Serious topic here. What's the worst that could happen if you own one of these listening devices?
>Is it true that they only record once you say the keyword?
>Does your smartphone do the same thing?
>Is it an invasion of privacy?
From what most people say, it's very convenient and they say that they don't have anything to hide anyway. What's the argument for privacy in this case?
If you own a smartphone you already do. These are just extensions.
Go look up Edward Snowden; do some personal research.
Already do what?
>activates on keyword
How can it hear the keyword if it isn't always listening?
>Is it true that they only RECORD once you say the keyword?
I know for a fact the new card readers at my 7-Eleven hears you when you use your debit card.
I was talking to the clerk (we chat about my business next door), just getting some coffee and mentioned my heat pump was out at the shop so it was annoyingly cold. Said I needed to order a new circuit board for it.
Nothing I had searched for or even said a word about to anyone except him yet. I went on Amazon an hour or so later and "Recommended for you" were new heat pumps.
The bigger question is how can this negatively affect a normal person that isn't involved in illegal activities?
Yes they know what you want to buy and give you the opportunity to get it. So? I want to understand what's so bad about it.
"Alexa calls cops on man allegedly beating his girlfriend"
nypost.com
Yes, all technology created in the last two decades was made to collect all information on you and invade privacy.
Watch "A Good American" for free at www.agoodamerican.org
If you have owned anything close to a state of the art phone it has been listening to everything you say since pre-2010.
When you get recommendations from Google or other apps and you wonder why it feels like your phone is reading your mind, it's not. It's just listening to your conversations.
Being turned into a human product is never good
Peleus was created to make backdoors into hardware, In-Q-Tel was the next iteration of Peleus and it was made to penetrate software as well
>Is it an invasion of privacy?
not if you personally subscribed to it by purchasing the device in the first place
You’ll know for sure when they haul your ass into court for things they have no business knowing in the first place.
Too many instances of this happening to me.. and I’m rural and lo-tech for the most part..
Fuck they know my taste in anime
> What's the argument for privacy?
That my privacy is worth more to me than a company selling my personal information, whether that be that I like buying electronics online or that I sometimes message my friend with memes from this place. The whole "if you have nothing to hide, what's the problem" argument is completely flawed. You're giving up your own privacy for convenience. Slowly over time, more and more will happen to the point that we'll become fucking UK-levels of Big Brother observation. You won't be able to own a TV without being pestered about your fucking loicense. You won't be able to post things on the internet without fear of being persecuted for holding beliefs that Israel is an illegitimate state that is NOT the ally of the US. You won't be able to do anything a typical plebbitor will do.
So no, fuck your convenience. Learn some fucking restraint, you piece of shit. Enforcing your "convenience" on me is not freedom, it's oppression.
You already have a cell phone you take everywhere you go. Alexa is nothing.
Have a hot mic running at all times, like your phone but that is your ISP also having it but also feeding it to the alphabet agencies. Using alexa/echo is giving your live mic to jeff fucking bezos and feeding washington post.
>they say that they don't have anything to hide anyway.
>hurr I freely give out personal information because I don't care that I'm literally doing work for other people for free and can't understand why someone could think this is a bad thing
You should tell me who these people are, I've got a really fun fence painting game for them in my backyard.
About listening devices- fiber optic cable is a listening device. That's part of the reason for Google's fiber to home initiative. Fiber optic is the size of a human hair and is extremely sensitive to external disturbances, including sound. Sound waves cause fiber optic cable to vibrate in a way that can be understood by monitors at the end of the line. Those monitors can tell exactly where those vibrations occurred and they can translate them to sound (Alexander Graham Bell used light to transmit sound over 100 years ago, so the tech isn't new. google photophone). Military bases have a strand of fiber optic cable buried around their perimeter and it's capable of hearing any sound approaching the base, including footsteps.
The Hibernia express is an undersea fiber line that has 12 fibers in it. Literally 12 human hairs that transmit the data for an entire continent. Amazon is currently constructing facilities with 5400 thread cables in it to harvest the massive amounts of data they will be harvesting from your home when you use Alexa. If you also have google's fiber to home, that data will include audio recordings of everything you say (whether alexa's speaker is within reach or not, a map of your home built from sonograph, a map of your position in your home at all times of the day, the people inside your home and their identities (voice id and photo id) and literally everything you do or say.
I was also in my house garage, prepping my snowblower for the season when I realized I needed a new scrapper blade. Came in the house, used Bing to search for an MTD model number for it and when I clicked over to Amazon it was in my "Recommendations for You" section already.
In order to recognize a spoken keyword, any algorithm (deep-learning or traditional) would have to record, at least, a buffer corresponding to the time needed to pronounce the keyword. So yeah, they technically are "recording" all the time.
The point is more to know if the data is used for anything else than starting the device. IMO they don't do it since the legal risks for the companies selling those products would be massive, and the gains limited. It is sure, however, that every of those devices have backdoors which can be used for law enforcement or hacking.
on board chip scans for the keyword and then starts recording
easily verified if this is not true. you can easily monitor network traffic of devices. your router probably has a feature for this but there's plenty of hacker tools that do the same.
if any device like this really transmitted everything, we'd hear about it pretty quick because there wouldn't be a way to hide it.
you have nothing to hide, right goyim? It's not like we want to know of anybody who criticizes Jews, to take note of any political dissidents or anything
>>Is it true that they only record once you say the keyword?
If it's only listening after you say the keyword, how does it know when you say the keyword? They're absolutely listening all the time. They probably only actually log when specific words are used, like about schedule/shopping/what you buy and shit. Heres this too
people.com
They allow the government to construct a parallel investigation while breaching the 4th amendment. The NSA and DEA both use it extensively. While you don't have to give a shit right now almost at all unless you're a significantly important person, it insures you cannot run for politics or hold a serious amount of power without the establishment being aware of everything you do. It is an act of tyranny to keep you under control, and regardless of its practicality in your life you should be against this treason on principle.
People will find out I talk to myself when Im alone
Me and my brother we're playing videogames over the internet and we wanted to chat.
He didn't have a headset so he suggested using Whatsapp for voice chat.
I was terrified after using that because I could hear EVERYTHING that was going on in his appartment. (Mind you it is a small appartment).
I could hear when someone was using the microwave, the fridge, someone entering the place, leaving, using the washroom.
So if they can flip a switch and turn your microphone on when they want. They could eventually figure out everything about you.
All proven with vault 7 leaks on wikileaks, before they offed julian ofc. Smart TVs are bugged, every operating system is compromised, etc. Plus the vulnerabilities that 1 year after the vault 7 leaks were withheld from public reports. You're only as safe until they decide you're worth spending resources on if you're doing illegal shit. With Five Eyes, Canada is sharing all of its data with the EU and they're in turn sharing it back in exchange for data on the EU through traffic rerouting. it goes up to fourteen eyes but I suspect every country does it at this point.
pick up that can
They have been spying on us for quite a while. What's more powerful than spying on us is making us so paranoid that we censor our own speech and even our thoughts. Stalin used the technique really well, long before cellphones etc existed. What gets people in trouble is not spy tech, but loose talk with people who can't keep their mouths shut.
>What does it matter if they know all my secrets? I have nothing to hide.
See, people say this, but everyone has stuff they wish to hide. To anyone here who genuinely feels they have nothing to hide, then please go ahead and respond with your social security number, a picture of government-issued ID, every text conversations you've had for the past few years, the last time you had sex, and a set of your home keys. Please and thank you.
Just because we don't feel like our privacy is being violated doesn't mean that there are no consequences - potential or real - to it.
>pic related, a Remote Administration Tool from the NSA, along with ETERNALBLUE/other zero days/tools from 2011. Two of the exploits were used for wannacry which infected a quarter million pcs in a matter of days, and again used in NotPetya believed to be a false flag against ukraine as they were ground zero and it was a nuker virus that ended up being one of the worse cyberattack in history. Was it putin through shadowbrokers releasing the tools (from snowden as a peace offering?) either way these were exploits from 2011 that even today are still effective. They have things like stuxnet now, controlling all power plants/water/geothermal plants, etc through PLCs, tech from the 80s. It was used as a last ditch effort to slow down irans nuclear production or Israel was going to nuke them.
Israel also happens to open geothermal plants all around the world.
There used to be websites that exploited the vulnerabilities when people would leave the default passwords on their smart TVs, webcams, and security cameras in place. You could go on the website and see into literally thousands of people's homes, and what they were doing when they had their equipment on. Most of them were doing stuff like ironing clothes or fallen dead asleep in front of the TV in their undies while cuddling the dog, but some were quite explicit.
If a person knows another person's IP address, with a simple search string they can do the same. Additionally, there are bots that are loose on the internet that automatically search (like Google) for such vulnerabilities. I saw one YouTube video of a security expert running his software that shows how soon his system is compromised when he plugged a video camera into his home network; he did it several times, and the average time was something like 12 seconds before his system was compromised, with some computer somewhere monitoring him.
...and for what it's worth, I only have dumb TVs, and my one computer that came with a camera has a Snoopy band-aid taped over it. It was in place before I powered it on for the first time ever.
My phone (I assume, only known mic in the area) has done this to me
This is how stingray devices were detected
youtube.com
Watch his other talks too, very informative
I ask politically incorrect questions whenever I come across an Alexabug, knowing that the owner will see them in the app paired with the device
Years ago my buddy sent me a pastebin link that was entirely hacked webcams that you could watch live. I just pulled it up, but all the links I've tried so far are dead.
...anyone have a working one?...
I have installed one of these in every room. I just assume that they are recording everything and will avenge me if anybody assaults me in my home.
Seriously though, you have started to see judges asking for "all recordings". You know they don't mean just the ones done when you say "alexa"
For real. When I got that link o posted further up, there was a ton of other ones that I hadn't heard of, of judges ordering Alexa transcripts be given to the court as evidence.
most people never check that deep into the app or even realize that screen is there
it's interesting though. it does sometimes record unusual things because something in the conversation sounded enough like the keyword that it activated
P.S.
You guys should be WAY more fearful of your computer than some hardware device. For the hardware device to do what you're suggesting implies a conspiracy from a specific hardware manufacturer.
For your computer to do it requires just about any random programmer managing to get some malware on your Windows machine. Then he can do whatever the fuck he wants to your mic and your data and you'd probably never notice.
Knew a guy who made a semi-popular game. He had it take screenshots and upload them. He intended to catch hackers running cheats on his game but ended up catching all kinds of fucked up stuff instead. Like people watching child porn on another screen.