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Gizmodo: Don't Buy Anyone an Amazon Echo Speaker (gizmodo.com)

Posted by msmash on from the take-note dept.

Adam Clark Estes, writing for Gizmodo: Three years ago, we said the Echo was "the most innovative device Amazon's made in years." That's still true. But you shouldn't buy one. You shouldn't buy one for your family. [...] Your family members do not need an Amazon Echo or a Google Home or an AppleHomePod or whatever that one smart speaker that uses Cortana is called. And you don't either. You only want one because every single gadget-slinger on the planet is marketing them to you as an all-new, life-changing device that could turn your kitchen into a futuristic voice-controlled paradise. You probably think that having an always-on microphone in your home is fine, and furthermore, tech companies only record and store snippets of your most intimate conversations. No big deal, you tell yourself. Actually, it is a big deal. The newfound privacy conundrum presented by installing a device that can literally listen to everything you're saying represents a chilling new development in the age of internet-connected things. By buying a smart speaker, you're effectively paying money to let a huge tech company surveil you. And I don't mean to sound overly cynical about this, either. Amazon, Google, Apple, and others say that their devices aren't spying on unsuspecting families. The only problem is that these gadgets are both hackable and prone to bugs.

7 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Good grief by fyngyrz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You already own one of these you carry everywhere — your cellphone. A microphone (and camera!) you take everywhere, and is connected everywhere, including in your home.

    The Echo and its brethren are not a sudden influx of a listening device that can be hacked. You swallowed that bait a long, long time ago.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:Good grief by Scottingham · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Presumably though cell phones have a power constraint, the battery. If it were constantly sending full audio and video back to the mothership battery life would nose-dive.

      Plugged in smart hubs though? Buying one is probably considered opting in to full time surveillance.

      1984 seems so quaint now. Relatedly, I'm pretty sure GIFs are the 21st century Newspeak.

    2. Re:Good grief by Aaden42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Scope matters.

      If my cell phone was recording everything around me and transmitting it, my pocket would be on fire, my battery would be dead before lunch every day, and my bandwidth allowance would be toast by the end of the first week every month. At home, there's essentially infinite power, no bandwidth limitation, and I can hardly tell the difference between a small hockey puck that's idling & one that's active just by looking at it or touching it. Tolerances for cooling aren't nearly as tight as a phone.

      The limitations of a mobile platform provide a degree of safety, or at least verifiability. The laws of physics are on your side in this case.

    3. Re:Good grief by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Look at your routers usage logs. Are they constantly sending full audio back to the mothership? No? Then stop spreading this paranoid bullshit and actually try contributing to society sometime.

    4. Re:Good grief by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If my cell phone was recording everything around me and transmitting it, my pocket would be on fire, my battery would be dead before lunch every day, and my bandwidth allowance would be toast by the end of the first week every month.

      Not really, at least for audio. I still have one of those little voice recorders that people used before smartphones were around. It can record a couple of days of audio in its 2005-era flash storage, with just the power from a pair of alkaline AAA batteries.

      A rogue app on your phone could probably do the same to some file you wouldn't even notice, and upload it whenever you connect to WiFi without you noticing that either.

      At any rate, there seem to be no power issues with phones running the microphone 24x7 and constantly processing the data to look for "OK Google". That would probably be at least as power-intensive as just making a recording.

    5. Re:Good grief by Radish03 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Or the device could just record and store all the audio temporarily, then transmit only when the phone is charging when the phone gets hot already. Depends if you want to do real-time surveillance or not.

    6. Re:Good grief by sobachatina · · Score: 5, Funny

      I just got a google home when they went on sale a couple weeks ago.

      I already had a chromecast and audio chromecast.

      My kids, who don't have phones, now say "Hey Google, play Christmas music on the family room speaker" And it happens. "Goodmorning" and it tells me the weather and my commute time while I eat breakfast. "Add eggs to my shopping list" as I'm walking through the kitchen thinking about it. "Turn off the Christmas trees" as I walk upstairs to bed.

      All of these tasks could be done with my phone. Most of them are much faster and convenient to just say. There are some things I still use my phone for- like picking specific radio stations or tv episodes to cast. It's been a fantastically useful tool.

      I suppose the trade off is that I now have to refrain from planning my murders or insurrections in my kitchen.