This seems to be a pretty big assumption, without which your whole argument falls apart. In my case, at least, I have no such functionality enabled. You could argue that the manufacturer of my phone could push a software update that enables it without my knowledge (in fact, they likely couldn't, because I don't have automatic updates turned on), but even if this were true we're now arguing about a very different thing - the theoretical ability of MegaCorp to spy on me as opposed to actual known spying.
...the malicious entity already pushed it out silently in the last update you did accept...
You really have to trust the entity building the software on these devices. These little half-measures are purely psychological protection.
There is a huge difference between "we listened to your conversation, but hey didn't you accept our EULA?" and " let's spy on some random people".
https://www.techspot.com/news/73776-google-receiving-police-...
https://www.propublica.org/article/no-warrant-no-problem-how...
https://www.csoonline.com/article/2222749/mobile-phone-surve...
And of course, the police have been caught abusing this data. Data acquired this way is likely to get to you in another type of cases: divorce proceedings often use this sort of data as well, and it's been used in trade disputes too.
Given that all that already happens with cellphone data, what's the point of doing anything about it at this point ?
How do you know? Is your device _incapable_ of performing that task, or did you just click a checkbox somewhere? Because if you just politely _asked_ the OS to disable it, it doesn't really matter, does it? We are back to the matter of trusting the vendor.
> (in fact, they likely couldn't, because I don't have automatic updates turned on)
So you say. The software may or may not agree with your statement.
> the theoretical ability of MegaCorp to spy on me as opposed to actual known spying.
There's no "actual known spying". Spying implies intent, none has been demonstrated so far.
Where your argument falls apart (yeap, I can use that line too) is this: you are interacting with other people also carrying powerful listening devices of their own. They may or may not have disabled a "ok google" functionality, and they may or may not have disabled updates. Again, where do you draw the line? Do you ask everyone to leave their devices behind before interacting with them?
I turn off voice assistant on my smartphone and don't have any google home/alexa devices either. I have a TV with no voice activation. I won't use voice activation devices.
Is it possible my phone is listening to my anyway and sending recordings to someone? It's possible. If I were smart I would never say anything that would be 'dangerous' if someone heard it with my phone in the room, although Im sure I'm not that careful, it's probably not possible.
If I found out for sure my phone was listening to me surreptitiously, rather than just knowing that it's not impossible -- I'd do something about it.
One affect of arguing "it's all the same, your phone COULD be spying on your voice conversations anyway" is, perhaps ironically, to make people care LESS about it. If it's doing it anyway (or just if I can't prove it's not?), what do I care about Google Voice doing it too? But one disincentive for companies doing it is precisely that people will be upset if they find out. (And they're gonna find out eventually).
You don't need to go live in the woods to care about it. It's good to care about it. You don't need to either "draw the line" at living in the woods without electricity, or draw no lines. We can draw lines. They can move. If your argument is that since you can't be sure that nobody's spying on you, you shouldn't care about the people you DO know are spying on you and shouldn't get upset about it -- that's not how any of this works.
Insisting on all or nothing gets you nothing (cause it turns out 'all' isn't really an option), and who wants nothing?
For the Echo/Google Home/etc. devices, I don't have any of the above options, so I simply don't buy them and don't use them.
Here's a paper describing the privacy invasive and potentially harmful properties of pre-installed apps [1]. I specifically saved this paper in my files so I can have a comprehensive answer when people ask me why I go through the trouble of rooting my devices.
P.S. People who know more than me are saying that the baseband processor can be restricted with hardware practices such as IOMMU [2]. I don't really know how effective that can be.
[1]: https://haystack.mobi/papers/preinstalledAndroidSW_preprint....
The baseband processor isn't running Siri or Google Voice on my phone. Yes, if the state has a back door into the baseband processor there's not much I can do about it, but that's not the threat model that I'm avoiding by not using devices like the Echo or Google Home.
100% this. IF a state intelligence agency is after my data they'll get it somehow (most likely just by asking). My concern is the rampant dragnet aggregation of personal data that I didn't expressly provide them by companies like Google and Facebook. I mean, Google having access to your emails that you store in Gmail? Kind of understandable. Google buying MasterCard transaction records to cross-reference against your web browsing data as tracked by any site using Google Analytics? No.
Which defeats the whole purpose of having it, namely, to respond to voice commands.
> You can turn voice off just the same as you can on a phone.
I don't have to turn off voice altogether on my phone, I just have to turn off the apps that I don't trust. On an Echo, either I turn it off and might as well not have it, or I turn it on and it's recording everything. There's no middle ground where I get some basic functionality without being spied on.
I'd guess that most people could effectively find a middle ground by treating the Echo as if it were someone in a cordial but not really friends relationship with a family member, such as a classmate of one of you kids over to discuss a school project, or a member of your spouse's church over to discuss planning the annual church picnic.
If they are doing things that they would not mind such a person overhearing, have the Echo on. If they are doing things that they would not do until such a person leaves, have the Echo off.
It would be interesting to give these home voice assistants faces, including eyes that look at and track people it is listening to when they speak, to help people remember that it is still listening to them. That might make it easier to remember to turn it off before discussing sensitive things in its presence.
You don't own the device despite paying for it. It updates itself when it feels like it and does whatever its actual owner says including compromising itself if told to.
i'd be really surprised if that couldn't act as an offline cache.
Graphene OS, a security-hardened Android ROM: https://grapheneos.org
Librem 5, probably the ideal solution: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ Just look at the bullet-point features:
+ Does not use Android or iOS. The Librem 5 comes with the mobile version of our FSF-endorsed operating system PureOS by default, and is expected to be able to run most GNU+Linux distributions.
+ CPU separate from baseband, isolating the blackbox that the modem may represent and allowing us to seek hardware certification of the main board by the Free Software Foundation.
+ Hardware Kill Switches for camera, microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband.
+ End-to-end encrypted decentralized communications via Matrix over the Internet.
+ We also intend the Librem 5 to integrate with the Librem Key security token in the future.
Someone really needs to make a decent modular smartphone with a detachable radio.
So, assuming you have a smartphone. That is a device which has:
- Permanent network connection. Doesn't matter what you do on your Wifi, it has the cellular data network. Which is controlled by an independent processor with its own firmware
- Excellent noise-cancellation microphones. They may not be able to pinpoint the sound source like an Echo would, but they are still pretty sensitive
- Accurate location updated via GPS. If you block GPS, it can still use the cell phone towers as an approximation, plus any SSID beacons nearby
- Very powerful processor, capable of listening for 'interesting' data before sending anything
- Similar functionality to an Echo / Google Home / Apple whatever. They'll be listening for "hey siri" or "ok google"
And so on. Plus, anyone you interact with will have such a device in their pockets.
Given that. why would an Echo be of any particular concern? At least you can monitor their network activity easily. Not so with a smartphone, which is a much higher threat. And yet most people sleep with them next to their beds.