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A comment on Google’s Nest fiasco harms user trust and invades their privacy. Parent comment

Re:Google’s Nest fiasco harms user trust and invades their p... by smelendez on Saturday March 16, 2019 @03:21PM (#19409632)
That's a good point. I think it varies from person to person.

Part of my reason for blocking video is I can never figure out when videoconferencing tools will default to transmitting video, which I never want, before I have a way to turn it off.

Also, I don't think I'm a high profile enough target that somebody would bother sifting through everything I say in front of my laptop for something interesting.

Capturing images every minute or so and looking for something embarrassing (someone showing lots of skin) seems much easier for malware to automate.

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Re:Google’s Nest fiasco harms user trust and invades their p... by trevyn on Saturday March 16, 2019 @03:34PM (#19409721)
>I don't think I'm a high profile enough target that somebody would bother sifting through everything I say in front of my laptop for something interesting.

The threat model is closer to automated transcription, global history search, and parallel construction.

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Re:Google’s Nest fiasco harms user trust and invades their p... by Pocketknife on Saturday March 16, 2019 @07:57PM (#19411227)
I am amazed at the general level of understanding regarding this sort of thing. People simply don't know enough, on average, to even make an informed decision about this stuff.

They think the FBI is gonna sit and watch or listen to a recording. They have no idea this is gonna sit as text in a database forever to be searched against later.

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Re:Google’s Nest fiasco harms user trust and invades their p... by smelendez on Saturday March 16, 2019 @03:54PM (#19409842)
I think that would be hard to pull off in the US, where I live. There are enough paranoid infosec people that would spot the data transmission or CPU usage.

But certainly no harm done in muffling or ripping out a mic if you're concerned!

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Re:Google’s Nest fiasco harms user trust and invades their p... by pdkl95 on Saturday March 16, 2019 @06:54PM (#19410916)
Why would anybody bother trying to hide traffic? Lots of apps already waste bandwidth and CPU to exfiltrate a wide variety of data, often sending it straight to Facebook[1]. They simply relabeled it "analytics",

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_...

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Re:Google’s Nest fiasco harms user trust and invades their p... by r00fus on Saturday March 16, 2019 @05:41PM (#19410466)
Not if it’s intermittent / on-demand and hiding within existing traffic.
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Re:Google’s Nest fiasco harms user trust and invades their p... by TrinaryWorksToo on Saturday March 16, 2019 @10:15PM (#19411794)
There are startups that automate listening to devices. See www.deepgram.com
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