The people who called me crazy because “there’s no way your phone can be listening in on you all the time” are the same people who are going to be the most excited about this “feature”
Im a perfect world, as they claim, its a secondary system listening that isn’t recording or transmitting anything, and is meant to be low power. If it hears the wake up word, it wakes up the other mic and starts recording.
Thats how they claim the smart speakers work anyway.
This was my understanding, but I just don’t believe it anymore. There have been way, way too many time my wife and I were talking about an incredibly niche thing that didn’t come up through the internet in any way, and lo and behold the algorithm presented those key words. Nobody will ever convince me it isn’t being done to some extent.
I have a memory of people black boxing it and seeing power usage and network traffic that supported the claims but that was a snapshot in time and as others note its all proprietary.
It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.
They ship with proprietary code, this would be the point of open source.
In practice in my experience, every company is at least skirting the law regarding privacy, and I never worked for one big enough that could lobby itself out of a fine.
I used to run forensic network capture and analysis tools.
First thing, traffic is encrypted. All you will see is a blob of traffic passing through. You used to see hostnames with TLS, but now with quic, you see nothing. This makes it hard.
You could root the phone and install a root ca certificate for a decrypting proxy, you might see more, but the data itself (not just the transport protocol) could be encoded or even encrypted within the network encapsulation.
Next, you’d have to reverse engineer the protocol if they’re using something nonstandard. Also, malware can often be set up to “behave” when it can detect analysis. I’m all but certain Google would do this.
Maybe you could do statistical analysis of the traffic and attempt to baseline normal vs when it’s transmitting audio. It would be a bit of a blind guess at best.
If I had more time, I’d love to try it. I have an old pixel7 pro. Maybe I can sort something out.
Even if it was open source, you’d need to be able to verify what they ship matches the specs. Allowing you to flash whatever you want onto it helps, but you still need to validate the hardware.
Doesn’t need to track you all the time to know exactly who you are and what you’re up to.
Continuously monitoring is such a waste of their resources, they already know everything about you, they just need to check in now and then to make sure you’re buying the correct t-shirts.
The people who called me crazy because “there’s no way your phone can be listening in on you all the time” are the same people who are going to be the most excited about this “feature”
How did these people expect “Hey Siri” / “Hey Google” to work?
Im a perfect world, as they claim, its a secondary system listening that isn’t recording or transmitting anything, and is meant to be low power. If it hears the wake up word, it wakes up the other mic and starts recording.
Thats how they claim the smart speakers work anyway.
This would be different.
This was my understanding, but I just don’t believe it anymore. There have been way, way too many time my wife and I were talking about an incredibly niche thing that didn’t come up through the internet in any way, and lo and behold the algorithm presented those key words. Nobody will ever convince me it isn’t being done to some extent.
It can’t hear if it isn’t already listening.
“How they claim?” Is there no way to confirm that?
I have a memory of people black boxing it and seeing power usage and network traffic that supported the claims but that was a snapshot in time and as others note its all proprietary.
It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.
They ship with proprietary code, this would be the point of open source.
In practice in my experience, every company is at least skirting the law regarding privacy, and I never worked for one big enough that could lobby itself out of a fine.
would this not be detectable by tracking the data sent through your network?
I used to run forensic network capture and analysis tools.
First thing, traffic is encrypted. All you will see is a blob of traffic passing through. You used to see hostnames with TLS, but now with quic, you see nothing. This makes it hard.
You could root the phone and install a root ca certificate for a decrypting proxy, you might see more, but the data itself (not just the transport protocol) could be encoded or even encrypted within the network encapsulation.
Next, you’d have to reverse engineer the protocol if they’re using something nonstandard. Also, malware can often be set up to “behave” when it can detect analysis. I’m all but certain Google would do this.
Maybe you could do statistical analysis of the traffic and attempt to baseline normal vs when it’s transmitting audio. It would be a bit of a blind guess at best.
If I had more time, I’d love to try it. I have an old pixel7 pro. Maybe I can sort something out.
If its real time monitoring you, but not if its logging data to send later when it would be expected to be doing so.
Audio doesnt take up much space.
Even if it was open source, you’d need to be able to verify what they ship matches the specs. Allowing you to flash whatever you want onto it helps, but you still need to validate the hardware.
I dont know. You’d need to reverse engineer the hardware and software to be confident, and could a OTA update then sneak a bypass in anyway?
Edit: i think Amazon might have abandoned this as well and always records on echos now too.
Doesn’t need to track you all the time to know exactly who you are and what you’re up to.
Continuously monitoring is such a waste of their resources, they already know everything about you, they just need to check in now and then to make sure you’re buying the correct t-shirts.