
Goodbye privacy, hello Alexa: Amazon Echo, the home robot who hears it all - walterbell
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/21/amazon-echo-alexa-home-robot-privacy-cloud
======
cryptoz
In threads like this, Hacker News is usually in favour of the privacy
invasion, and it's happening here right now. I wish everyone would understand
that the question isn't about your own personal privacy ("I'm willing to give
that up" says everybody).

The question is about our society, and government+corporate control. In a
society where everyone accepts 5-10 different listening devices into their
homes, a system is being built to listen to every thing we say and watch
everything we do. How many different manufacturers built all the microphones
and cameras that are in the same room as you and also connected to the
internet? How many countries had their hands on those devices before they got
to you?

The problem is with a big trend in society that we _want_ to be listened to
and watched, because it makes life more convenient on a personal level. Even
HN users will happily let in multiple surveillance robots into their homes
because they are comfortable with the personal decision.

But it's NOT a personal decision. When we have a society that so willingly
accepts and even _desires_ to live in a surveillance state, well, that's a
problem. This is a direct path to a totalitarian surveillance state that would
be much much more invasive than anything written about in 1984. We should be
working to avoid that world, not invite it in as fast as we can open the door.

~~~
dunkelheit
While I agree with you, I think I am starting to suffer from a kind of
"privacy violation revelations fatigue". I have read the article and thought
"so here is another gimmick that steals away a bit of my privacy, so what? no
big deal". And that's scary.

The problem is there is no coherent programme on how to counter the privacy-
encroachment trend. There is a bit of general dissatisfaction, some idealists
urging us to repent and leave the clouds and a good amount of profiteers
trying to benefit from that dissatisfaction. Meanwhile the forces behind this
trend are organized and powerful.

~~~
Frondo
Another aspect to the problem is that honoring privacy as a human right is a
social issue, not a technology issue.

The place to work on solving it (and, like all social issues, it won't be
"solved," just "solved for now") is in the public and political spheres. We
need to talk about this. We need to have the conversations that describe "what
does privacy look like" and "how can we get the benefits from these gadgets
while protecting our human rights".

Right now, no one's talking about a world in which you _can_ have your cell
phone listening to your conversations, while ensuring that private companies
and government agencies can't make use of that willy-nilly. The place where
those restrictions have to happen is in the laws we need to develop to keep
them all in check.

We can't go back to a primitive, disconnected world, but right now, no one's
leading us forward either.

~~~
CaptSpify
> The place where those restrictions have to happen is in the laws we need to
> develop to keep them all in check.

IMO we need that, but we also can't rely on that. Things like the NSA have
shown that the laws don't really matter. Yes, we should be striving for those
laws, but we should also not depend on them, when they can so easily be
ignored.

------
ChuckMcM
I am dreading the first time I visit someone with one of these. I wonder how
they will respond to my request to turn it off? offense? understanding? pity
and ridicule?

Amazon and Google have both figured out that the current commodity of value
isn't oil, and isn't energy in general, it is information. The people with
more information have an advantage over the people with less information. That
advantage can be tactical, commercial, or personal. So collecting information
while being helpful gives you a much better asset than simply being helpful
does.

We've read stories of cops misusing information databases to check up on their
ex-spouses or future dates, Google SREs reading people's mail, and NSA
analysts passing around "juicy" intercepts with prurient but no security
value. We've got people on the other side of these piles of information and
those people are fallible, and susceptible to bribes, and generally
susceptible to poor judgement.

What is worse, is that the "service" that something like Alexa offers is
pretty credibly offered in a modest cluster of modern machines with GPUs. I
would expect that a 32 node Jetson cluster could provide reliable general
speech recognition and execution. But the illusion is that you need a "big
cloud" of machines to do this. You don't.

So I'm all in favor of these interesting technologies helping folks out, but I
really wish we would step past 'cloud' and into a 'house cluster' which, like
your furnace or HVAC system, does the work locally and protects your privacy.
It is a company I have seriously considered starting twice now. Even in the US
people can get multi-megabit connectivity to the Internet from their home,
there is no reason any more why you shouldn't be able to access your pictures,
your media, your email, and communities by talking to your server in your
house. The challenge is turning it into an appliance. That is doable I
believe.

~~~
DanBlake
The device does not communicate with amazon.com until you say "alexa" and the
code/hardware for that is all done on the device itself. So its not listening
and streaming everything, all the time. It is listening all the time, yes- But
only for the word 'alexa' \- If it hears that word, then it starts talking to
amazon.com and starts doing voice recognition. This is very easy to verify
yourself with a network monitor.

Do you ask people with iphones or androids to turn them off when you are close
because its listening for "hey siri" or "ok google" ?

If you asked me to turn mine off when visiting, I would happily oblige you-
And then label you as a nutcase who has lined their walls with tinfoil.

~~~
jacquesm
> If you asked me to turn mine off when visiting, I would happily oblige you-
> And then label you as a nutcase who has lined their walls with tinfoil.

That's an interesting response. So because someone does not like to have
unknown third parties listen to everything that is said in a room they're
right away tinfoil hatters?

~~~
aeze
No, because the device does not communicate with amazon.com until you say
"alexa" and the code/hardware for that is all done on the device itself. So
its not listening and streaming everything, all the time.

(in case you skipped that the first time)

~~~
nitrogen
I think jacquesm's question makes more sense combined with this
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10611179))
plus a possible distrust of closed software with automatic updates.

Edit: corrected link (was
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10605775](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10605775))

~~~
jacquesm
I fail to see the connection with a 'Secret pagan basilica in Rome', can you
please explain?

~~~
nitrogen
Sorry, my phone's clipboard is very erratic and pasted the wrong link. It's
kind of funny in a Dan Brown/Da Vinci Code sort of way, to think that there's
a link between modern surveillance and ancient Roman religions.

The link was supposed to point to another comment in the same thread. I have
corrected it.

------
Pyxl101
"Ok Google" on Android, Siri, and listen all the time too, don't they? That's
presumably how I can wake up my phone from a state where the screen is locked
and powered off by saying "Hey Siri" / "Ok Google" / "Hey Cortana".

I was taken aback briefly when I first considered it. I realized it must be
recording the environment constantly, in order to scan for the code word. Upon
hearing the code word, it wakes up and streams the last few seconds of audio
remotely, where the real linguistic analysis happens with Siri/Cortana/Google
Voice Search. [1]

The difference is my phone is with me virtually 24/7\. It's rarely not in the
same room. In my opinion, the cat was out of the bag a while ago.

I make a decision to trust the device manufacturers, who claim their devices
only listen for the code word. As a scientist and engineer, I know what that
means: it's recording everything, all the time, and probably running a simple
linguistic analysis sufficient to recognize codewords only. Then on waking up,
it streams that audio centrally, which is how it can respond to queries out of
the blue like: "Hey Siri, what's the temperature?" Answer: "It's currently 41
degrees Fahrenheit". It must be recording and processing everything, though in
a computationally inexpensive way, for the sake of battery life.

[1] Google Chrome apparently supported this on the desktop for a while too:
[http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/26/google-brings-ok-
goo...](http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/26/google-brings-ok-google-
hotword-voice-search-desktop-new-chrome-extension/)

~~~
acgourley
In pursuit of a low battery foot print and low memory foot print the "wake up
word" technology is really just a trained ML classifier running locally to
identify a specific 3+ syllable phrase. They don't start sending everything to
the mothership until after that gate is passed.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
So when it's plugged in to power it can send everything? how reassuring, since
I pretty much always plug it in when I'm home?

Related, my 'Hey Siri' is only active when the iPhone is plugged in.

~~~
scep12
It could send everything, but you can do some pretty basic investigation to
figure out if it actually does. Spoiler: It doesn't.

------
chippy
So here's my confusion. CPU prices are getting lower and processing power is
getting higher as time goes on.

We can emulate entire operating systems in a web browser now.

You can fit an entire routable, navigable map of the entire world on a mobile
phone or usb stick. Every single named place and every single path or road
between them on the planet on a phone, offline.

Why are we still thinking that we need the cloud to process speech? Why not do
all the listening, all the private bits, locally, and optionally connect to
specific services (Music, Shopping, hotels etc) as and when.

Why not?

~~~
JD557
Some projects such as Jasper[1] actually do that.

[1] [https://jasperproject.github.io/](https://jasperproject.github.io/)

~~~
CaptSpify
I wouldn't use this as an example. Last I checked, Jasper still shelled out to
Google/AT&T to do the voice-to-text translation

EDIT: Oh, it looks like they have Pocket-sphinx and Julius now for internet-
less systems. Interesting....

------
jimrandomh
The sheer number of different parties with the ability to record everyone's
conversations is getting very excessive. The microphones in cell phones and
laptops are bad enough; can we please note add any more? This one seems
relatively easy to push back against: if you visit someone and they have one
plugged in, treat it as a faux pas.

~~~
userbinator
_if you visit someone and they have one plugged in, treat it as a faux pas._

I might just direct a profanity-laced rant about surveillance at it, on the
slim chance that there's actual humans listening on the other side.

...or not, because that could even be enough to arouse suspicion in the world
today. This reminds me of a scene in a movie long ago...

------
mirimir
OK, so I'm a privacy fanatic. However, I'm not very troubled by Echo, because
two-way verbal interaction is a core feature. So users know that they'll be
monitored. There is the concern about loss of third-party privacy. Guests
might not know that they're being monitored. Things that listen and watch
without warning (such as some "smart" TVs, apps and browser extensions) are
far more troubling.

But of course, there's also the concern that adversaries will intercept
surveillance data.

------
pcmaffey
Privacy is an asset that people are willing to exchange for tangible benefits.
Especially because most people don't really know how to value their privacy
until it's been breached.

Create a system that realizes the tangible value of privacy and people will be
much less likely to give it away.

What does that look like? That's the billion dollar question. For starters,
here's an essay by Albert Wagner of USV that sets the stage for a solution (in
a very abstract way): [http://continuations.com/post/131372549150/land-
capital-atte...](http://continuations.com/post/131372549150/land-capital-
attention-this-time-it-is-the-same)

------
pbreit
As far as I can tell, the article committed the most important information:
how rigorous is Amazon in ensuring that Echo can not be used to eavesdrop?

~~~
jacquesm
'omitted'.

------
ianmcgowan
I have an Echo in the kitchen, which I love. And other devices in the house
that respond to "Ok, Google" or "Hey Siri!".

The conscious trade-off in my family is that voice control is useful, natural,
and fun versus a somewhat low probability that amazon/google/apple are
recording everything we say. The latter would be as catastrophic for those
companies as the VW emissions scandal. Which of course happened, so it's just
a low probability, not zero. Companies do dumb things and break the law all
the time. The answer is to make sure that sensible laws, vigorously enforced,
are in place.

I don't see a huge difference between an Echo and the camera/microphone in my
laptop - they both could be listening all the time, and there's a certain
level of trust that smarter people than me have checked and found nothing. Can
anyone wearing a tin-foil hat in this thread point to credible evidence
otherwise? That would be enough to make me change my mind, but I doubt there's
anything I could say that would change yours.

------
julianpye
For me the advantage for Echo is not so much in speech recognition, but in
hearing all sorts of other cheap household sensors. An Amazon dash button that
outputs a high-pitch sound can be manufactured ~10-30 times cheaper than one
that needs Bluetooth and WiFi. A cheap Smokealarm can become fully networked,
a doorbell heard can activate added features, etc.....

~~~
pbreit
Does Echo support this type of "networking" today?

~~~
nitrogen
Some apps use this type of thing to link viewing profiles across TV, web, and
mobile. There was a recent arstechnica article on the subject.

------
UnoriginalGuy
Technically speaking the Amazon Echo does not listen to your conversations and
does not transmit them back to headquarters.

The Echo has a low power chip-mode which is able to do "basic" voice
recognition and wake the device when the correct phase is spoken.

So the chips itself is interpreting everything you say looking for the correct
wake-up phase, but the wrong ones aren't recorded, and most of the device's
logic in in idle/sleep/hibernation.

Now, that being said, when the device is awoken anything you ask it IS
transmitted back to Amazon HQ. For example "ok Alexa, what is the weather
today in New York," the "ok Alexa" won't be transmitted (that just wakes the
devices) but the "what is the weather in New York" is transmitted.

Most of these articles focus on the Amazon Echo "always listening" and while
that is technically true, there is no known privacy implications to it (since
it isn't recorded/transmitted).

------
datashovel
I think the problem is being framed incorrectly if we assume it's "Amazon's
data", and they can do what they want with it.

I think the conversation needs to start with the assertion that "this is my
data, and I'm letting Amazon use it".

------
colorblocks
I don't think privacy is the main issue with this product launch, yes it is a
major issue but we had these discussions already with Google Now, Cortana,
etc. There's nothing new to discuss.

The main topics I am surprised:

1\. Why do I need a dedicated device if any phone can do this too?

2\. I think Google is capable of doing way more than Amazon AI-wise since they
have more NLP experience and more data about us and the world

3\. This is another time that Bezos launches a questionable product which will
probably fail (Amazon Fire), the one success in the hardware space of Amazon
is the Kindle though

------
emptybits
Ronald Arkin (the robot ethicist in the article) says, “You see this in sci-
fi: Star Trek, Knight Rider. It’s the natural progression.”

Yikes. IMO, the presence of something futuristic on popular TV does not
establish it as something to naturally progress to. I look to (good) sci-fi
for ideas and thought experiments and, often, cautionary tales.

I don't have a big problem with the privacy issue here, because Amazon's
ecosystem is opt-in. But I hope that ethicist is more critical-thinking than
the snippet in the interview paints him to be.

------
userbinator
Presumably there's no way to rename it? There are quite a few humans named
Alexa, and I can imagine the confusion that could arise...

~~~
servercobra
You can rename her to Amazon. Hopefully there aren't very many people named
Amazon.

------
ap22213
I have so many connected devices in my home. How do I determine which ones
have microphones and which don't?

~~~
rsync
You can't. The answer is to reduce the number of connected devices.

Your refrigerator does not need networking capability. Nor does you wash
machine or your toaster or your tig welder.

In fact, I would argue that even your display device (your "smart tv") should
not have a network connection, but I think I'm in the minority there. For
those that are interested, I have very good luck using "commercial displays"
like the ones you see in airport signage. They are dumb. They are also
fantastic and well engineered displays.

~~~
CaptSpify
> Your refrigerator does not need networking capability. Nor does you wash
> machine or your toaster or your tig welder.

Although you are correct, there's a lot of advantages that can be had with
these devices being on a network.

I know this answer isn't for everyone, but I personally have a home-network
dedicated to devices, and it's air-gapped from the internet. I don't really
see any other solution to this (other than FOSS-everything), but I would love
one.

~~~
eveningcoffee
Indeed!

Problem is that there exists people who try to convince us that we need a
middleman between our networked devices and us - that we need to connect our
devices not into our home network but with their servers.

The reality is that we do not need middlemen, the middlemen needs us such that
they could steal the data, repackage it and sell it.

I will give one example that I have already given before.

Suppose you have an IoT device in your bedroom that uploads CO2 values (of
course it may also do something useful too such us showing this data to you or
regulating the ventilation).

Now the rate of CO2 production depends on bodily activities. More activity
means more CO2 production. I suppose that you agree that having this
information you more or less are capable to deduce when a couple has sex.

This means that we could calculate a metric how much sex is going on and
relate it to specific user.

Suppose that we detect that rate of sex has gone down by 20 (a made up number
dependant of our model). We can now sell this information.

This information is for example useful perhaps for psychologist who want to
sell you counselling.

But it is even more interesting for divorce lawyers who now could prey on
couples having period of difficulty in their sex lives.

Even more, this information could be made more valuable by some additional
influence. For example feeding the user with articles related to marital
happiness and sex life.

I leave the rest for you imagination.

I think that such devices are very usable, but the data should not leave our
home.

------
te_chris
I don't work for amazon but have done a bit with them. According to their
engineers it only listens for 'alexa'. I'm assuming we can all take that how
we will.

------
xarien
I'm happy to lose a bit of privacy for something my kids can use so easily.
One of the lesser known features is its wikipedia key word. If you say
wikipedia followed by what you are looking up, it will read the wiki entry for
you. It's a perfect fall back plan for when it doesn't understand a question
otherwise.

~~~
digler999
why do your kids need to use it "easily" ? Why not be a father and show them
how to use things ?

~~~
xarien
Because:

1) I'm not a sadist. 2) Lowering the barrier of obtaining answers leads to a
higher level of curiosity and greater yearning to learn. 3) It allows an easy
way for my kids to be exposed to more types of music. 4) It helps with piano
practice.

And seriously, lay off the personal attacks. Echo isn't a replacement for a
parent. This isn't about sitting a kid in front of a TV, this is about a
wonderful supplemental product which kids can use at an early age.

------
jsprogrammer
Easy. Haven't bought one.

Edit: @tl, I'm rate limited, so I'll respond here. Hopefully you'll see it.

I'd probably ask them why they bought it and if I could try it out, or, if
they could show me how they use it. It's an interesting interface, I'm just
not sure how generally useful it is compared to more traditional interfaces
(keyboard, mouse, touchscreen). I view it as a novelty "Trojan horse" of a
sort. I'm sure Amazon is collecting specific metrics on users of their device
and most users probably get some novelty from it before they unplug it and
forget about it.

~~~
tl
And how would you respond to friends / family buying them? Or to a coworker
who brought one into the office?

