
Google speakers are listening to more than just voice commands - kiyanwang
https://www.protocol.com/google-smart-speaker-alarm-adt
======
harha
I had one of these when I worked for Google, I didn’t quite trust it though,
so I had it in the bathroom to limit what my employer could listen to.

Imagine discussing a product idea at home with friends, then having that
stolen by an engineer at one of these companies (who figured out how to find
the interesting conversations) for a promotion or new position.

On a larger scale these might get hooked up with some advertising algorithms
that manipulate you further based on conversations you didn’t know were
recorded.

I hope for more pressure to move these systems and other devices, that don’t
necessarily need to be in the cloud to function, to a local solution or one
that is closed to outsiders. Technologically this should be possible in so
many cases.

~~~
croutonwagon
I just dont have them in the house.

Every now and then i get called paranoid.

And sure, my phone can function the same (though i specifically have siri
disabled on our iphones)

Its just a cost benefit. I can get off the couch and flip a switch or use a
remote to turn on a song. I really dont need speach recognition for those
functions.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I unplug my parents' Google wiretap device when I enter the house for holiday
parties. For some reason my parents can both know that I know way more about
this topic than them, and still totally disregard me and spend hundreds on
Google hardware devices because they seem cool. \o/

~~~
themacguffinman
It's clear that your parents have different values from you regardless of what
you tell them, an obvious point that seems to be lost on many commentators in
this thread who perpetually oscillate between "you don't know what you're
doing!" and "how could you use such a device?!"

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The problem isn't different values, it's that non-technical users aren't able
to make informed consent, they don't understand how they're being harmed.

~~~
parineum
So instead of informing them you just unplug the devices or you did inform
them, they don't agree with you, and now you take it upon yourself to do
what's best for them because they just don't understand.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
When attempting to inform them of real world events has them treat you like
you're a UFO nut...

I take it upon myself to do what's best for me. They're free to use whatever
they want when I'm not there, but I'm not going to be in the house with the
blasted thing.

------
paul_f
There is a big difference between smoke alarm detection built into the wake-
up-word circuitry, versus every sound sent to Google's servers for analysis. I
am not bothered by the former, but would be aghast at the latter. Does anyone
know for sure?

~~~
chaboud
It’s easy enough to test, but I don’t really need to.

Alexa Guard has had this functionality for a while, and I’d expect the folks
here at HN to be able to infer a few things from the support link and basic
reasoning.

Support link [https://support.ring.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360028205592-Usin...](https://support.ring.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360028205592-Using-Alexa-Guard-with-Alarm-to-Detect-Broken-Glass-
Smoke-and-Carbon-Monoxide)

So: 1) if an event is detected, you can listen to a 10 second clip or drop in
(2-way call) to listen in or look. 2) Echo devices have relatively small
amounts of RAM 3) Echo devices aren’t constantly hammering WiFi connections

From this, one should be able to deduce that the wakeword engine detects
events and streams clips to servers only in situations that match events and
settings to support these features. Why? Because processing, transit, and
storage aren’t free, and one can’t store data in RAM that isn’t there or
transmit data over WiFi without the physical layer showing signs of it.
Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB
lossless compression only to squirrel it away only for use in voice
assistants.

Take the number of Alexa devices sold and run the numbers for all of those
devices sending audio data to AWS all the time. The costs would be
astronomical. The same goes for Google (though not with AWS). They’re no doubt
incorporating the detectors into their on-device models.

~~~
asfginino
>Furthermore, Amazon hasn’t cracked the code on hyper-efficient GB into KB
lossless compression only to squirrel it away only for use in voice
assistants.

They could do speech recognition on the device and then ship off the plain
text. I don't think they do this, but it is most certainly within their
technical ability.

As a practical example, I have a copy of a 458,045 word audiobook on my
computer and I just downloaded a copy of the e-book. The audiobook is just
over 1 GiB, while the plain text of the e-book compressed with bz2 comes in at
800 KiB.

~~~
zachm0
Small knit pick, but speech to text isn’t lossless. How someone says the words
has a lot of impact on the meaning of those words. It’s possible Amazon
doesn’t care about that lost information but that is a completely different
conversation.

~~~
asfginino
That's true. Speech to text also isn't entirely accurate, which loses some
information.

Even when they actually do ship audio off the device for processing, I'd be
surprised if it's done losslessly.

~~~
scollet
For anyone curious about this, I highly recommend developing on CMU Sphinx for
a weekend project. It will really paint some pictures about machine
interpretation based on training data and the actual application code.

------
feralimal
How surprised would you be if in 5 years there was a Snowden-type revelation,
that yes, the speakers and Facebook/Insta apps, Amazon echo, etc, etc, were
listening all the time?

Sorry.

And that there was a secret court ruling that meant all that data was live-
streamed to NSA Utah.

Not surprised at all, is the answer.

~~~
jankiehodgpodge
I mean it's pretty easy to prove that's not true. Just stick it on a network
and check the network traffic.

The bandwidth required to do that would be immense anyway for basically no
benefit.

~~~
dr_kiszonka
Is there a simple app that notifies users about changes in internet traffic
patterns of IoT devices on their networks?

~~~
squarefoot
You can't trust the devices themselves to tell you that, so the best approach
is to put them behind a (hardware) firewall that protects both ways, not just
from external connections but also to prevent devices to call home if their
behavior is unclear.

------
theshadowknows
For the folks who think your devices aren’t listening try an experiment: start
talking out loud about a product you’ve never, ever searched for. Something
you’ve never, ever needed or wanted. See how long it takes for ads for that
very thing to start showing up in Facebook and in your targeted ads. I’ve done
it and Started getting ads in a matter of days.

~~~
Balgair
Try the experiment with friends!

First, get a friend or relative to go along with the ride here. Try to have
that person not be on your local network of wifi and the like.

Then, go a website that will generate a list of random words:
[https://www.randomlists.com/nouns](https://www.randomlists.com/nouns) . Make
sure that you are selecting for nouns or adjectives. Copy the first three
words that you get. More is fine too. Just get enough words to be pretty
specific.

Then go to amazon or some such online retailer:
[https://www.amazon.com/](https://www.amazon.com/) . Search for the three
random words you got.

Now, here is an important step, sort the returned list by price, from _high to
low_.

Take the most expensive item as your experimental item. You can do this with a
few items if you'd like. You're just trying to get something that is not what
you or your demographic would normally look to purchase.

Then, talk about that item around your gadgets, critically, with someone that
is not you. Your amazon search history is already corrupted just by searching
for this.

Check back in with your friend or relative in about a week. You can set a
reminder in your phone to do this. See if they got any ads that were trying to
sell them on the random item you chose.

~~~
greiskul
Please add a control for this experiment. There should be another list of
products selected that you did the same with, but you didn't talk infront of
the gadgets. There might be some signals that the ads networks are getting
from you or your friends.

~~~
slavik81
To be double-blind, they should talk about both lists of products, but a
third-party should make a (hidden) gadget present for one conversation and not
for the other conversation.

------
nerdbaggy
Wyze cameras do this too. I never throughly about it put apparently the noise
a fire alarm or co alarm makes is standard [https://support.wyzecam.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360031134712-H...](https://support.wyzecam.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360031134712-How-does-the-Smoke-Alarm-and-CO-alarm-work-)

~~~
eli
Amazon Echo as well but I think you have to opt in

------
silasdavis
How long until insurers start coercing customers into installing intrusive
smart home devices in order to get reasonable premiums? It might not happen
tomorrow but if enough people are willing to opt into alarm surveillance you
can see how they could lower the liability for insurers.

------
tjpnz
I'm surprised that people are outraged by this. It's a given that you're
losing some privacy by putting one of these devices in your home. Any argument
otherwise assumes that the companies manufacturing these devices are
trustworthy.

Thankfully the solution to this problem is simple.

~~~
Espressosaurus
Most people don't look at it that way, or they don't see the harm in doing so
because it's all theoretical.

------
jto1218
I, for one, am _shocked_ that an advertising company would do such a thing.

------
mrbombastic
Does any company or person do privacy audits of these smart home devices? At
the very least doesn't seem difficult to sniff packets sent out on the home
network? Seems like it is generally accepted that these things are a privacy
nightmare but haven't seen a lot of actual analysis.

------
suddenexample
People here are just as bad as those on Reddit. The article title is clickbait
and the actual content describes alerts that Nest speakers could send you when
they detect beeping smoke detectors or breaking glass. The top comment in this
thread right now talking about presence detection to disable Netflix account
sharing is so frustratingly ignorant. You can have privacy concerns all you
want, but the bottom line is that Google has seen that people care about
privacy and any funny business would surely tank their reputation.

------
mttjj
Sounds like a similar feature (“Sound Recognition”) that is coming in iOS 14.
[https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-14-preview/features/](https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-14-preview/features/)

It’s not clear from the article but I assume the Google implementation was
pushed out to users and turned on by default (likely without a notification
that the device would now start doing this). Since the iOS feature is listed
under “Accessibility” I would assume that it’s opt-in.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I am running iOS 14 beta right now - certainly a good update.

In my perfect world, there would be excellent open source software and
hardware designs for home monitoring, etc., where we would have 100% control
of our own data. We don't have a perfect world, and right now, Apple seems
like the best bet (for me at least) for a company to trust (with healthy
skepticism).

------
moreorless
I get gizmos like this as gifts every now and then. I never bothered opening
any of them up. What are some fun things that we can do with these things
besides their intended use?

~~~
harha
Would be a fun open source project to find the cheapest board that can fit in
the box, ideally take some components (speakers, WiFi) and have similar
functionality like controlling music, home devices, setting timers. I’d try to
contribute if anyone is working on topics like this.

~~~
AsyncAwait
There's [https://mycroft.ai](https://mycroft.ai), [https://www.home-
assistant.io](https://www.home-assistant.io) & probably others.

~~~
harha
Thanks for sharing, from a first glance I like how mycroft sells hardware to
match the open source software, Will give it a try.

------
popeathlete
One company controlling all these electronics in my house. How do people not
find that disturbing?

~~~
JoBrad
I find a security system that only lets me know when it’s been triggered
useless. My wife set off our alarm the other day. I used an external webcam to
verify that it was my wife, and disabled the alarm before she could put her
things down and disable it herself. You can’t do that with a system that isn’t
connected externally.

~~~
est31
External connection != external control.

Although with home security services, it's one of the areas where I think
external control is advantageous because the best cameras don't help you when
the thieves take the device that keeps the recordings with them.

~~~
acidburnNSA
> External connection != external control.

Exactly this. Even in security contexts, my Home Assistant-based security
system is running fully-local object detection and runs automations when
"Person" shows up in an unexpected place at an unexpected time. It emails me
the offending image (thereby offloading from the camera) and records video
locally. If it happens at night while I'm asleep it runs a sequence of turning
lights on to scare them off and then wakes me up if it didn't work.

This is kind of a combo of local-only with a few pings to the outer world.

~~~
oauea
What software are you using for object detection? I'd like to extend my Home
Assistant setup.

~~~
acidburnNSA
I made a custom component to integrate this object detection lib with pytorch.

[https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5)

The tensorflow one it comes with didn't work on python 3.8 or on my gpu.

I should blog about it.

~~~
ViViDboarder
In case you do, what’s your blog so I can follow?

------
sschueller
Google sent me two of these home speakers for free. Why? I never asked for it
and I will never use it.

~~~
IshKebab
Probably because you signed up for or bought something else and it was a deal.
Either that or they made a mistake. Google aren't in the practice of just
sending free hardware to people for no reason so I'm not sure what your point
is?

------
choeger
I might sound like a grumpy old granddad to some of you (and I am not even
_that_ old), but did you really think that a huge company would offer to put
microphones into _your_ living room for _your_ advantage? They are going to
benefit from this and you are going to pay for it. How? For instance with
dynamic pricing. Your loved ones tell you how much they want that vacation on
that Greek island? Good luck finding a cheap flight. You are sharing your
Netflix subscription? Sorry, but not while _that_ person is in the same room.
You are applying to that exciting position? Nah, with _that_ statement we
heard on your dinner table, we think you are a cultural bad fit for our team.

~~~
eloff
Any of those things would be such massive trust violations that the fallout
would almost certainly sink the product and badly tarnish the company. That's
not saying a company wouldn't be stupid enough to try it, but it's very
clearly a bad business decision - so logically they wouldn't do it.

~~~
asddubs
sure, it's company policy not to. but if you do it anyway and don't get
caught, your risk-taking will be rewarded, so it becomes a numbers
game/informal policy.

~~~
ineedasername
That just means we need more than company policy. Regulations w/ teeth and
verifiable audits, for example.

------
criley2
I can't even get Google Assistant to reliably work for commands they claimed
to have rolled out years and years ago
[https://i.imgur.com/ucmKl5l.png](https://i.imgur.com/ucmKl5l.png). I would
literally never trust Google Assistant with anything remotely near my safety
or security.

"Google, call the police!!!" Playing the Police on Living Room TV

"Google, lock my doors" The Doors were a psychedelic rock band formed in
1965...

------
polote
How could people on HN be surprised about that kind of thing ?

~~~
dsr_
We would all be surprised if it turns out that a giant corporation who sells
you always-on networked microphones wasn't abusing it in any way, shape or
form.

Here's a slippery slope for you:

1\. "OK Google, order pizza from Sal's."

2\. "Broken glass detected in living room. Should I call police?"

3\. "The baby has been crying for more than 60 minutes. Do you want
assistance?"

4\. "Shots fired. Calling 911 now."

2016-2020 has taught me that slippery slope arguments are not fallacious in
and of themselves; they just aren't convincing by themselves.

The sound of a Siamese cat in heat is extremely similar to a crying baby.

Watching an unusually well-Foleyed action movie on a good sound system can
probably fool any recognition system Google can jam into next year's $150
smart speaker.

And that's how Google could swat you with the best of intentions.

~~~
pickledcods
5\. "Your kids are having sex, Shall I ask if they are using a condom?"

~~~
casefields
That would be pretty funny and creepy. Similar to a father being told his teen
daughter was pregnant by Target.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-
targ...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-
figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#7f7760ed6668)

Awkward.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
That was a great article.

And for me it was the moment I realized that society had entered new territory
it would never return from.

Yet with today's eyes it seems almost quaint.

Edit: I should add, it was the original nytimes article that I remember being
profound, not the forbes summary that is linked above.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits....](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html)

------
sys_64738
This abuse was always likely to happen. We’ve yet to discover what secret
subpoenas that get filed to eavesdrop on possible felons or other persons of
interest. A wireless mic to the cops is not what you want in the house.

~~~
swebs
>A wireless mic to the cops is not what you want in the house.

Yeah, that belongs in your pocket.

------
ilamont
Original: [https://www.protocol.com/google-smart-speaker-alarm-
adt](https://www.protocol.com/google-smart-speaker-alarm-adt)

------
Havoc
Hence me toying with respeaker setups. I'd rather have no voice control than
have big brother voice control. Google already knows more than enough about me
(gmail primarily)

------
arminiusreturns
So when does bugfinding make a comeback? Let's start taking back control and
desoldering these mics all over.

------
Animats
Big Brother is always listening.

Next, "detection of patterns of harmful behavior".

------
take_a_breath
I took all my moms hand-written recipes and made dithechef.com after she died.
Never added any features.

[1] [http://www.dithechef.com/](http://www.dithechef.com/)

~~~
teddyh
On first glance, this looks like spam, but perhaps it was meant as a comment
in this other thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24091577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24091577)

~~~
take_a_breath
Absolutely, apologies.

------
ape4
Too lazy to look it up. Didn't somebody without a pet talk about pet food
around some speakers then get ads about it.

------
unixhero
Of course they are

------
gerash
The HN post title is a click bait.

TLDR: The google home device also listens for the sound of glass shattering
and smoke alarms which is very useful. In fact I wish it would listen for dog
barks too. I hope they add that.

------
svnpenn
What the hell is going on in the comments here? It's like half the comments
are edgelords with some version of "i am shocked that an advertising company
would do such a thing"

Has HN just turned into Reddit? Do people really not care that people's
privacy is being dumped down the toilet? Google is known for shit like this.
They even scan your emails and alert you when bills are due. Shit like that is
_not ok_. Don't fuck with my privacy unless I _opt in_.

~~~
quantummkv
Hide from it, run from it, Eternal September arrives all the same. It was
bound to happen. Honestly, it's a miracle and really hard work from dang to
delay it for this long

------
alfiedotwtf
Where’s the executive order to ban Google

------
rahulchowdhury
I unplugged my Google Home Mini long back because of this unethical spying.

~~~
michaelcampbell
I have a big cognitive dissonance here of what led you to buy it in the first
place? The gulf of knowledge or personal risk tolerance between those 2
stances is so vast that I can scarcely comprehend them being in 1 person.

But, clearly they are so I'm obviously wrong.

~~~
fibers
because sometimes you might literally get the product for free when you buy a
tv, same with amazon echos

------
tehjoker
Just remember that Google's business model is a private intelligence agency
and everything will always make sense.

------
rvz
These findings of Google spyware is getting pretty boring. I feel sorry for
whoever is Google's Chief Privacy Officer to defend all these privacy
violations in their own products. They must be facing daily privacy
investigations at this point.

Another day another Google listening device article. Get ready to comment on
the next one.

~~~
dannyw
Google, without notice, intentionally started listening to something that
wasn't a wake word (glass breaking). How is this 'pretty boring'?

~~~
sukilot
It's an obvious enhancement to a home monitoring product users paid money for,
specifically for this purpose.

[https://www.blog.google/products/google-nest/5-things-
know-a...](https://www.blog.google/products/google-nest/5-things-know-about-
new-nest-aware/)

Google added smoke alarm sound detection to a product that users bought
specifically for "smart" smoke alarms and "smart" audiovideo recording of
their home

~~~
itsoktocry
> _It 's an obvious enhancement to a home monitoring product users paid money
> for, specifically for this purpose._

And yet it was turned on for people who did not pay for the service, or give
permission to Google to do so. Which means they can listen in whenever they
feel like and chalk it up to "whoops, pushed the wrong code, sorry!"
apparently.

~~~
jdashg
Consequences are in line with what happened, not the least charitable
possibility of what that class of error can be.

Google absolutely has the technical ability to auto-update my phone to send
deepfaked porn of me to all my contacts, but it's pretty reasonable for me to
expect them not to.

