Microphones connected to power and internet 24/7 have been in people’s houses since the 1990s (or earlier, if you consider the phone network to be equivalent). Yet it only became “creepy” when they started talking back. This tells me it’s an emotional response, not rational.
Nobody considers the phone network to be equivalent :)
Even current smartphones do not turn on their microphones outside of a call, unless one has made the huge mistake to turn their assistants on, or there's an app recording - and at least on iOS that's controllable by permissions and marked clearly when the app is in the background.
Modern smartphones have assistants that "listen all the time" in the same way that you're saying that smart speakers do (namely, they look for a wakeword).
No, modern smartphones allow you to have assistants that listen all the time. Disabling those is one of the first things I do, and I'd be pretty unhappy if it turns out those are still listening and wasting battery (even aside of privacy issues).
No the parent is right. They are not "listening all the time". They're essentially sleeping while a separate process handles the audio stream looking for the wakeword. When it finds the wakeword, it then "wakes up" the assistant which reprocesses the audio snippet to confirm the wakeword is really there (using more expensive analysis), before then actively listening to the rest of the audio.
Back in the 1990s, their hardware design was simple enough that any mass surveillance would inevitably get exposed when the odd hacker took his device apart.
These days, I'm not sure at all. All we have is the law as a deterrent, and that's weak, especially to governments.
Cell phones, even now, can't be doing that much background processing unknownst to us, because they are connected to a battery, battery life is a big deal in a highly competitive industry, and we'd all notice if they drained very quickly.
ISTR there are documented instances of law enforcement and/or intelligence doing that sort of thing to phones, and the battery drain causing it to get noticed.
Hooking it up to an outlet is a legit different thing.
If battery tech or power reduction tech progresses sufficiently, including just by continuing on its current curve (most power reduction rather than battery tech), cell phones will rise to the same level of concerning.
(Cell phones of course leak location data full time, and some similar things like that. I'm not saying the current cell situation is awesome either. Only that there is a legit reason to be more concerned about gear hooked up to actual power lines than portable gear.)
Google's actual smartphone line (Pixel) ships with passive song recognition, default disabled. I enabled it because I was curious and it sips so little power that I left it on, but to function it has to be listening to the audio all the time so that it can say to itself "Hey, that is Sabotage by the Beastie Boys".
It doesn't use the network, or the screen (unless you power the screen on to find out what you're listening to) but it passively remembers every recognisable song it heard, essentially forever. So that means it is _listening_ it just doesn't tell anybody about it.
That's part of why I left my caveat in there about the future. We've had chips to detect wakeup words for a while now. From what I know about song detection, that's likely to be doing yet more stuff, but still nowhere near enough for full voice transcription yet. But it is only a matter of time before your phone can be doing full voice transcription, with good guesses as to who the speaker is, full time. Squirting a full day's transcript of your speech up would be very easy to hide in all the chatter a phone already has, and squirting up just selected "suspicious" speech could easily be hidden in just the metadata network traffic of a phone.
We have not historically been there, which informs people's about cell phones, and we are not quite there yet. 4 or 5 years maybe.
(Although I have some interesting thoughts on how to deal with that. It would be fun to take one of these "transcribing phones" into a movie theatre, then fire the MPAA at Google for copyright infringement.)
I wouldn't think so. It's basically the script of the movie, minus the stage directions, and I don't think the MPAA is going to agree that's not copyrightable. There's no "transformation" there in the copyright sense that I can see, it's just a copy.
What does "awake" mean here? If you mean do I need to explicitly wake it, then definitely no, to test this I just left it on a desk while I played Pulp's "Do you remember the first time?" and read a magazine, after a few minutes I'd read several pages and the song had stopped, I opened the phone and it told me I had listened to "Do you remember the first time?" by Pulp six minutes ago.
Does it in some sense "wake up" to do this? Yes, I assume so.
I don’t think battery life is a problem. I think the examples you mention were from much older phones with limited local storage, so they were basically just in a call the whole time, and burning power operating the radio. A modern phone can save the data to local storage and upload it opportunistically.
We know that modern phones fan constantly listen to the microphone with minimal power impact, since that’s what these voice assistants are doing. That’s specialized hardware, but adding a little something to save the data wouldn’t be hard.
Even if we take it as a given that it can’t be done on batter power, phones get connected to outlets pretty regularly. Have you ever heard someone refuse to charge their phone in their house because it’s creepy?
It's totally rational. When the mic activates only when I physically press a button or pick up a device and dial a number, it's different from it activating itself. I'm in control of the former, and am happy to have it in my home.
I don't know that an old-school land line phone isn't always listening. But it was made by some disinterested party who just makes hardware. It was a simple logical device designed to rely on a simple mechanical switch. It could be listening, but it's understandable by someone like me and there's no incentive for anyone involved. I don't really know if I'm in control, but it's reasonable to think I am.
I don't know that a modern voice assistant isn't always listening either. It is an incredibly complex device usually designed by an entity whose business makes hundreds of millions of dollars based off of the inspection of the personal data of people like me. It is a complex full functioning computer. It uses a statistical algorithm that I know will incorrectly activate sometimes. I cannot understand or predict when it will listen. I cannot understand or predict when it will send a recording somewhere. It receives updates frequently. Because it's a full computer with an internet connection, those updates could make it do a huge variety of things. I know I'm not in control.
For some reason smart speakers give me pause but not a smartphone. A smartphone is kind of the same thing (microphones listening) when plugged in with the addition of a camera and a host of other sensors. I guess because a phone's main function is to not listen to us that makes the speakers much more worrisome to everyone?
Even something like an Apple Watch is the same thing with the addition of reading your vitals.
If you don't trust home assistant vendors to not randomly send non-queries to the cloud, I'm not sure why you'd trust phone vendors to not have the microphone on when you haven't given it permission.
The latter is more unlikely compared to the former, which is by design. Furthermore, at least on iOS Siri can be completely turned off through a configuration profile.
This is a reasonable approach for someone whose thread model allows them to use a smartphone...
The microphones are in the houses 24/7, connected to power and the internet. That is creepy.
There were also several creepy situations involving these devices:
* Google home had a hardware flaw which actually made it record 24/7.
* all assistants activate by mistake when they think they recognize the activation word. Siriously.
* An Amazon Echo recorded a private conversation and sent it to a random contact of the owner