I’m old enough to remember when people were concerned about using credit card numbers online.
I figured announcements like this were inevitable, but I’m surprised at how little of a ripple it has made:
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I have no Amazon devices in my home. I don’t use Siri, but the other human in the household does, unfortunately.
Is there a standard politeness protocol by now, how to indicate, maybe with a sign at the entry, that either visitors are instructed not to use such tech inside home they are entering or that home occupant does use it, whether visitor likes it or not?
That is, I would like to politely indicate such tech is unwelcome in my home, and would like to know if it is in use at homes I visit.
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When I did housesitting, I unplugged Alexa. I’d apologize for doing it, but it was non-negotiable.
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Apparently the main reason for this major change to privacy is to support/improve Voice ID - where Alexa can recognise who is speaking. Strange that Siri seems to do this quite well without storing recordings at Apple.
I guess the difference is that Siri gets to know us through use of iPhones and this knowledge is shared with Homepods.
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You could ask some local contractors for an estimate on shrouding your living room—or wherever you usually host guests—with a Faraday cage (this will be easy anywhere there are lots of government agencies and companies that do business with these agencies like Northern Virginia and Beltway-adjacent Maryland, ha ha).
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I’m going to write my representative about this. Some states have laws against making recordings without gaining approval from participants. I presume Amazon has figured out a way around those laws.
It’s bad enough to be subject to constant surveillance on the streets, but if we get to the point where one has to assume constant surveillance in private homes, it is dystopian in the extreme. It’s even worse when you factor in automatic recognition of each speaker’s identity…and people willingly accept that into their homes as a feature!
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For my part, I didn’t know those things ever did any on-device processing. I had assumed they were always immediately piping every invocation straight to Amazon all the time, and that the people who owned hosted them were all okay with that.
I think actually a lot of people are.
Until recently, they were only supposed to do this after receiving the activation word (“Alexa” for Amazon devices, “Hey Siri” for Apple devices, etc.)
But if devices are now monitoring all audio in order to avoid the necessity of an activation word, that is new and not a good thing, for all the reasons described here.
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1st April approaches - no joke