compensate. Change the comparison to give me your phone for a day and I'll give you £1000 and suddenly you'll get far more different answers.
Give me access to your phone and your email for a couple of days - it will improve our conversations, so many topics suddenly! Effectively this is what search and advertising does - probes on the intimate side of things and exposes them via tuned search or as ad themes.
You can just change to the the following experiment:
You walk into your local grocery store. A store employee, stops you at the door and asks, 'If you hand over your phone for a second, I will quickly copy over its contents onto my computer. Then, while you shop, I will read through your recent your messages, your emails, your browsing history. Based on that, I will recommend a product or two I think you will find useful. Do we have a deal?'
I don't think many people would actually go through with this (rather than just say they would), if we actually did this experiment. Remember, someone got beaten up for wearing google glasses in public and not taking them off when requested. Humans are really bad at thinking in the abstract, but when things are there in the flesh, is when real preferences are revealed.
Actually, it sounds awesome, provided they recommend a great product I would not otherwise notice, don't spend too much time copying, etc. Not sure what your problem is with that offer.
> Change the comparison to give me your phone for a day and I'll give you £1000 and suddenly you'll get far more different answers.
That may be a better comparison, but with one caveat. If you offer the money in exchange for the phone's data now, the user will balance out the privacy value of what they intuitively believe is on their phone at this very moment.
Instead, the offer should be "I'll give you £1000 now in exchange for the right to access all of your phone's data for a day at the time of my choosing, and without you knowing it beforehand or after the fact".
I liken it to the census in Germany prior to World War II which asked religion, people gave it thinking they were doing nothing wrong. 1939 came around and it was used as a register for genocide.
It's still happening. Anything you say or do no matter how trivial or meaningless could become a vehicle for your annihilation sometime in the future. Those that don't care about their privacy because they have nothing to hide, clearly haven't given enough thought to the repercussions of loss of privacy.
> I liken it to the census in Germany prior to World War II which asked religion, people gave it thinking they were doing nothing wrong. 1939 came around and it was used as a register for genocide.
Do you have a source for this? I remember reading about similar things, but I can't for the life of me remember the sources to give to others.
This. A thousand times this. Unfortunately very few seem to believe that this scenario is possible, even after pointing out that’s exactly how the Nazis operated. The response is almost always a variation of “It will never happen here.” At which point, I lose a little more hope for the future of humanity.
… which might be the least of your concerns under a fascist regime.
I mean that it doesn’t take an authoritarian regime change for surveillance capabilities to become scary.
It could be your neighbor democracy tapping into your national systems, the national company entrusted with public information to misuse them for profit…
To be fair dictatorial regimes are terrible even without advanced technology.
Ask someone who lived in the USSR, East Germany, Lybia, Syria, et...
Maybe your phone does not snitch on you but your neighbors can
Yes, but technology makes the dictatorial regimes more efficient, and increases their reach. Now just imagine a slightly different timeline than our own, in which the coup in January succeeded. Now President for Life Trump takes all Alexa files (and similar from Google and Apple) in existence and scan them for people calling him an asshole. Those people will never get a government job again. If you happened to have called his regime illegal, you get some people in uniform knocking on your door.
That being true, there is a radical difference in scalability and speed of implementation of an old-fashioned dictatorial regime and the potential that could be achieved with the current ubiquitous technical oligopoly of devices with potential access to voice recordings.
Getting a significant proportion of the population loyal or scared enough to snitch on their neighbours takes time and effort, and that's without counting the infrastructure needed to handle and process the reports. Do the snitches phone a government snitchline, write an email, talk to the officer in charge of their sector? How is the specific identity of the people they are snitching on determined? Which bureaucratic level makes the decision to act on a report, are the reports triaged, can you coalesce the data?
Now compare that with how comparably fast an authoritarian regime with unlimited access to home recordings could keep control of a population, together with the power of large scale voice recognition and data analysis. What's more, under the right circumstances, it could even be implemented with plausible deniability that the regime is even using this data, in the same way that the British Government (if you forgive the unfortunate analogy) was able to make use of the intelligence gathered by Bletchley Park without the Germans ever suspecting their cryptography was being cracked.
And now thanks to vaccine passports they have an easy mechanism to block access to services for wide groups of people. I am 'sure' no government will abuse them to restrict the people they find undesirable, whether those would be an ethnic minority, people of different religion or with opposing political views.
Protests against the thing you are doing? Just find a single infected person in that group, then claim that the entire group must quarantine for two weeks for their safety. Protests over.
I'm fairly sympathetic to the "I don't have anything to hide" argument simply because in most cases it's probably true.
The reality is that most people don't have much information worth keeping private (beyond authentication information). Nor do most people have a strong use case for free speech protections. I mean, let's be honest, most folks have boring lives and aren't really saying anything interesting.
That said, some people do have secrets that could be used against them. And some people do have speech/ideas that are dangerous to entrenched authority. Those things are worth protecting and that's why we must be vigilant. You can't protect the good stuff without also protecting all the banal drivel that the rest of us traffic in.
It’s a matter of the individual vs collective perspective. In America at least it seems like we have to always find some tie tot he individual because reasoning about collective issues doesn’t gain traction.
I may not have anything to hide, but we have something to fear about an all encompassing surveillance society.
I think people would be extremely upset if police started buying real time access to GPS data from your phone in order to more efficiently locate speeding cars (instead of setting up post somewhere and wait for a car they feel is speeding "enough to be worth it", or eventually get board of the spot, and just go after one of random cars that is speeding slightly.)
People sometimes do things like planning a surprise for a loved one. sure you might not really care about hiding this from the government, but hiding it from some corporations can be important. Imagine planning a surprise party for your spouse, only to have the surprise ruined by all devices in the house starting to show ads for something you searched for. (I've literally seen this sort of thing happen. I've even had things my parents who live multiple states away look up start showing up in my advertisements, because ad-tech companies correlated a unique identifier for one of my devices with unique identifiers from their devices, because both shared a public IP address for a while when I was visiting a month or so previously.)
People generally have many things they would not be comfortable being generally known. Exactly how much money you make. How much debt you have. How many things you bought out of state that you failed to declare use tax on. The fact they they sometimes use piracy sites or torrents to watch movies or shows from services they don't subscribe to. What type of porn they watch. The list goes on.
Once again, many (but not all) of those are things people don't really care if the government knows. They may only want to keep this information from people who know them, or even specific individuals. But these are still things to hide.
In all honesty why should I care? It makes things easier for me. Does my life become somehow worse there are recording aromatically stored. I am not looking for a theoretical scenario. At this moment why should I care?
>” For myself, why should I care about other peoples use case. That's irrelevant”
I didn’t actually expect them to be so blunt and honest about the impact on anyone aside from themselves being irrelevant. That reply really speaks for itself and needs no response.
There’s a large number of people who only care about immediate perceived convenience, and don’t think about the implications of a continual slow eroding of privacy/freedom. Privacy really is freedom. They just don’t think anything bad will happen to them personally to have zero privacy, so why should they care? It’s like the race to the bottom type thing with product quality (and more) when people just want the cheapest product
A long time ago I configured Alexa to only keep my audio recordings for 3 months (the shortest option other than None).
Reviewing the settings today I see Amazon added several new classifications of history (e.g. Smart Home Device History, Recorded Sounds History). Rather than respecting / extrapolating my existing choice, they all defaulted to Forever.
These kind of dark patterns are depressing, but I catch a glimmer of hope when I see people like this raising awareness of them.
To me, it's more than just privacy. It's about simple decency. As a developer I've always felt a strong sense of stewardship for the trust my users have placed in me.
I have a similar experience with iOS. I have disabled every settings I could find related to iCloud. It is pretty clear that I don't want my data stored there, and yet every new app or service enables the iCloud integration.
I love to find out that iCloud got turned on/enabled for something only when I get a notification that my storage is near full. I didn't want to use you in the first place, fuck off already!
The problem is inability to enforce law when it comes to big corporations. They have enough money to buy entire WH so there is nothing you can do about it apart from just not giving them more money.
I know HN is supposed to give the benefit of the doubt, but this is exactly what I would expect from Amazon at this point: an illusion of choice.
I mean, they are under investigation for lying to Congress, right? If true, what possible reason can we believe that they would not also lie to their customers?
Linkedin has also been doing this for years - tens upon tens of different "communication preference" options. They keep adding more, or renaming existing ones and defaulting them to on.
Wow, did they send her wav files? Havn't seen these in a while, thought that if you were to collect millions of audio clips from your customers you would use some compression algorithm, but apparently Amazon does not have to care about such details.
they might store them in a compressed format but send them as wav to make it less easier for the customer to store/process or maybe the compression is proprietary and they dont want to reveal internal details of their models.
Wow, they installed Amazon smart speaker devices and didn't delete the data nor make changes to collection in settings and then is surprised that it exist.
No, ignorance is ingrained. You are very likely ignorant about a lot of non-tech (or work) related stuff. It's impossible to be reasonably informed about every aspect of things in your life.
Ignorance about tech is real, normal mainstream users suffer from it and victim-blaming is a non-solution. People, normal general people, aren't yet understanding privacy implications and the ways you can control those on the products they use. Mass adoption of these technologies will, by default, imply that a large parcel of the customer base is ignorant about its potentially harmful (or morally disputed) sides.
Your point of view is completely unempathetic, being ignorant about tech is the default state in our world, expecting that the solution to dark patterns designed to confuse normal people is to blame the ignorant victims is ultimately pointless.
It isn't just an ignorance of tech, it is an ignorance to things in general. It would be like bringing a stranger into your house where you also have children. Ignorance with tech isn't just an issue with people being ignorant to technology, but overly naive and ignorant in general. Yes, they can claim ignorance but if you bring a stranger into your house and something happens to your child I don't think a judge is going to be all that sympathetic and say... oh, poor you, how could you have known that is a bad idea?!? If you want to enable that, then that is on you but it simply isn't based in reality where that would be a good idea. Buying tech and bringing it into your house that listens to you and is connected to the Internet, and then acting surprised to find out that they keep recordings is on the same level of ignorance. So, yes if you are the type to bring strangers into your house and are surprised when something bad happens, then I can see how you'd be sympathetic.
Your analogy completely breaks down when you, again, fly past the empathetic and pragmatic part of "how things actually are" to "how I think things should be".
Again, people aren't educated about the risks of bringing a tech item into their daily lives, you are taught since a kid to be aware and cautious of strangers. The ignorance is ingrained because our daily/life education hasn't caught up to the reality. Diminishing that reality to fit into your worldview filled with judgment helps nothing, doesn't help to educate anyone and doesn't help the issue at hand.
You're basically soap-boxing, it's quite exhausting to be honest.
Buy three smart speakers with microphones and several light bulbs and then you get shocked that someone is listening to what you're saying. This is the really shocking part. People need to get educated.
That's overly reductionist. It's more like saying that there's no point in raising the drawbridge because there's an open window the enemy can shoot arrows through.
Yours is certainly a more fitting metaphor. But either way the point is that it’s ridiculous to assert that one must be 100% perfect in all their endeavors in order to criticize or critique an action.
Yes, because FB, Amazon and everybody else invest in constant PR to assuage people's concerns. That messaging is much more common than stories of people discovering what they actually store.
I know someone who is head of critical SRE for a major wall street trading firm (you've definitely heard of them), who has these devices all over their house running everything from window blinds to outdoor accent lighting.
They know very well Amazon is probably listening to and recording every last work spoken in their home, but just cannot see what the big concern is, arguing that Amazon risks massive legal and PR damage if it's ever found out they acted on any information gleaned from his (or anyone's) household audio. I don't understand this risk calculation at all.
Either a) they are not using it, or b) if they do use against the terms then a 7-9 figure cheque will be arriving in your letterbox.
If it an 50-50 chance that Jeff is sitting there listening to your friend all day, then risk calculation wise buying a device has a net present value to the buyer of $5mil.
I tend to agree Amazon probably isn't using the information in untoward ways. Yes, the pr hit alone would be devastating.
But I think you have to calculate in the risk of a leak or hack, which is definitely non-zero. The files exist, so they are a privacy and security risk.
The fact that this user and and everyone reacting to the news and TikTok video are shocked, it shows that simply having a page is not acceptable and that the average person does not expect this to happen even though they agreed to it in the ToS
I've never understood the Alexas and Google homes. People complain about the "1984"cation of our society and houses, and then they literally PAY to have an always on microphone in their homes.
You either dont care about it and buy that stuff, or you care and dont put those devices in your private spaces.
There are plenty of good points regarding issues like defaults that you set getting changed and the fact that you are using a device that has to be aware of you speech to function. I agree that we should be aware that we are giving up something in exchange for using any device with a microphone that listens for prompts. Personally I'd rather have an Amazon device on the basis that Amazon doesn't view me as a product (mostly), they view me as a customer and they cherish their customers. It is very deep in the culture they built. Any notion that you might bust the trust of your customers would quickly get squashed within Amazon. This is based on having worked there and having seen this firsthand at the highest levels of the company. The reason I hesitate is that advertising as a business is growing rapidly in Amazon. Advertising puts me in the "product" role which creates a conflict between me as customer and me as product. I sure hope the leadership at Amazon sticks to their guns on the leadership principals. I am also a chrome, android, and gmail user. I'd never use a google voice assistant. This is a bit irrational because the privacy leaking from my browser and email is probably way worse than anything else.
My first thought when I saw this video was that I already knew that this was happening. I suppose the only real answer to this type of problem would be regulation about what information can be stored about a user, and for how long. Make everything more Blunt, as well as put limits in place for how long things like audio clips could be stored, I would vote for 24 hours. I don't reckon that they are being actively used for anything beyond that point anyway.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] thread> ... another joked: “Can someone explain to me why this is ‘scary’? I’m not interesting enough to care if they have my contacts or audio.”
I used to try to explain to people why they should care about companies and governments vacuuming up vast amounts of data indiscriminately, and I get back "It improves my search results ... why should I care?"
I've given up.
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
This seems simple enough for most people to understand the crazyness of the idea.
Hm, you are correct - I haven't looked at it in this way. I guess it's time for another round of questions around my family and workplace!
You walk into your local grocery store. A store employee, stops you at the door and asks, 'If you hand over your phone for a second, I will quickly copy over its contents onto my computer. Then, while you shop, I will read through your recent your messages, your emails, your browsing history. Based on that, I will recommend a product or two I think you will find useful. Do we have a deal?'
I don't think many people would actually go through with this (rather than just say they would), if we actually did this experiment. Remember, someone got beaten up for wearing google glasses in public and not taking them off when requested. Humans are really bad at thinking in the abstract, but when things are there in the flesh, is when real preferences are revealed.
That may be a better comparison, but with one caveat. If you offer the money in exchange for the phone's data now, the user will balance out the privacy value of what they intuitively believe is on their phone at this very moment.
Instead, the offer should be "I'll give you £1000 now in exchange for the right to access all of your phone's data for a day at the time of my choosing, and without you knowing it beforehand or after the fact".
I liken it to the census in Germany prior to World War II which asked religion, people gave it thinking they were doing nothing wrong. 1939 came around and it was used as a register for genocide.
"Oh that would never happen today..."
https://www.businessinsider.nl/genocides-still-going-on-toda...
It's still happening. Anything you say or do no matter how trivial or meaningless could become a vehicle for your annihilation sometime in the future. Those that don't care about their privacy because they have nothing to hide, clearly haven't given enough thought to the repercussions of loss of privacy.
Do you have a source for this? I remember reading about similar things, but I can't for the life of me remember the sources to give to others.
I mean that it doesn’t take an authoritarian regime change for surveillance capabilities to become scary.
It could be your neighbor democracy tapping into your national systems, the national company entrusted with public information to misuse them for profit…
Getting a significant proportion of the population loyal or scared enough to snitch on their neighbours takes time and effort, and that's without counting the infrastructure needed to handle and process the reports. Do the snitches phone a government snitchline, write an email, talk to the officer in charge of their sector? How is the specific identity of the people they are snitching on determined? Which bureaucratic level makes the decision to act on a report, are the reports triaged, can you coalesce the data?
Now compare that with how comparably fast an authoritarian regime with unlimited access to home recordings could keep control of a population, together with the power of large scale voice recognition and data analysis. What's more, under the right circumstances, it could even be implemented with plausible deniability that the regime is even using this data, in the same way that the British Government (if you forgive the unfortunate analogy) was able to make use of the intelligence gathered by Bletchley Park without the Germans ever suspecting their cryptography was being cracked.
Now imagine how small that minority needs to be with modern tech.
Protests against the thing you are doing? Just find a single infected person in that group, then claim that the entire group must quarantine for two weeks for their safety. Protests over.
People close and lock the door when they go to the bathroom, but it's not like the rest of us don't know what you do in there. It's just private.
Just because there's nothing secret in what I do, doesn't mean that I necessarily comfortable with other people knowing.
The reality is that most people don't have much information worth keeping private (beyond authentication information). Nor do most people have a strong use case for free speech protections. I mean, let's be honest, most folks have boring lives and aren't really saying anything interesting.
That said, some people do have secrets that could be used against them. And some people do have speech/ideas that are dangerous to entrenched authority. Those things are worth protecting and that's why we must be vigilant. You can't protect the good stuff without also protecting all the banal drivel that the rest of us traffic in.
I may not have anything to hide, but we have something to fear about an all encompassing surveillance society.
I think people would be extremely upset if police started buying real time access to GPS data from your phone in order to more efficiently locate speeding cars (instead of setting up post somewhere and wait for a car they feel is speeding "enough to be worth it", or eventually get board of the spot, and just go after one of random cars that is speeding slightly.)
People sometimes do things like planning a surprise for a loved one. sure you might not really care about hiding this from the government, but hiding it from some corporations can be important. Imagine planning a surprise party for your spouse, only to have the surprise ruined by all devices in the house starting to show ads for something you searched for. (I've literally seen this sort of thing happen. I've even had things my parents who live multiple states away look up start showing up in my advertisements, because ad-tech companies correlated a unique identifier for one of my devices with unique identifiers from their devices, because both shared a public IP address for a while when I was visiting a month or so previously.)
People generally have many things they would not be comfortable being generally known. Exactly how much money you make. How much debt you have. How many things you bought out of state that you failed to declare use tax on. The fact they they sometimes use piracy sites or torrents to watch movies or shows from services they don't subscribe to. What type of porn they watch. The list goes on.
Once again, many (but not all) of those are things people don't really care if the government knows. They may only want to keep this information from people who know them, or even specific individuals. But these are still things to hide.
Everyone does illegal stuff all the time myself included anyways
>” For myself, why should I care about other peoples use case. That's irrelevant”
I didn’t actually expect them to be so blunt and honest about the impact on anyone aside from themselves being irrelevant. That reply really speaks for itself and needs no response.
Reviewing the settings today I see Amazon added several new classifications of history (e.g. Smart Home Device History, Recorded Sounds History). Rather than respecting / extrapolating my existing choice, they all defaulted to Forever.
These kind of dark patterns are depressing, but I catch a glimmer of hope when I see people like this raising awareness of them.
To me, it's more than just privacy. It's about simple decency. As a developer I've always felt a strong sense of stewardship for the trust my users have placed in me.
I mean, they are under investigation for lying to Congress, right? If true, what possible reason can we believe that they would not also lie to their customers?
I just turned auto-updates off after that, and stopped downloading apps for stuff that has a perfectly serviceable website.
But I'm surprised they didn't send these wav files in extremely high samplerate, to annoy those who request the data.
Ignorance about tech is real, normal mainstream users suffer from it and victim-blaming is a non-solution. People, normal general people, aren't yet understanding privacy implications and the ways you can control those on the products they use. Mass adoption of these technologies will, by default, imply that a large parcel of the customer base is ignorant about its potentially harmful (or morally disputed) sides.
Your point of view is completely unempathetic, being ignorant about tech is the default state in our world, expecting that the solution to dark patterns designed to confuse normal people is to blame the ignorant victims is ultimately pointless.
Again, people aren't educated about the risks of bringing a tech item into their daily lives, you are taught since a kid to be aware and cautious of strangers. The ignorance is ingrained because our daily/life education hasn't caught up to the reality. Diminishing that reality to fit into your worldview filled with judgment helps nothing, doesn't help to educate anyone and doesn't help the issue at hand.
You're basically soap-boxing, it's quite exhausting to be honest.
I do find it praiseworthy that privacy advocates are present on all channels though.
Now it's literally true.
دیوار موش داره و موش گوش داره Divar Moosh Dareh, Moosh Goosh Dareh.
Not to say it couldn't, but by default, it's not supposed to be listening.
While alexi is.
My intent is different.
Might as well open the floodgates! There’s no point anymore.
They know very well Amazon is probably listening to and recording every last work spoken in their home, but just cannot see what the big concern is, arguing that Amazon risks massive legal and PR damage if it's ever found out they acted on any information gleaned from his (or anyone's) household audio. I don't understand this risk calculation at all.
Either a) they are not using it, or b) if they do use against the terms then a 7-9 figure cheque will be arriving in your letterbox.
If it an 50-50 chance that Jeff is sitting there listening to your friend all day, then risk calculation wise buying a device has a net present value to the buyer of $5mil.
But I think you have to calculate in the risk of a leak or hack, which is definitely non-zero. The files exist, so they are a privacy and security risk.
From there you can get to all the recordings and control how long to retain them for.
reacting to tiktok videos in an overly exagerated shocked manner is exactly the point of tiktok videos, it is not really a reflection of the content.
Perhaps wait until we are married and live together?
Sounds not very reasonable.
How do you like it, extreme privacy advocates?
> The TikToker then ...
And just like that I am out.
If she were distributing pamphlets, should she avoid doing so in a public square because it has CCTV cameras everywhere?
You either dont care about it and buy that stuff, or you care and dont put those devices in your private spaces.
They are doing it because they are deep in "Brave New World"ification process and are enjoying it.
These are mostly separate groups of people.
It's also cheap enough that it gets added to shopping carts, then distributed to friends as gifts.