PrivacyMic looks to keep your home smart without Google, Alexa, Siri and pals listening in Researchers at the University of Michigan have proposed a way to have your privacy cake and eat your home automation too. They've found a means of using a voice-activated smart speaker system without it having to listen to everything you say – and no, it's not "pressing a button." "There are a lot of situations where we want …
We had voice control WITHOUT recording OR Cloud Provider servers over 20 years ago on devices a lot less capable than a Raspberry Pi or a even a 10 year old smart phone.
The inescapable conclusion is the the companies want to capture the activity of use of the TV, phone, home hub etc.
It's true that I don't want corporations or governments (or anyone, really) to be able to hear what people say in my home. However, I also don't want them to have access to information about "human activity: tooth brushing, toilet flushing, vacuuming, running the dishwasher, even using computer monitors". Whether there's any direct harm from some of these is debatable, but the principle is very simple: that's no one's business but mine. That's why the only way to win is not to play: I don't possess, and will never allow into my home, networked devices with microphones I cannot mechanically detach.
Note: I did read the article, including the standard boilerplate nonsense about physicians using these devices for what we are to assume are benign humanitarian purposes. Physicians don't even have the time to examine and listen to their patients properly, much less listen to thousands of hours of ultrasonic noise or even to read some probabilistic summary of that noise. Microphones are tools, so they can be put to good uses or ill, but this is an obvious application for which the nefarious uses overwhelmingly outweigh any plausible beneficial ones. It's extremely improbable that anyone will ever benefit from this universal corporate or government surveillance other than the nefarious actors themselves, and whatever miniscule benefits might exist are completely overwhelmed by the harm.
I was cheering for them at first. A home automation that respects privacy, I can dig that. I read the article to figure out how they did voice commands while ensuring it didn't record/leak anything else. Imagine Experience my disappointment when I read that it doesn't do voice command, it also doesn't not-spy. This is some shit the cops would pull: "It's not recording voices, so we don't need a warrant".
Sure, it won't record your political opinions, or record the phone calls of an affair; but it will know that there are two people brushing their teeth whist one partner is out (it heard the garage door and the car leave).
"Sure, it won't record your political opinions, or record the phone calls of an affair..."
Not that any participant could make out in unmodified playback, anyway. Someone will probably go back through piles of data and find a way to enhance the ultrasound back into speech, or correlate the ultrasonics with specific spoken sounds to reassemble it. Eventually people will learn that it's not the specific type of data that's the problem but rather the type of people with access to it.
"Someone will probably go back through piles of data and find a way to enhance the ultrasound back into speech, or correlate the ultrasonics with specific spoken sounds to reassemble it."
I was going to make this exact point. Just because an end user can't identify human speech doesn't mean a computer can't. Hello, harmonic frequencies, anyone?
"Sure, it won't record your political opinions, "
Hahahahaha.
Seriously? Hmm... They sat in front of the TV two hours each night of the national convention of WHICH party?
They can figure out which sitcom you are addicted to by when you get up from the couch. (Commercial breaks are not synchronized between networks.)
Read up on the history of spycraft. Shocking amounts of information have been revealed by dismayingly little raw data, properly processed. Now, everyone has a multi-gigaflop computer in their hand.
"Commercial breaks are not synchronized between networks."
Really? In which country?
In the UK, I have a Humax/Freesat box. Commercial breaks on most channels seem to be timed specifically to prevent channel hopping - if one has a break, all have a break (every time I try it anyway).
Who watches any TV as it is broadcast the first time these days?
With all the streaming and catchup services as well as our own PVR's there is little to keep us sat in front of a screen at a fixed time these days.
I also have a Humax Freesat box. I replaced the small HDD it originally had with a 1TB SSD. I've plenty of space to store all sorts of progs for later viewing. I plan my recording schedule once a week and then pretty well forget about it.
As for watching adverts? That's what the skip forward button is for. With most channels, it is one of two presses and you are at the end of the waste of space that is called TV adverts.
The more that I can frustrate those who are hell-bent on spying on each and every one of us just to sell more crap that we probably don't need anyway the better IMHO. In the grand scheme of things, it might not be much but at least I am limiting the amount of shit about me that gets collected and sold on which in my eyes is a good thing. If we all took the same attitude then the spymasters might have to think again. They get far too much data about us given to them on a plate.
Not sure about TV as I watch recordings with MythTV, and it skips commercials. You are, however, absolutely spot on with commercial radio, back in the days before podcasts I used to turn the radio off for 5 minutes three times an hour as channel skipping was pointless. Even the ads were synchronized, so hopping off a MacyD ad just got you to the same ad - aaargh.
> Physicians don't even have the time to examine and listen to their patients properly, much less listen to thousands of hours of ultrasonic noise
Definitely! Seriously, which MD would bother listening through one week of ultrasonic noise to assemble a patient's life schedule, when asking about a sedentary life is all he needs? It's not like what (and when) exactly the patient is doing hour after hour matters. Utterly ludicrous.
Even researchers, who might indeed have the need for such fine-grained information, have better/simpler ways of doing so, like asking the test subjects to fill in a hourly questionnaire ("in the past hour I've done this, done that").
"I don't possess, and will never allow into my home, networked devices with microphones I cannot mechanically detach."
Really?
No mobile phone of any description, no laptop of any description.
Just be grateful that you live in a bubble where the concept of accessibility either doesn't occur to you, or doesn't make it beyond a ramp into certain buildings.
For many people these devices enable independence.
For very many people they are merely a convenience, but that says more about the fact that making things accessible very rarely excludes anyone.
> the concept of accessibility either doesn't occur to you
While one can't but admit that voice-activated stuff must be a great help for movement impaired people, there are many persons who aren't actually disabled and so don't need this, much like they don't need the tons of other devices and things making disabled peoples' lives easier.
(Besides a device only capturing ultrasound is useless for disabled humans. Go sell it to disabled bats.)
Nothing to do with the ultrasonics, but the advent of voice based assistants has been massive for many - to write them off in the way you did is seriously detrimental to those for whom they make a serious difference.
For most, I agree, they are a luxury - but you can't help throwing the baby out with the bathwater with such sweeping damnation of the devices.
I take your point, but their benefits to some don't make them necessarily useful to all.
Especially since they weren't made to be helpful, they were just made to harvest juicy personal information and steer buying decisions. Your unconditional defense of them is a little like saying that everybody should carry a vial of nitroglycerin around because it really relieves angina pectoris... Yes, it has a use, but it's dangerous and people without the need of it should avoid it at all cost.
I'm not sure I'd suggest anyone carries around nitroglycerin, even if it does have a medicinal benefit, the more obvious risks are rather more severe.
The fact that smart speakers have found a place in so many homes is purely down to their benefits. There is certainly an argument to say that we now have sufficient compute capability in very low power devices that we don't need them to be cloud connected at all times, but we wouldn't have got to the point where it's possible to build a "disconnected smart speaker" without the work that was done on the connected versions.
It's like banning all cars because of the deaths motorists cause. Heck, we don't even ban the bloody motorists.
That is a real problem. 40% of Britons are either totally stupid or incapable of finding out how to turn the fecking things off.
Alexa is the worst of all.
I have to admit that Amazon has some really slick adverts but the effing thing is listening in on all your conversations and sending oodles of data back to Bezos. He is already the richest man in the world and laughs at you for paying your taxes. Isn't that enough of a slap in the face with some rotten fish?
Take all those digital assistants and shove them up their makers CEO's backsides. This is a small price to pay for the crimes that they have inflicted upon humanity.
None of these bits of spyware will ever be activated in my home.
Coincidently I was in the attic and top of an old heap of CDs was IBM Viavoice98.
Voice to text -> then parser (The code of Eliza is available FOSS on Linux repositories inside a version of EMACs). Bob is then a close relative.
No "so called" AI is required. Eliza, Alice etc are not AI.
Yes, I had hoped this was an article about a group of hackers working on this. I have imagined doing it myself - do the keyword recognition locally, without any data going offsite, then use paid-for, commercial cloud-based speechrec to recognise the request and handle it locally. I haven't looked into it but I am fairly sure it is possible to use cloud-based speechrec in a privacy-preserving mode if you are willing to pay.
I would expect it to be fairly easy to integrate with a FOSS home automation system to handle things like "Computer, turn on the lights", "Computer, play Bat out of Hell".
You can definitely pick up speech from ultrasonics. It's different, of course, but you still get unique sounds from air and mouth motions. Teeth and nose hair whistle. Saliva makes loud clicks and crackles as the mouth moves. It's not much different than whispering.
PrivacyMic says it can't be modified by hackers to perform new kinds of analysis. Uh huh.
The root of the problem is never addressed: Your personal data goes to an untrusted 3rd party that is motivated by profiting from that data.
So what exactly is the benefit to the purchaser of these devices? Why would you buy a device to listen to ultrasound in your home and send it yet-to-be-identified companies that would want to purchase that data.?
You can't solve your insecurities about not keeping up with technology by showing off the device to your friends.
> So what exactly is the benefit to the purchaser of these devices?
Unlike Echo and Google Home, this product has "Privacy" in the name.
That's it, that's all I can really come up with - there's no inherent privacy improvement (in fact, I'd say this has the potential to be worse as it can tell more about what you're doing).
Being aware of possible threats motivates people to take responsibility for their own privacy.
So where can we find articles that describe the possible threats in terms that non-Reg readers will understand? When I try to explain to family they just roll their eyes and try to change the subject.
Same here - I get the "so what" response from the bunch of FaecesBorg and WhatsUpDoc users in the family.
SWMBO got an Alexa Dot for Christmas off one of our lasses - and it was made quite clear that I had no say in the matter. Cue swiftly kicking it off the guest network when I got home to find No2 daughter was busy setting it up, and onto a segregated network specially for the IoTat - we've since been afflicted with a Firestick as well.
Of course, SWMBO accuses me of hypocrisy when I use them - to which I respond that it's their presence in the first place I'm against, but since I've lost that battle I might as well get some positive benefit from them.
TL;DR version: All these devices and services offer many positive benefits. It's just that the vendors have proven themselves incapable of trust. If, from the early days, they'd offered a "snoop free, paid offering" and proven themselves trustworthy then there would be a loss less trouble. As it is, they've proven that even if they offered such a service, they couldn't be trusted not to snoop anyway.
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