If you have a smartphone with Siri or the equiv app on it (Android, Windows) your device is already 'always listening.' I fail to see the difference.

People carry around a GPS tracking device with a mic and camera built-in. They use it to post their entire lives on social networks. And they're worried about privacy.

Hilarious.

> People carry around a GPS tracking device with a mic and camera built-in. They use it to post their entire lives on social networks. And they're worried about privacy.

i think people who are worried about privacy are not the people who are broadcasting their entire lives on social networks

You are correct. And those few people NOT having their lives online are decidedly not the target audience to begin with.

By that argument, those people won't buy the Amazon Echo either, so what's the problem?

> so what's the problem?

I think that's a fairly naive point of view. Consider the simple fact that these devices are not to be used in isolation - e.g. you come to someone's home, etc. If you think this is too alarmist a mindset, maybe you'll remember how quite a few folk were outraged about facebook's new app which was to actively listen via your mobile's mic (so it can e.g. recognize music and add "while listening/watching" etc. info to status updates and so on.)

The problem in that case was not (just) the actively-listening part ("don't use it if you don't like it"), but rather that people (in)voluntarily become the dreaded dragnet surveillance infrastructure.

"Such future hope for decentralization." Ha! :)

And this is also true for cellphones. Siri is always listening for you to say her name, which means that anyone you talk to with an iphone is always recording.

Not everyone has the same level of concern over "priacy" that you do, deal with it. It's 2014, everything is being recorded now and will be even more so in the future.

If you don't trust your friends, there are much worse ways they could betray you.

The people who don't broadcast their lives on social media are also concerned about what happens to the people who do.

Because they are not psycopaths.

well, generally speaking.

Converting other people to your religion "because you care". How nice of you.

Well as a very simple example:

I don't let people eat poisoned food because they didn't know it was poisoned.

You'd resent me if I let you do that, wouldn't you?

Now if you turned to me and said "I don't believe you." Should I forcibly stop you?b If you turned to me and said "I know", what then?

No, Siri only takes commands when you activate it.

There's an "always listening" feature, but this is off by default and only works when you are plugged into external power.

Someone else said this:

"Yes, it's possible the technology respects your privacy."

If you can suggest that Amazon Echo is potentially listening and transmitting the data to Amazon even when you don't explicitly say anything, the same can be said of Apple and Siri.

How do you know that it's actually off?

> How do you know that it's actually off?

I take your meaning, in the sense that there's no inherent reason to trust one but not the other; but I think that it's fair to say that there's a big difference between:

    Hey, wouldn't it be handy for our users if we started storing and pre-processing audio *before* hearing 'Alexa', so that we're ready to respond instantly?  Let's quietly take down the text that says that we don't do that.

(which is a plausible reasoning process somewhere down the line) on the one (Echo) hand, and

    Hey, wouldn't it be a good idea if we ignored our users' explicit election to turn off a feature?

on the other (Siri) hand.

Unless you expect random or targeted surveillance, if it generally listened and sent packets all the time back to Apple, even if you didn't tell it to, that someone would have discovered this by now.

Not everyone is like that. I personally have a build of Android with most of Google stripped out and the rest semi-disabled and it should have a minimum amount of tracking. I also don't install social networking apps, or at least deny them access to my personal data on Android.

Yes, people carry smartphones, use social networks. However that doesn't automatically disallow them from worrying about privacy, as they simply don't have an option. And no, sometimes not using a smartphone or a social network is not an option for a lot of people.

What they should do is advocate for privacy and try to change the situation.

Maybe my point was unclear.

Anyone who elects to put their personal information in a public forum or any kind has willingly surrendered that information. They made a choice to make private information public.

How then, can they be concerned about privacy?

I think you're (either willfully or out of ignorance) ignoring the most imporant aspect of privacy: it's about CHOOSING what to share.

I CHOOSE what to share on a social network. Devices spying on me rob me of that choice and my ability of filtering what public knows about me.

No, I agree with you.

>No, what I'm saying is, what you choose to share is public. People share so much every day, nobody needs to spy on you at all. Everyone thinks the govt./bigco is out to get them. If they are, they don't even need to do any actual work, people give the information away hand over fist. [1]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8570568

So, for you this is an all or nothing thing. If I made some things public through Facebook then I'm automatically OK with Echo possibly sending data to Amazon about the things I didn't want to make public?

Perhaps I want to be in charge of what can and can't be known about my personal life. I know, a radical thought... Maybe I want other people to know some things and not others. Why so many people seem OK with notion of corporations doing whatever they want with the data they collect without accountability?

They even blame the victims: "You bought a device with the things that 99% of devices in that category bring and can be used to collect information about you. So it's your fault, you could have bought that very difficult to get (or obsolete) device that doesn't have them, or none at all. Of course, neither corporations nor security agencies can be blamed for their sociopathic behaviour. It surely has something to do with business or security that's entirely reasonable even though they kept it in secret."

No, what I'm saying is, what you choose to share is public. People share so much every day, nobody needs to spy on you at all.

Everyone thinks the govt./bigco is out to get them. If they are, they don't even need to do any actual work, people give the information away hand over fist.

Exactly. I don't actually carry a phone these days and people think I'm crazy. Personally I just don't want to be available all the time but it has certain privacy advantages.

How do you possibly live?

I joke! In all seriousness, did you find your concentration improved as you didn't feel the desire to constantly check for text messages or emails?

Well I was in emotional, physical pain and panic like (I assume) a crack addict for a couple of weeks. It was horrid.

Then I was sitting down reading a book (Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card) and realised I'd blown 4 hours on it rather than doing any work. Rushed and grabbed the laptop and nothing was broken, on fire and no one had emailed me. Then I did a two hour coding binge. Did more on that day than any other and it has just got better and better.

Concentration has improved as has tolerance and patience. I also read a lot more because I have the time to.

I'm only posting on here because I'm waiting for compile cycles :)

I don't care about my location information, I don't use social networks.

I care about the content of my private communications w/ other people. Including in-person conversations.

> I don't care about my location information, I don't use social networks.

> I care about the content of my private communications w/ other people. Including in-person conversations.

A widely accepted security fundamental is that metadata, such as where, when, and with whom you interact, is as valuable as the content of those communications. People in the surveillance business (from security agencies to businesses who track users) value metadata for a reason.

Think about it this way: If you wanted to spy on someone what would be more valuable?: Recording everywhere they go and everyone they talk to, or recording the content of those communications?

I'm a private citizen. Spying on me is only productive for corporations and its the content, not the list of contacts, that would be useful.

Knowing I talk to Vendor X is worthless because soooooooooo many people talk to Vendor X. Knowing I'm buying 1000Y from X is more useful, eh?

So your worried Amazon will be specifically listening in to your conversations and use the content to...what? Blackmail you? Share clips of your conversation on the Internet? Inform your wife/husband you're having an affair?

Well they already go to my suppliers they know about and try to buy from them? So what do you think I'm worried about?

> Incorrect. The device is always listening, waiting for you to say "Alexa" so that it can start acting upon your commands.

You say "incorrect" then re-phase exactly what I said in a different way but retain exactly the same meaning.

The detection of the key word is on-chip. That's all that matters. Until the chip signals that it was spoken nothing is transmitted.

> So no, this isn't "pathetic baseless fear mongering".

Sure it is. If you know that on-chip keyword detection is a "thing" (which you do by your own admission) then you know also that claiming that everything you say in a room is sent to the cloud is entirely "pathetic baseless fear mongering."

You fully admit you know that that isn't the case here, but yet continue on like it /could/ be the case. Pathetic.

Yes, it's possible the technology respects your privacy.

But it's not open source. Therefore it's technically possible that Echo waits until you make a request, and then bursts a transcript of everything ELSE you've said, as well. Or maybe the device only does that if Amazon receives a valid Search Warrant, and they flag your device to enter "transcript mode." Or even "live, continuous broadcast."

People have a right to be concerned about their privacy. They have a right to ask questions. They have a right to boycott a product unless they feel satisfied their concerns are addressed. They have a right to worry that their government (maybe not even the US) could force Amazon to violate their privacy.

You calling them "pathetic" is not remotely constructive. You don't share their concerns, is all.

This sort of exchange is unfortunately the dominant mode of discourse--not just online either.

Both sides loudly proclaim the foolishness of the other without ever having an opportunity to establish some reasonable grounds on which an actual discussion could proceed.

As an aside, I have most assuredly been guilt of this on HN and elsewhere but have been making an effort to curtail it. We'll see how that goes.

"Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."

-- Mark Twain

Pro-tip, when people make such outlandish comments and call people idiots en-masse, (which I am amazed hasn't been flagged away), just ignore them. :-)

I hear you.

...but I feel like it's an important topic, and this conversation thread was ALMOST worth trying to redeem... I thought I could maybe shine a bit of light where there was a lot of heat...

But yeah, I hear ya.

What you are saying is technologically correct, possible and prevalent but I couldn't find Amazon saying it anywhere on their page. Can you point me to the part where Amazon says nothing is ever stored/transmitted unless "Alexa" is spoken?

I noticed that your profile mentioned "recording engineer" so maybe some concrete numbers related to digital audio technology will put boundaries on plausible scenarios.

We assume either of 2 engineering designs:

(#1) the trigger word "Alexa" is detected within an embedded chip. The DSP (digital signal processing) intelligence for analyzing sound waveforms is inside the device. Therefore, the words spoken after "Alexa" are then sent to the cloud.

(#2) the trigger word "Alexa" (and/or other words) are detected remotely via cloud computers. There is no "smart" DSP chip within the Echo device. That means that the device must send a constant 24/7 stream of digital waveforms to the cloud.

If we continue on the #2 scenario, we can guesstimate what data transfer volumes would look like. To be conservative, we use 8kHz 8-bit audio as the parameters which is telephone quality. (Reliable voice recognition probably requires inputs with greater audio fidelity e.g. 16-bit 32kHz but we'll keep the 8kHz-8bit as a possible lower bound.)

Using 8kHz-8bit, it means that the device would have to stream 691 megabytes a day which leads to 20.7 gigabytes a month. Likewise on the back end, the amazon infrastructure would have to scale up to constantly analyze millions of parallel 24/7 digital waveforms. The amazon datacenters would be burning up terawatts of electricity to ignore the 99.99% of digital waveforms that is not the word "Alexa".

So, are there any consumer devices out there surreptitiously uploading 691 megabytes of digital waveforms (or any data) every single day? Is it realistic that Amazon would engineer the product to work like this?

I have a router that has a fallback option to a cellular connection in case my cable is disrupted. I and others would hate to get a surprise bill from Verizon/AT&T for going over my 2GB/month transfer limit if the amazon device was designed via scenario #2.

EDIT TO ADD scenario #3:

(#3) there are unpublicized/secret list of words in addition to the documented "Alexa" within the embedded chip's "vocabulary". Such words might be "vacation" and "book" and depending on the subsequent words sent to the cloud, you'd see ads for suntan lotion or Stephen King novels on your next visit to amazon.com. The chip's vocabulary may also include listening for transient sounds like dog barks or sneezes. You'd then get ads for dog food and cold medicine. In this scenario, a constant digital waveform is not uploaded 24/7 but extra trigger keywords unknown to the consumer causes more data to be sent than he/she agreed to.

I'm glad we're now discussing our assumptions about what Echo can/does do.

You present a scenario that I certainly did not imply, namely that Echo must be performing voice recognition in the cloud. Also, you make it out as though that is the conceivable alternative possible to on-chip voice recognition, from a privacy point of view.

Let me present another scenario to you - Echo keeps "listening" to all our conversations - on-chip of course - but creates additional metadata that is stored locally and uploaded to Amazon servers periodically.

What might theis metadata be?

- Audio streams that were close enough to Echo's threshold for "Alexa", but not quite, thus got rejected (perhaps some of them were falsely rejected, so let's keep a copy to feed our algorithm).

- Data on how often Echo heard voices in the house, from which rooms and at which times. Perhaps Amazon would like to know when a household wakes up, when it likes to listen to music or when to order groceries. Why should Google Now have all the fun?

I could give many more scenarious why Echo might want to retain some data from ambient conversations, so as to make itself more "useful". It needn't store the entire audio stream in these cases, but just metadata or logs.

Such a scenario falls outside your 1 vs. 2 design options; is plausible; useful; and fairly easy to program too. I'm sure there will be many others like that.

My point is - don't implictly trust a closed-source device that is inside your house and always listening in all directions. If Amazon were so careful about the Echo user's privacy, wouldn't they have mentioned the word at least once in the entire page? So let's not rush to give them a free pass till we know they even want it, much less earn it.

P.S. My profile says I'm a "recovering" engineer, not a "recording" one :)

>Such a scenario falls outside your 1 vs. 2 design options; is plausible; useful; and fairly easy to program too. I'm sure there will be many others like that.

Yes, I went back and added scenario #3... apparently at the same time you typed your reply. I think my scenario #3 is similar in spirit to what you're warning people about.

>P.S. My profile says I'm a "recovering" engineer, not a "recording" one :)

I have several browser tabs on music recording and I definitely had a dyslexic moment there.

This reminds me of the (just as insane) concerns that people had about Microsoft's Xbox One Kinect being likened to a 1984 telescreen. I crunched some numbers like you just did - back when the One came with a Kinect and had to be online to work, the numbers worked out to something like exabytes of data that would be getting streamed to Microsoft, every single day.

You think the ISP's are cheesed off at Netflix? You haven't seen anything yet. The screaming from a non-trivial portion of their customers suddenly uploading multiple gigabytes of data per day would be deafening.

Sarcasm aside, anyone who thinks that this is seriously some kind of government listening device needs to up their medication. The number of insane assumption that have to be made for this to be plausible are:

* This is a listening device, live transmitting everything you say, when it would be more economical to listen for a codeword on chip. (Amazon is wasting money because they are not a corporate enterprise, and we all know how much companies love spending money they don't need to)

* That the data being transmitted is being stored for long term periods of time (Amazon is wasting money on storage when it makes more sense to just process commands)

* That that literally nobody actually notices the data stream going to Amazon servers when not in active use. (Not bloody likely)

* That ISPs will not flip their collective shit at the data usage should this catch on (Hello? Netflix? And that's a company whose business is transmitting large quantities of hard to compress data.)

* That customers won't notice this data usage when their next bill comes in or when their shitty connections get saturated by the upstream

* That the sorry state of connectivity in the USA (especially with regard to upload/download asymmetry) doesn't render the entire exercise meaningless from a surveillance standpoint even if we ignore every other point above

* That the outrage angle once these things that are never noticed are noticed wouldn't be played up in the media

Fucking. Seriously?

If I were a high level NSA guy, and this was the plan that was brought before me? I'd fire the guy for rank incompetence.

You do realise that it doesn't need to be streaming 48kHz 24 bit audio back up don't you? It could be something really low, like GSM which is 13.2 kbit/s. AMR is even lower! So to stream audio at the threshold where it is still legible, it doesn't need masses and masses of data as you presume.

Any decent voice-optimized codec (CELP, CELT, Speex, hell even old GSM)can squeeze that in 1Kbyte/sec - actually even half of that but let's retain some quality. Include silence detection and you probably have less than 60 minutes/day from the average household. And storage is cheap. Oh, and Amazon has lots. S3?

They have advanced speech recognition but have never heard of compression? I would be surprised if the bandwidth consumed in plan #2 was even 1/3 of what you suggest especially in a non 24/7 sound environment like the typical home.

Given the state of the average American internet connection, is #2 even possible?

"prove this doesn't happen"

Can I, as a consumer that hypothetically owns one of these, control the software that is running on it?

Can you, as a consumer control the baseband on your cellphone?

In practice, "No." to both. Which suggests that you are far more confident than you should be.

Amazon publishes the leadership principles that they demand their employees aspire to: http://www.amazon.com/Values-Careers-Homepage/b?node=2393650...

Look over those for a moment. Assume for the moment that Amazon engineers and their management take them seriously.

When Amazon employees working on this project raised concerns about privacy, do you think that they were berated? Or do you think that they were heard out? The sort of attitude that you have towards these concerns is exactly what so many people fear. It is part of the reason those guideline principles were created.

I suppose with a lot of constraints that you can, using something like OsmocomBB: http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/

so you guarantee that the system doesn't access the microphones until it gets an interrupt from that chip? I don't see why that should be mutually exclusive.

Wouldn't it be fairly simple to just monitor network connections to see how often it's sending data to Amazon's servers?

Granted - then of course you can have the argument that it's always recording, and then only sending data at the opportune time so that it's a little bit more hidden. And to that - I'd just say you can keep track of how much data should be being sent for the average command.

i would much rather have a device that i can actually control and trust instead of having to spy on a device that's most likely spying on me in ways i might not like.

And what's great is that your personal preference on these things takes absolutely nothing away from the device itself.

I don't think i'll buy one because I have Siri in my pocket at all times, but these privacy concerns aren't absolute truths. They only matter to you because you're sensitive to it.

agreed and upvoted

Then buy one of those instead.

It will be easy enough to test once it gets into someone's home who understands how to use a packet sniffer

Do you mean like 'Ok Google'? on a typical Android device? Ok, that only works on the Launcher but I'm also familiar with tech on Qualcomm devices which does the voice keyword recognition in hardware. So this isn't anything new.

"From any screen" definitely is one of the choices in Google Now settings, at least on Note II.