Reply to post: Re: Sonos equals convienience

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

Kiwi
Pint

Re: Sonos equals convienience

Do you have any idea of the quantity of data that would be generated by just one household?

Yup. At a pretty decent recording level (not studio quality but plenty enough to work with) you're looking at about 7mb/5 minutes. Using really modern voice-activation technology (like from the 70s or earlier for small devices) to automatically start/stop recording based on sound level, you can limit it to just when people are speaking - so not necessarily 24 hours/day. You would need a little over 2g for 24 hours of conversation.

But without going into more detail, just consider how many home/business camera systems record and hold the data for weeks or months (or more) at a time. They're not just audio but also video (not particularly high quality video but video just the same).

Time doesn't permit me to do a search right now, but there have been articles linking echos or Samsung TVs or something to recorded conversations used some time later (possible an "accidental" release of someone's conversation to a neighbour? Can't quite recall).

The mass of data won't be useful but that isn't reason for a company to not take it if they can. Given the metrics on what Google, Facebook, Amazon etc try to take anyway (and things like Nest fire alarms having built-in microphones..), and given how many people have experienced being near a conversation on a certain topic NOT of interest to them and later getting ads on that topic (I wonder sometimes how much is us just being more aware of it, but OTOH when a friend talks about a newborn baby and then your ads start showing baby products a week later, or one talks about their trip to Phuket and island holiday ads show up the next week...)

I'm not actually saying this does happen of course, but I do respect my privacy enough not to have devices in the home that are designed to listen to conversations and act on what is said. (And yes, my laptop's microphone is disabled in hardware, and if we're having a private conversation phones are left elsewhere)

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