
If You Care About Privacy, Throw Your Amazon Alexa Devices into the Sea - kupatrupa
https://gizmodo.com/if-you-care-about-privacy-throw-your-amazon-alexa-devi-1834277824
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kermitismyhero
Every time I visit a friend or relative who's all excited about their new
voice assistant gadget, I make sure to do my best to demonstrate the potential
problems with the technology.

"Hey Siri, who around here can sell me a few kilos of cocaine?"

"Hey Alexa, add a thousand feet of rope, a half-dozen ballgags, a box of latex
gloves, and a few shovels to my shopping basket."

"Hey Google, give me the addresses of every ammonium nitrate seller, gun
store, cargo van rental company, and elected official in a hundred-mile
radius."

~~~
RugnirViking
Wheras presumably amazon or pure internet search history does not provide
exactly the same function?

I mean yeah, audio does provide a new attack vector, but then pretty much
every new technology does.

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kermitismyhero
There is a difference between deliberately typing those sorts of queries into
a search field on a website, and a remotely-administered audio bug capturing
every random bit of conversation within earshot.

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RugnirViking
a website quite literally is a remotely administered user input gatherer. I
understand the concern about open microphones, but we've had this conversation
about everything from laptop microphones to smart TVs before. I don't see how
something like a new device changes the equation much compared to those
things.

~~~
kermitismyhero
You and I and many others on internet forums may have had that conversation,
but most non-geeks in my social circles haven't. Deliberately fucking with
their voice assistants is a great way to quickly get them thinking hard about
the issue with a minimum of conversation. It's past time to appeal to logic.
It's now time to go straight for the emotional jugular by inducing some panic.

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partomniscient
What happens if you care about privacy AND the environment?

~~~
badrabbit
Turn it into a minature flower pot.

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java-man
don't buy it in the first place.

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mikece
Or give it to an elderly family member and sue Amazon for negligence if
something happens and their surveillance device doesn't summon an ambulance?

~~~
glenneroo
I guarantee it's buried in their TOS that you can't sue them for inability to
deal with emergency situations. Relatedly, do you remember all the smartphone
pop-up warnings about lack of emergency-line (e.g. 911) access when using a
wifi connection?

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LinuxBender
I was on a zoom call with a coworker. It turns out you can order things over
zoom. She now has 10,000 rolls of toilet paper queued up.

I am curious how sensitive these devices are. If I add a sub-audible track to
a youtube video, could I get millions of people to order a case of beef jerky?

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mr_overalls
Is there any evidence that the general public's attitude toward privacy and
surveillance is changing? Is _anyone_ persuaded to care who isn't already
privacy-conscious?

I see articles like this all day long about Facebook, Amazon, Google,
Microsoft, telecom providers, device manufacturers, DHS, Walmart, etc, etc.

Snowden's revelations about the NSA were in 2013, for God's sake.

And I don't evidence of any systematic change: no legislation to protect
personal privacy (like the EU's GDPR), no effective boycotts of companies that
abuse privacy.

It feels like we're losing, or have already lost.

~~~
salawat
I got my grandma on board with avoiding Facebook.

She thought that the principle of "don't broadcast me, just make my stuff
accessible" was in play.

I sat down with her and explained what they really do, and it really turned
her off. I've been pondering whether I could implement something better. A
"this is me" web-connected data vault with fine grained, easy to adjust access
controls; but I'm not sure there's any way to streamline the process enough
where you could hand it to the user and not have them instantly be out of
their depth. I don't believe a centralized solution is the way to go. Too much
potential for abuse, and it makes it too easy to manipulate.

Plus, Mastodon may beat me to it.

Also, I've gotten my family/friends to give the various voice assistants a
wide birth, sans Siri unfortunately.

Funny how being the techie in the family has turned me into a comparative
Luddite. Then again, no one I talk to tends to like being productized either.

~~~
KumarAseem
Do you have any points written out with examples when you explain to your
folks? I could use those. Thumbs Up!!! for being successful in weaning a
person off from such portals and getting them to understand Privacy and
Security.

~~~
salawat
Basically, I just took some time to sit down and talk with her. Spent about a
week with her on vacation. Talked about a lot of things.

Specifically though, if I had to hone it down to something I think it was when
I connected the dots for her about how Facebook really works. She'd thought it
was more of a "place I can put stuff where friends could reliably get to it."
A sort of classified ad as a service as it were I think is how we boiled down
her understanding of it.

Then she had said she kept getting flustered because people she didn't know
kept popping up in her feed.

That's when I explained to her that Facebook wasn't like a passive paper. They
were actively utilizing any data she made available to them to expand their
network, to the point of actively putting her information in front of people
she hadn't even met, and may very well not care to.

Then I explained to her the whole "Big Data" thing. Basically how more and
more, things one would just do were being made in ways that they generated
data trail that businesses would sell to other businesses. There was no such
thing as professional discretion anymore.

She really didn't like that and honestly never realized that that sort of
thing happened. She knew they were a valuable company, but didn't realize it
was because they were selling access to the user base.

Talked to her a bit about the history of the company, and it's CEO's more
controversial statements, and connected those with a couple of personal
experiences I've had fighting to "do the right thing" in the industry with
minimal luck.

I learned that week that people want somewhere to provide a "social media
experience" as it were, but what I got from her is there was a much higher
expectation of privacy and control of who got access than she was
experiencing.

She still "checks it" occasionally to keep up with other members of the
family, but I"m happy to say, she's much more satisfied with how I streamlined
her email client than what she gets out of her Facebook account.

I don't know if it'll work for anyone else. She was already only tentatively
dipping into the platform as it was, so it just may not have taken as much
convincing to get the dots connected. Hell, it may not have been anything I
said about it, but just that it disturbed/stressed me out so much that did it.

But nevertheless, I got Gram to back slowly away from Facebook. That means
I've at least convinced one person. Should get easier from there right?

~~~
andrei_says_
Thank you.

