Generally Siri and Google's service are pretty good about asking for consent so by definition if the feature is on you must be OK with that. Of course are you OK with someone else's device in your proximity listening to everything you say? That is a stickier problem.
Misleading title. You need to turn the feature on, and it asks you if you're OK with that.
And it only listens when the device is connected to power, and you've opted in.
In the next version, if it listens even when the device is not connected to power, you'll still have to opt in. So this entire article is sort of a duh.
I find the idea of remotely turning an iPhone into a bug quite scary, and wonder when we'll first see a public attack of this nature.
But this feature does literally nothing to aid such an attack∗; it just makes the long-existing threat more obvious. As implemented, it doesn't send data to the server until the trigger phrase is detected, at which point it plays a conspicuous tone. To make it do more than that, you need to hack or modify the firmware, which would also let you implement the same thing on an older iPhone.
(I'd like to see an assistant that doesn't require data to be sent in the first place, but that's basically a separate issue.)
∗ okay, whatever hardware performs the trigger phrase detection with low power consumption could probably be reprogrammed by a hacked firmware to detect some other phrase, making a bug slightly more powerful... but that's pretty minor.
It's highly likely that powerful interests [governments and big tech] can already silently listen on mobile phones and have a database of voice signatures so they know exactly who's talking and what. That being said, the Panopticon is going nuts. I want a device with a pluggable mic, so I can buy / build my own mic with a physical on/off switch. Fuck off, peepers.
Sure, but without cell service (as in a phone number instead of just data), aren't those just closed IM services?
Don't get me wrong, I use Hangouts over SMS/MMS whenever possible but while I can reach anyone on Hangouts if they have it installed, I can't install iMessage since it only works on Apple devices. As such, I have to fall back to SMS to reach people on iPhones who haven't or won't install Hangouts.
As much as I prefer IM over texting for the general features and speed, it's still useful as a fallback option if only because the various IM services aren't interoperable.
