Hey I’m the last thing from a bootlicker but off the top of my head, purchase of various legal products which when taken together might constitute an ied.
It’s not Amazon doing anything illegal, law enforcement is interested in the end user. For example what if law enforcement found out that a suspect for X thing had an Amazon device? They would have incentive to ask Amazon to turn over their data in regards to that person. There might be more broad requests being made like “send me data of all these Muslim users on this list, even though they aren’t suspected of terrorism”, this might’ve not happened yet but it has happened with other websites and services in the past.
I immediately went to “Best Friend Hero” and flashed back to the printer smashing scene from office space.
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Sure bro, these things can’t transcribe voice to text and then send that very tiny text file back to amazon, nopenopenope.
With the caveat that any person reading this post should read my post above explaining how an Alexa device could actually be abused –
NO, they do not transcribe all text to speech.
Alexa is an open platform with a published API. If your Alexa has not been modified, it is not listening to you other than when it indicates that it is.
To think otherwise puts you in to company of Anti-Vaxxers and other conspiracy nuts.
You’re correct but the recent past is full of examples of various companies saying one thing but doing exactly the opposite until busted by security researchers. Likely not for nefarious purposes, but those cases are still relevant. In this particular case with Amazon i don’t think Alexa is constantly listening and eavesdropping, but then again i can’t be 100% sure and as such i don’t use Alexa or other services like it.
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Now I just want the HAL 9000 eye hack to remind me.
https://www.facebook.com/ScreenJunkies/videos/10155953204437403/
This seems to be a conversation we repeat constantly around here but there’s no way in which a smart phone is any different to a voice assistant in terms of the manufacturer being able to listen in to you.
There also is a perennial confusion that voice assistants mics being “always on” means “always being sent off-site” which has been proven not to be happening by independent research.
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Security researchers have been trying to bust this since the thing was released and have found nothing but evidence that the device only sends voice data after the on-board software detects the wake-up word.
It is a risk that these devices could perform such underhand and illegal actions but there’s no reasonable argument that any closed-source smartphone or laptop computer doesn’t have exactly the same risk profile.
Yeah, I hate to see such conspiracy thinking around here every time this comes up. It’s pretty lazy and ignorant.
YES! It’s a risk to have any device with an internet connection and closed-source software. YES! We should be sceptical and tear these things apart in independent tests.
That’s all been happening and I can be certain that any security researcher who found such a flaw would be shouting about it.
That would require them to hand over the info on anyone purchasing almost any chemical. That’s a blanket search and would be ilegal.
Which is exactly what I’m worried about. Illegal mass surveillance of groups of people based on association.
My point is I don’t want such a device as a primary mode of interaction since hostile third parties can and will break into any device that is online. Don’t pretend that some smart devs haven’t tried or are trying to find ways to break into devices. I don’t believe vendors themselves are doing this but I can see the NSA doing this if only to see if they could do it. The NSA and related organizations across the world don’t share the same ethical or legal (inasmuch as protecting the bottom line of shareholders) constraints that a corporation does. This isn’t a matter of tin-foil-hattery this is a matter of the sad state of our paranoid governments. Remember, the US govt recently tried to prevent a US citizen from getting access to a lawyer by trying to disappear them into their foreign prison system. This isn’t exceptional but rather the normal state of things.
Not if it’s in the course of an ongoing investigation. Police need a warrant for search histories- let’s say for example an individual makes a bomb threat- in the course of discovery the police would likely obtain a search history via warrant to determine whether or not the individual was actually attempting to make a bomb, as opposed to being just unhinged and making terroristic threats. The information obtained from the warrant would aid determine the severity of the crime.
If Amazon is getting requests for data from police departments, it is either through warrant- which is how they would obtain actual search results, or subpoena, which only allows for certain metadata- isp, sites visited, etc.
The flip side to this is that of course the NSA can get all (or most) of this information anyway, and absent taking pretty extreme measures on your end there’s little you can do to stop it.
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