Contrast this to Amazon: during design of the original Echo at Lab126, an engineering discussion took place where they determined that implementing the mute function in software would be less expensive in terms of component requirements than implementing a physical disconnect of the mic circuit.

The engineering team refused to take the less expensive route, and insisted that the mute button physically disconnect the circuit, so that no future engineering team could decide to stealth "unmute" the microphone through software.

To this day, you can disassemble an Amazon Echo device and you will find a physical disconnect of the mic circuitry when you push the mute button. Don't want an "always listening" smart speaker? Just keep it muted, and a red LED circle informs you that the mic is physically disconnected.

I'm proud of the approach that Amazon takes to privacy. Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon, and this customer obsession (the #1 leadership principle) permeates the organization.

Disclaimer: I'm a principal engineer at Amazon.

In this story, it was only lower-level engineers that took a stand for user privacy. It was them against everyone above them at Amazon. Doesn't sound like Amazon-the-company deserves credit.

Update to clarify reasons for this characterization: Parent used the words "refused" and "insisted," which strongly suggest conflict between the pro-privacy engineers and others at Amazon involved in the project. And "so that no future engineering team could decide to stealth 'unmute'" suggests a lack of trust in long-term company management. Nothing in this story supports the later statement that "Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon."

The company fully backed their decision. They did not have to fight anyone.

This type of product design decision happens all the time. Whenever you're considering component costs, you have to evaluate all of the options. You're mischaracterizing it as a fight between engineers and management.

That's not fair. First of all, the OP didn't say it was only "lower level engineers", it could have been the entire engineering team, for all we know.

And second, Amazon did the right thing and listened to them, when they didn't have to. They could have given the project to a different team, reassigned people, or even fired them.

Instead, they had the sense to listen to their engineers, which was the right thing to do.

Doesn't matter if it's lower-level engineers or a janitor, So long as they worked at Amazon and Amazon finally agreed. Amazon deserves credit.

is this the same company that's shilling Rekogition to police departments and governments?

for some reason i'm thinking this point of view isn't held company wide.

>> shilling Rekogition to police departments and governments

That's a rather poor choice of words. I prefer "helping police departments catch criminals", myself. 'cuz, you know, police departments exist for a reason.

Both of these POVs are a bit extreme versus actual real-life implementation.

Police have a legitimate, important societal purpose, and have historically abused and over-surveilled minority populations in a way that's highly problematic.

There's a compelling use case for facial recognition in law enforcement. There's also a compelling case that it needs to be closely scrutinized and regulated.

I do think you don’t need citations to know that over-surveillance is a consistent happening, my apologies if you aren’t American.

New York recently finished settling and paying out a case where they were accused of heavily, unreasonably surveilling a number of muslim people and properties. In the end, they still admitted to no misconduct.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/nyregion/last-suit-accusi...

This is just a single drop in heavy policing that NYC pushed for and is still dealing with the effects of doing so. Stop and Frisk comes to mind: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=846365

That's because you're looking at US law enforcement as a unified system. It is not and never has been a unified system. I don't think the FBI is still running surveillance on all civil rights leaders so they can blackmail them, but that happened - I don't really doubt that the police department in Baltimore is planting drugs on people though, as was shown on their own video cameras in the last year.

> without heavy policing a large city with very high income inequality like NYC would quickly turn into a dystopian shithole

A lack of order is not what I'm 'proposing', but more the factor that 'order' is very obviously skewed towards minorities as shown by various sources you could seek now. One could also discuss how it's based on crime statistics, but that would reach to "systematic oppression" fields: You can't continuously punish random people of a certain race just because statistics say they're 'likely' to commit crime, this is systematic. What you see as a dystopian shithole is already just that for those who can't have their peace without law involvement, and ML tools will not skirt around this, the bias will only transfer and amplify such shit.

> I also believe countermeasures are necessary to prevent Islamic radicalization (and any other kind of radicalization as well).

The department responsible for the spying disbanded and confirmed in 2014 that they hadn't generated a terrorism related case since 2008, as stated in the previous NYT article. You'd frankly figure that after 9/11, American Muslims — Let alone those in New York, would be actively against any kind of 'radicalization' unless you consider simply practicing religion as 'radicalization', which NYPD practically did here.

> Don't try nothing - won't be nothing

I mentally envy the ability to state such a thing, to be honest.

> What you're missing though is that without heavy policing a large city with very high income inequality like NYC would quickly turn into a dystopian shithole.

Citation needed.

How about a citation (with actual data) about the NYPD's work slowdown[1] in 2014-2015. Contrary to fears about NYC into a dystopia and the traditional authoritarian claims about "broken window" policing, lower police activity resulted in lower crime rates.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/07/2...

> What you're missing though is that without heavy policing a large city with very high income inequality like NYC would quickly turn into a dystopian shithole.

Sounds like an argument for addressing income inequality.

Yeah, that was my initial reaction.

Really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing

Sub in "law enforcement" for "police" if you want to be that pedantic, and I did say "historically".

If you want more recent examples, Chicago was disappearing people to black sites for interrogation this decade.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...

and torturing suspects for decades, well into the 2000s:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/18/guantanamo-t...

>Citation needed

See: South Africa

Where I come from the police used to hunt and kill "undesirables", and bury the bodies up in the mountains. One of the first things my dad taught me was how to recognize those long skinny headlights on a cop car, you had to learn to avoid them at all costs to survive if you didn't have the appropriate skin color.

They aren't always good guys, and it's ok to have legitimate concerns about cooperation with law enforcement.

Police departments exist to perpetuate the interests of the state and those in power. They exist to defend private property. I would strongly disagree with your assertion especially in America. :)

> The engineering team refused to take the less expensive route, and insisted that the mute button physically disconnect the circuit, so that no future engineering team could decide to stealth "unmute" the microphone through software.

Who are these engineers? Have they ever spoken publicly about this stance?

That was a bit more dramatic than it should have been. The engineering team said a software mute button would be a security issue due to back door enabling, so they implemented it as hardware. This wasn't really dramatic, engineers said no and the higher-ups respected their expertise.

Good job. Thank you/the team for standing up for good basic principles.

Does this apply to the Sonos one, also? It has Alexa integration, but is a sonos project.

I don't believe this applies to any 3rd party products. Those manufacturers have to make their own design decisions.

One anecdote I remember from the Steve Jobs biography was how he'd discovered that a speaker could also be used as a microphone. Is there any risk of some of these devices using that capability to convert their audio output tech into audio input tech?

I don't have a direct answer to your question, but it piqued my curiosity so I did a quick search. I found this informative little post:

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/154343/can-a-sp...

Some on-chip gyros/accelerometers can also work as microphones – and may be even harder to separate those via an external cut-off switch.

So can capacitors - a common factor to avoid in amplifier design - and at the limit, so can just about any semiconductor.

I remember someone in a recent HN comment thread mentioning that, as an ex-Googler, Google today feels like Microsoft under Ballmer.

So while I agree with you, it _also_ wouldn't surprise me if someone raised the concern, but that person was on a different / more silo'ed team and therefore the concern never reached the execution stage. Herego too many management layers and/or nodes of entropy for communication.

But that's just a hypothesis.

Or was "yes, yes, we'll add a story to the backlog to add it to the specs" and it just flat out got forgotten. I've seen this happen so many times where I've been the one to raise the issue and because I've passed it off, I've forgotten about it only to circle back around 2 months later when someone says "Oh, we need to do this" and I say "I raised this 2 months ago, I thought X had put it in the backlog."

And when you go looking, sure enough, there it is in the backlog down in Priority "We'll get to it when we get to it, after all these other more important things that needed to be completed by last week."

I am sorry but I do not buy this "added to backlog and forgot" theory, especially for a resources-packed company like Google. Are you implying that everyone from PM to devs to QA all ignored the microphone sitting in there? All electronics needs to be compliance tested at a gov labs in Northeast (Baltimore area) because of electromagnetic signature since Nest devices have WiFi. Are you saying even they forgot to bring it up as well?

I'm not saying the microphone was ignored or forgotten about, I'm saying the "add that line to the specification sheet for public release" was forgotten about.

I work in Google and my org of over a hundred engineers has a single tech writer assigned. I assure you she never sees the bottom of her backlog.

This is so common in so many companies I've worked with that it doesn't even begin to surprise me. This is an accepted way of life at most tech companies.

Sure, that seems plausible. If the existence of the microphone wasn't a secret internally, why would PM or devs or QA or government inspectors be disturbed to see it?

Although this is all possible and perhaps even more plausible than the alternative, it's still more fun and conspiratorial to view Google as the new Evil Empire, so I'll just keep doing that, thanks.

As a current googler, this seems like the most plausible explanation. Entirely likely that the person who noticed didn't actually know which other team to escalate to....

Reminds me of the time that school issued laptops where the camera could be remotely turned on when the student was using it at home (including in their bedroom), and somehow no one realized the pervy implications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...

Oh they absolutely knew the pervy implications, they didn't think they would ever be caught:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...

"The school district intentionally did not publicize the existence of the surveillance technology. It also actively sought to conceal it.[23][41]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...

It seems at least as likely that the microphone feature, as a non-working component of a future product upgrade, was omitted at the request of attorneys reviewing the product literature so as to not create a false expectation of that unreleased feature.

I've worked on several products that had capabilities that we were told by attorneys could not be "advertised" (i.e., no references to them) until the complete feature was ready to be announced.

Yeah, I think it's most likely that. Seems very plausible Nest wanted to have some voice features but they got cut before launch. The mic's still there because changing hardware is hard, it's not announced because it doesn't do anything.

Product Marketing does not 'document' they position, and write about features. If the 'mic' isn't part of feature or proposition, why would it even be in their radar?

The '1st order' response of marketing doing their job is 'who cares?'. Few people care about tech tidbits that are not user oriented.

There's already tons of things to worry about and address - and every single bit of copy takes up valuable space.

The issue also does not fit into the standard communications framework: Hey, should we should tell people that there is a microphone, even if it is not working and does nothing? How do we even do that? "Hey, your alarm has a microphone!" Wouldn't that seem odd, why does it have a microphone?! You'd even have to kind of explain it: "Your product has a microphone so that one day in the future, you might enable some other features that don't exist yet"

"this has privacy implications" - no - it only has the perception of privacy implications. Because Google is not actually intervening on people's privacy, it's unlikely they really thought about the need to give people an unneeded affirmation.

Maybe they had a discussion about it, maybe it just didn't rise to the level of 'very important'.

Only with a very specific concern for a subgroup of customers who are wary of these things, would someone have enough leverage to get that "Hey, there's a microphone that does nothing!" notice on the box.

Google is not doing specific evil. They are not trying to infiltrate your homes and take nude pictures of you so they can look at them or sell them.

They are systematically evil, in the sense that it makes sense for them to sell you voice/video features that you want in order that they might provide you even better services. And their AI will use nudies of you in a backwards way to learn more about you.

They're getting evil due to their scope of influence, and negative externalities, much like FB has problems with 'Russian interference in elections' - i.e. not a problem they are trying to create, not a problem they want, just a sensitive byproduct of their product and massive success.

>`"this has privacy implications" - no - it only has the perception of privacy implications. Because Google is not actually [intruding] on people's privacy [...]`

I've got to disagree here: it has privacy implications because at Google's end they can issue a software update and now be monitoring all audio, and the T&C no doubt say they can be unilaterally varied without notification. That all means that Google think I accept Google snooping on me; of course I don't but in court Google lawyers would say I did, and them being in a position to do that is important.

Also, if Google can enable the mic at some point then it's likely that's a possibility for a third party (crackers), OR that Google could do it in response to a legal demand from a government.

There seems no good reason to me that the specification summary can't say "microphone - not in use yet, reserved for future applications"; with a sentence somewhere expanding on that explaining they want the ability to improve the device later and do shipped a mic because it could be useful to expand the products capabilities.

Some of us actually do read instruction books; it would no doubt get some column-inches in a positive way ("what changes might Google make").

Google know everything they make is going to get a tear-down and that mics are going to be discovered in short-shrift: it's ignorant to not anticipate that. In fact one really has to assume they knew this "issue" would come up.

Google is not going to all of a sudden start recording you in your home without your knowledge, and then say 'hey look, you signed a contract'. That would be an obvious PR disaster, not an 'I forgot disaster'.

If/when Google enables this tech, it think it will be clear enough. If not, then definitely would be time to raise a real fuss.

"There seems no good reason to me that the specification summary can't say" - I agree with you there - however, I suggest that they mighn't have even have thought of it. That would be the prudent thing to do, but again, there's no established procedure for it.

There probably was not even a legal review hint etc. because as I say, they were not using it.

So it's questionable, weird, but not nefarious.

What they will do, with your ostensible permission, with a signed T&C - is to me, far more nefarious.

Documented where? Honest question. The marketing department isn't going to list something that's totally non functional. Is there a privacy oriented spec sheet somewhere (that people will actually read)?

I can see this slipping through the cracks between different job roles' responsibilities, although after this incident they'd probably go through a post mortem and find a way to incorporate new checks into the product launch process.

I doubt that they were silenced, more like the concern was raised but it was given some random answer at first and said to be discussed at a later date and then forgotten.

Or their voice is just echoed down a chain of managers that don't understand why it was brought up in the first place.

Not a good look for Nest...

My take is that maybe by that point that someone noticed all the product material had been printed or generated and someone else didn't want to redo it, or forgot, and hoped it would blow over.