What am I supposed to say here? I don't like microphones being always on either, but it's his phone and his home too. I can't escape the millions of cameras around the city or the constant internet trackers. We should have had regulated this stuff decades ago.

if it's important to you and you're willing to burn social capital on it, just politely ask that he not use it when [your boundaries here].

if you come to an impasse, then there's not much to be done other than part ways. i'd imagine this is similar to any other incompatible roommate situations, e.g. someone whose recent significant other recently started coming over and has annoying habits.

Brave and DuckDuckGo built entire businesses on the premise of privacy. Many an arrogant reader here HN have no qualms claiming that they can replicate Facebook in a weekend.

Go forth and walk the talk. Yet another Mastodon client is cool, but do you know what's cooler? A production quality OCR competitive with Google Cloud Vision API, voice transcription on par with AWS Transcribe, or personal assistants with the ubiquity of Siri.

If you're visiting me, you're on my property, ditto.

Any attempts to "fix" this will only make the world worse in the end. The people you empower to enforce your opinions about privacy in (semi-)public places will begin by exempting themselves from whatever well-intentioned rules you have in mind.

See, that's kind of the whole idea behind public areas. You aren't entitled to any expectation of privacy there. That's why they're called public areas, and not private areas.

The distinction is remarkably easy to comprehend.

But I don't know how to give you the guarantees you're asking for without harming my rights, and ultimately yours.

Right, and that's a good example of what I was talking about in my earlier reply, with regard to any attempt at "fixing" the Ring situation leaving us in a worse place than where we are now.

Currently, in the US, you have the right to put up a doorbell camera and record anything that happens on your property or in public areas adjacent to it. This is a GOOD thing. Rest assured, any restrictions on public/private recording will serve the police, and no one else.

If so, then perhaps the courts are the best remedy.

[0] https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent-states/

Legislation does absolutely nothing when the people aren't involved. When people are not involved, it almost always gets usurped to remove rights and privilege from the common person.

Thus you and your roommate should be talking about these things. To remain silent is to remain complicit.

The majority of people don't seem to care about always on microphones.

Thousands subcontractors of google/amazon/ms already hear it, why you can't?

Second of all most people expect that the recordings made by voice assistants aren't going to be shared beyond the walls of Amazon/Google. A few random contractors you won't ever meet hearing you feels different than the entire world including people you know hearing it.

Lastly, Amazon/Google has a good reason to listen to the recordings: improve the technology so it works better for everyone including you. Random strangers have no good reason to listen to recordings of you, only bad reasons.

It really bugs how most people here seem to go "oh if you like using voice assistants why don't you just share everything with the whole world?" Privacy is a spectrum, not a binary choice. Somebody can be comfortable with Amazon/Google using the audio and not be comfortable with a live audio stream accessable to everyone on the internet.

But it's also your home, and he should respect your wishes for privacy when you make them known.

However I do agree that 3pt14159 should talk to his roommate about it if it bugs him so that they can come to an understanding.

His roommate didn't have the courtesy to even ask about it up front. :(

That being said, his roommate may just have not thought about it. Only way to find out is by starting the discussion and seeing how it goes.

> Why should his desire to not have voice assistants in the house trump his roommate's desire to utilize the technology they paid for and want to use?

One thing is about security and privacy (important), while the other is about convenience (trivial).

That the roommate didn't even consider the security and privacy of other people is Not Ok. It seems fairly common in this early stage of voice assistants, so having a discussion about it may resolve things.

That's a pretty ridiculous expectation to put on an end user. It's a normal phone doing normal phone things.

Listening for watch words 24/7 is not a normal phone thing.

"Normal" phone conversations are between ~two people.

This voice assistant crap is sending people's audio to - at least - Google for processing/analysis/storage/etc.

It is now.

At least from the perspective of your everyday-person.

From your perspective, this is not the case. But I wouldn't put the hacker news crowd in the "everyday-person" category.

Blame the companies, but don't put that ridiculous expectation on normal people.

Sorry, but trying to normalise this crap is just not going to work.

Not sure why you're even attempting to.

I'm just recognizing the current reality. I also agree that it's pretty crappy.

I revisit the idea of a NAS at least once a year... each time I come to the conclusion it is more hardware to configure and keep up to date and just not worth it (being the fun of it)

I have two web cameras in the kids‘ rooms, but they are fully fire walled and have zero external access. But now that they aren’t infants... do we need them?

I do backup our pictures and documents to an external provider, but the backups are encrypted and not browsable per say.

I have no need for a fridge that orders groceries or a thermostat I can control from the office...etc.

Ironically, I write software for a living and love computers... I just value privacy more than most I guess.