[HN Gopher] Alexa, Ring, and Astro: Where's My Privacy, Amazon?
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Alexa, Ring, and Astro: Where's My Privacy, Amazon?
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 60 points
Date : 2021-10-02 17:51 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| ignoramous wrote:
| Andy Jassy's response to AWS AI abused by US Police Departments
| is _telling_ [0], while Dave Limp is even less diplomatic about
| Amazon Ring 's use by the law enforcement [1]. At Amazon, a
| popular credo goes, "there's no fighting gravity", which in one
| sense means that the prevalence of technology (ubiquitous
| computing) is inevitable, and so, resisting it is bad for
| business. That is the long story short of where our collective
| privacy went when it comes to BigTech.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUSFU8RRztI
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVVlrtAe5X8
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I genuinely cannot understand the mentality of purposefully
| wiring your home with microphones connected to the cloud, and
| then becoming worried about privacy.
|
| Like, you're doing this to yourself. Amazon did not hold a gun to
| your head to install Alexa everywhere. Maybe just ... throw them
| out? Also, if you're worried about the privacy implications of
| the Astro, _don't buy it_.
| sharkweek wrote:
| I have a smart phone so I'm only so immune to this invasion but
| there is no way in hell I'm trusting Amazon, a company I'm
| learning to despise, with a microphone or camera in my house.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Totally agree. The last thing I would do is allow an ad company
| or online seller invade my home with their closed widgets.
| elric wrote:
| The owner isn't the only party involved here. Anyone entering
| their house (or ringing their doorbell) becomes an (unwilling)
| participant in this surveillance apparatus.
|
| You're not just doing this to yourself, you're doing this to
| everyone you're interacting with at home, on your doorstep, or
| on speaker phone.
| CursedUrn wrote:
| The privacy cost of these devices is largely hidden. People are
| really bad at judging the long term and secondary/tertiary
| effects of their actions, they only see the immediate benefit.
| This is how the dystopian surveillance state grows.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| All I've ever been able to discern about it is that people will
| sell the farm to never have to think about something, even if
| that something is a grocery list.
| [deleted]
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I'm similar to the author -- I have several Alexa devices inside
| the house (one is a video device, I only enable the camera when
| I'm using it for a video call). I have several Ring cameras
| outside the house. But I have no desire to have cameras (not even
| a cute, dog like roving one) inside the house while I'm here,
| even if I told Amazon not to record anything while I'm home.
|
| When I go on vacation, I do plug in an inside camera that covers
| the two entry doors, but it's unplugged when I'm home.
| Animats wrote:
| From the article: "I have five Alexa-compatible smart speakers
| positioned in different parts of the house, so I have full
| coverage to deal with home automation issues. I also have a
| Google Home in the kitchen, plus multiple Siri-enabled mobile
| devices (Watch, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV). And of course, I
| have webcams for doing Zoom calls and the like on my Mac
| workstation and on my iPad and iPhone -- all of which aren't on
| unless I want them to be, presumably."
|
| Um.
| easton wrote:
| Isn't half the point of buying one of these smart assistant
| cans to have the same thing everywhere so that they all hit the
| same service? I don't want to come home and spend hours a week
| negotiating between Alexa, Google and Siri.
|
| (I suppose you could tie everything into Home Assistant but
| does anyone that doesn't enjoy playing with home servers like
| me do that?)
| Animats wrote:
| _I don't want to come home and spend hours a week negotiating
| between Alexa, Google and Siri._
|
| Oh, soon they'll work it out between themselves and just tell
| their humans what to do and when to do it.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| And then inform on the humans if they don't do what they're
| told.
| kingvash wrote:
| > But so far, I have resisted the notion of having cameras all
| over the place, peering inside the home's interior spaces. Sure,
| I have some Ring devices guarding the front of the house, but
| there's nothing recording inside.
|
| > I live in a gated community with only one way in and out, and
| I'm alerted immediately if someone should be let through if they
| aren't on my regular list.
|
| The whole tone of the article as I read it was Security & Privacy
| for me, not for thee (people in my community, my dogs, my
| hypothetical kids).
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _The whole tone of the article as I read it was Security &
| Privacy for me, not for thee (people in my community, my dogs,
| my hypothetical kids)._
|
| I sometimes jog and walk at night, especially when I had
| clients outside of my timezone. Some busybody reported one of
| their Ring videos of me walking past their house at night to
| the police, and for a while there I'd be stopped by beat cops
| for simply walking around my neighborhood.
|
| It's a surreal feeling knowing that you're being surveilled by
| just leaving your home and walking around the block.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Ring and Nextdoor turns people into paranoid nutters.
| Unfortunately the impact of these services is much wider than
| the users themselves, as your story shows.
| katbyte wrote:
| I imagine they were tat way before just now we're seeing
| it.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Possible. My personal experience is that these apps
| increased my anxiety significantly until I got rid of
| them. I live in an incredibly safe city, and yet they
| were making me feel unsafe.
|
| So I replaced my ring with a more privacy protecting and
| social media-free alternative, because video doorbells
| are very convenient still.
| rsynnott wrote:
| While I'm not a huge fan of these devices, that more seems
| like a cultural problem than anything else. Why on earth
| would anyone be concerned about someone walking at night?
| That seems... normal.
|
| I'm pretty sure when I go for a walk (since WFH, mostly late
| at night) I show up on _hundreds_ of cameras, mostly business
| and traffic CCTV systems (it's an urban area). That doesn't
| bother me. It would very much bother me if my neighbours were
| reporting me to the police, though; that's a neighbour
| problem, not a camera problem.
| smoldesu wrote:
| The consumer hardware sector has proven over the past decade that
| it has no interest in protecting user privacy, and unfortunately
| it looks like the United States has a whole lot to gain in
| complacency. Pretty much anything FAANG-related is inherently
| insecure, if only because there's statistically no way that
| three-letter-agencies don't have them tapped.
|
| I hate to say it, but we're living Stallman's future now. Post-
| privacy is the present, which makes it a little sad to read
| articles like this where people just _ASSUME_ that their Zune,
| FireTV, Apple Watch, Facebook Portal and Roku aren 't spying on
| them all the time. I guess this is the real cost of abstraction:
| users, so far removed from their software that they can't even
| tell which data is going in or out.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I would be concerned if any Zune was spying in 2021!
| 8note wrote:
| My zune definitely isn't spying on me. To do that, the zune
| related servers would have to still be up
| vngzs wrote:
| The entire point of these devices is to provide a window for the
| corporation into your home, so that Amazon can better sell you
| things. They're not doing you a favor by making the product; the
| product is an excuse to uniquely position them to observe your
| behavior in a domain previously unavailable (meatspace).
|
| Expecting "privacy" from such a device is absurd. You waived it
| when you bought the device.
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| >> _Alexa, Ring, and Astro: Where 's My Privacy, Amazon?_
|
| Who forced you to buy them? End of the story.
| angelzen wrote:
| Who forced my neighbor to buy a Ring? Should we have _any_
| confidence that my neighbor 's Amazon state of the art far
| field microphones don't _also_ pick up the vibrations from my
| house / condo?
|
| There is nothing I can do about it short of becoming obscenely
| rich and buying a large enough property that Amazon's spying
| tech can't physically penetrate.
|
| Just to be clear, this is the corporation we're talking about:
|
| > Amazon says it does not eavesdrop on customers' conversations
| to target advertising at them, after it emerged it had patented
| "voice-sniffing" tech.
|
| > The patent describes listening to conversations and building
| a profile of customers' likes and dislikes.
|
| [...]
|
| > However, the patent describes an algorithm that can listen to
| entire conversations, using "trigger words", such as like and
| love, to build a profile of customers.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43725708
| pvaldes wrote:
| This poses an interesting question: couldn't anybody disrupt
| this devices temporarily inside their property with a
| personal wifi jammer or something like that? What would be
| the alexa response in that case?
| elric wrote:
| Any kind of jamming equipment is illegal in many places.
|
| So could you? Maybe. Should you? Well, I suspect you're
| more likely to get punished for jamming frequencies than
| for spying on people...
| angelzen wrote:
| I don't know the tech answer.
|
| Socially speaking, I feel rather strongly that it should be
| elementary courtesy to shut off the panopticon if I visit
| your spyware-infested house. I didn't consent to Amazon
| building a profile of me, can you please stop being a
| creepy asshole on behalf of Amazon?
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(page generated 2021-10-02 23:01 UTC)