Yikes, please don't do or encourage using these in public - there are many accessibility devices (hearing aids, cochlear implants, etc.) which depend on MEMS microphones to function. You could inadvertently make the world much worse for people who already have a difficult time of things. Imagine carting a cellular and WiFi and bluetooth jammer around outside of a Faraday cage - it's insanely irresponsible and inconsiderate.
It's pretty irritating to me that it's the little guy fighting back against ubiquitous surveillance that gets the blame for this externally rather than the surveillance.
I can't bring myself to blame my fellow peasants for trying to take back some control.
Again, I can't really blame the peasantry for it even if it impacts others. I feel like ultimately the responsibility for the externality lies with the trackers, not the people trying to avoid the tracking.
If the only way to drop out is by using these, they are gonna get used. Whose fault is that? I blame the people who made it the only way to drop out.
“Can’t blame peasantry.. the Trackers are responsible”
That’s not how responsibility works. If you use this device, you’re responsible for the collateral damage it produces. The Trackers are only responsible for making you think you need it
If a company uses a listening device, it's responsible for the collateral damage it produces. So it's not the defender's fault - without listening devices in the first place, there wouldn't be the problem. Is this correct according to your approach?
My thoughts precisely. Well, I guess it doesn't take very much to dig up self-righteous assholes willing to actively harm innocent people with ineffectual and indiscriminate 'protest'.
You’re not disrupting anyone other than the already hard hit.
You’re not impacting the companies they perform this surveillance.
You’re not impacting any individuals other than the minorities that need these devices to function in a society that is already inherently biased against them.
So basically you’re protesting the existence of deaf people. Good job.
There is a good chance that if this technology already exists, then it is being used by intelligence agents to both foil hidden eavesdropping devices AND to interfere with necessary medical devices.
They should be illegal when used for that purpose. They're extremely loud and damage hearing directly. It's like blasting an air horn in someone's ear.
Also tempting. This is probably something that should be tested against. Critical systems should be able to handle connection loss, and society should be able to deal with situations where no cell signals are available with no more than a shrug. Anything that fails miserably because of some joker jamming signals is a liability.
> Critical systems should be able to handle connection loss
When the whole point of the critical system is to connect things wirelessly... your point makes little sense. There are backups, of course, but why would you go out of your way to make things worse when there's no fix and people already know it's an issue? What about that is tempting? It's a fundamental technological limitation - there is no jam proof wireless communication system.
Things don't have to be jam-proof, but the processes that depend on them should have a sensible failure mode. If anyone with a small backpack filled with fairly cheap jamming equipment can disrupt hundreds of systems in a busy area, then society (emergency services in particular) should know how this disruption can be prevented or mitigated, and also what the cost of such disruption would be (i.e., is it merely economical, or are human lives at stake?). Preferably before we become too dependant on such technology.
well i am actively encouraging and doing the opposite, i.e. using them. this is the wrong level of abstraction you are thinking about this problem from.
I've heard of bluetooth enabled pacemakers as well. The functionality is obviously not tied to the bluetooth, but rather it's just a form of data collection to provide doctors with a more complete picture. Interfering with this picture unnecessarily seems like a bad idea.
The people making the world worse are the ones putting microphones everywhere and eavesdropping on everyone by streaming all that audio back to their server farms.
If this is an attempt to say one is bad therefor the other is good, I’d advise against seeing the world in such a simpleton and dualistic manner–both amazon and someone who willfully interferes with a hearing device are both bad.
If the goal is to come up with something to defeat privacy invasion—and i think it should be–this isn’t the answer.
The fact that this article exists actually makes me sad.
When did we as a society give up our privacy for such a small amount of convenience? Or has it been gradually chipped away until we have reached this point?
I feel sorry for my children and the future in which they are going to live in. I also feel a sense of shame for participating in a society that has normalised these things.
Sorry kids. We got greedy. We boiled the planet and normalised blanket spying for profits.
“Privacy is a currency for which you do not know the exchange rate”
Read it on a Mozilla blog a few years ago and I think they quoted it too from somewhere else.
But I feel like it sums the whole thing up nicely.
For many, it does not feel like somebody is watching us. Just that data about us is dumped in a huge archive too vast for anyone to dig around in. This (Wrong) sentiment makes many assume that the currency is probably cheap.
The fact that this article exists actually makes me sad as well.
But because Alexa isn't eavesdropping on us and believing this is the tech equivalent of antivaxxers: "If you don't believe it, you're part of the conspiracy"
Do you recall the “ghost” incident, where Alexa believed she was being asked to laugh? What was Alexa hearing in your everyday life to believe that not only the trigger word, but the whole phrase was being said aloud?
Also, do you recall the fix? They remotely changed the activation phrase that triggered the laugh.
Do you recall the Google home devices with a minor physical flaw that caused the pucks to record and transmit everything?
Do you recall how these recordings are given to third parties to evaluate to improve the quality of the service?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we don’t know when or if these devices are recording us. Yes, the same is true with our phones as well (though this bracelet from the article would work on them too). It might not be out of malice, but its safe to say that we as the customers have no real idea of how much they hear.
Vaccines can't be remotely enabled to spy on you. For example, if you buy a laptop from the internet and the CIA or NSA wants to spy on you, they can easily intercept the laptop in shipment and tamper with it.
> A large, somewhat ungainly white cuff with spiky transducers, the bracelet has 24 speakers that emit ultrasonic signals when the wearer turns it on. The sound is imperceptible to most ears, with the possible exception of young people and dogs, but nearby microphones will detect the high-frequency sound instead of other noises.
This is surely not actually effective against a wide range of well designed, real world microphones, and definitely not against something designed to surreptitiously record you. Strikes me as more of a gimmick than anything else.
Full disclosure: I don't have any always-on microphones in my house, and probably never will, so I probably qualify as some kind of techno-skeptic.
any visitor to our house has to put their phone into a key box next to the entrence which is shielded. it is both annoying and confusing for them the first time they visit. but I guess for them it is also a bit exciting ("what kind of a looney place did we agree to come to") ... but it makes for great conversation ... the purpose for us is less security/privacy but a way to teach my environment about these problems. It also makes for interesting conversations around screen addiction, anxiety and spending time in the moment.
We still use wireless/laptop ofc and when we are among ourselves we have a rule that the phone goes in the box from 18:00 - 06:00. but for visitors there is no cell-phone in my house (this is perfect for us because we can pretty much rule out microphones/cameras being used).
I understand this might sound very strange for most people here, and it is strange. But how would you feel if say in the 80ies and 90ies you invite somebody for dinner and they show up with a big camera/flash around their neck and a microphone and tape recorder.
bienvenue chez moi!
also my partner does use a mobile phone for work, or on the go. I don't own one.
I think you should go one step further and after they reluctantly agree to put it in "the box", it proceeds to smash it with a hydraulic press clearly visible through a pane of glass on the front. Of course, you don't actually smash their phone, but a dummy you substitute with sleight of hand. Oh, but the look on their faces!
You put off your coat and shoes when you enter my house, but not your spycraft? Not that I follow the same rule, but when I think about it, I find it entirely reasonably. It is the rest of us who, including myself, who are mad.
Most people consider the likelihood of things actually happening. It is not likely that MI6 are listening to my phone or any of my friend's phones, and even if they were the worst that happens is they hear my boring conversations. So for 99.999% of people the benefit is essentially zero, and the cost is moderately high (having to put your phone in a box all the time).
Consider other things that have a similar cost/benefit ratio that are more obviously mad:
* I could install a 3 metre high wall with razor wire around my house in case the police try to attack me for some reason.
* I could walk everywhere wearing a bicycle helmet in case I fall over.
* I could never use stairs. Only use lifts - they're much safer!
It isn't the local secret service we should be wary of (they can already easily get access anyway); it is commercial companies who profit of data, and hostile secret services.
Sounds incredibly inconvenient. What if your guest is expecting/gets a phone call that day? Or they want to show you some holiday pictures? What about smart watches?
I'm really conflicted, as your approach is privacy focused but I just can't imagine following it in real life. Perhaps I'm part of the problem...
Wonder what is your opinion about hearing aids. Many modern ones broadcast everything via radio because of stereo processing. It's strictly proprietary and impossible to get any further information from the manufacturer.
If you ask their wearer to put them away before entering, then you can't have conversation with him/her.
This behaviour is not only unhealthy, it's also unnecessary. What precisely do you hope to gain from this? Do you truly think that you're really depriving any observing agents of knowledge that they desperately hoped to gain? I could understand protocall like this for mental health reasons, or for the desire to be "free" from technology for a time, but you can't justify this behaviour purely with privacy concerns. They already have more than enough information on you from the remainder of the time that you spend with your device(s).
you misunderstood. privacy is the conversation opener but discussions around mental health are the goal. when you say it is unhealthy are you implying "devices on the dinner table are healthy?" or putting toddlers on a screen/ipad is healthy? or showing your kids that it's ok to be only half present when interacting with them is healthy? sorry I utterly missed your point.
> Many privacy-concious people opt for software that allows them to verifiably control their hardware, be it desktop/laptop or smartphone.
I know a fair number of privacy-concious people, and not one of them have any sort of verifiable control of their hardware. It's surprisingly hard to do this, it turns out…
> I know a fair number of privacy-concious people, and not one of them have any sort of verifiable control of their hardware.
I have a reasonable level of confidence that my use of wirecutters and/or soldering iron gives me enough control over this kind of thing. It's impractical on a smartphone, but I solve that by not owning one.
I know more than a couple of older people who can still hear very high pitched whines from electrical equipment. The “only children and dogs” is some bad statistics.
Also houses have dogs or kids. Or both. It’s a thing.
I used to be able to hear monitors whine and I'd have to unplug them completely. Can't anymore; I thought it was because I was getting older and my hearing at the higher frequencies was dropping off. Still got one of the monitors I used to be able to hear whine and I can't hear it anymore.
Seems odd that there are older people who can hear the high-pitches when younger people can't. Maybe the kids are tuning it out.
I’m a bit older than average and these types of things and noises drive me crazy. I can’t even be near some old CRT screens due to the pitch they emit (especially bad with old CCTV monitors).
I may have lost a little at the high end or electronics have gotten better filters, but I used to grumpily stomp into the next room to turn off the tv or the VCR because it was bugging me.
There was a story a few years back about stores getting rid of young loiterers by playing these tones, then later on kids setting ringtones or alerts on their phones so that the teacher wouldn’t get mad that their phones were on. Guess what? A lot of surprised 15 year olds had their phones confiscated by disgruntled 40 year old teachers who could damn well hear the ringtones.
The TV noise you used to hear is gone because CRTs are gone-- it comes from the flyback tranformer in the TV, which had a propensity to resonate at the TV's horizontal scanning frequency (somewhere in the ballpark of 15.7 kHz, the exact frequency depending on whether your TV was NTSC or PAL).
I had a "I haven't heard that in ages" moment over the summer; was in some shop in the UK that had a CRT showing their CCTV cameras and could hear the thing well before I could see it. Apparently my high-end hearing's still decent.
CRTs are almost gone; they’re still highly sought after in the smashbros community. :-) IIRC trinitrons are the most highly desired.
Due to the shortage, a "crt vault" was created. [0]
I remember visiting multiple thrift stores ~2 years ago to collect them. The most I had was 6 I think, but I ended up giving them to other players. Here's an example of what they look like at tournaments [1]
The other day my dad, who turned 60 last year, swore he couldn't hear a cicada that was right outside the open window. It bugged him so much he made me go outside with him and point out the cicada. I told him about the mosquito tone, which is obviously much higher, and how mostly only younger people are meant to be able to hear it and played it for him off Wikipedia. He could hear it fine and so could I (30 this year). To hell with the mosquito tone as an anti-loitering device, it's horrible.
Like those high-pitched 'mosquito'-devices installed in places where young people tend to hang out; most adults over 25 can't hear them at all. There is a school here with an apparently inviting set of steps under an awning that activates this device outside of school hours. Passing that building is really annoying.
Oh God, I saw one of those in Japan outside a store at night, we came near it and I went "what the hell is that noise?", but none of my friends could hear anything. Turned out to be the mosquito thing, which was quite effective in getting me away from that shop.
I was 35 at the time and my friends were 30ish, I guess it varies by person.
This only fights a symptom, the real problem is that these smart assistants need to stream the input to a company. Of course I understand that this allows for better recognition, but while I personally would like to have a well-working voice assistant, I personally do not want to have someone else (potentially) listening in on me (if others care less, that's perfectly fine).
Maybe I'll find some time to setup a self-hosted voice assistant. Recommendations?
"It is a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg situation, but I don’t think there is a strong case for creating an easy offline setup before the core components are ready. It is close, but I suspect it will be at least another year before we (the open source community) have all those pieces ready."
In theory these devices recognize their activation word locally and start streaming audio after you said the activation word. In practice missing an activation word annoys the customer, and if the server can differentiate between random conversation and commands, unnecessary activations go unnoticed. So there's incentive to be very generous with the local detection.
If this actually works, then the Alexa engineers forgot to add an analog pre-filter to their ADC. And most likely, adding digital filtering through one of those horrible unsupervised software updates will also circumvent it.
Plus I'd say they chose by far the easiest target. A squirrel's sneezing is enough to confuse Alexa beyond recognition.
In my personal experience, the Google and Baidu speech to text algorithms are much more resilient against background noise.
In my conspiracy theorist opinion, they didn't forget. They left it out on purpose, so the mic can detect ultrasound embeded on tv transmissions to track which tv shows and comercials you're watching[0].
I thought it was to allow/support Luthor-to-Superman communications? I'm joking of course. I agree with you actually...When others think something is due to incompetence, i feel these companies are nothing more than sneaky and shady.
Filter won’t necessarily help. It’s possible to use ultra sonic for amplitude modulation signal to affect the non linearity of a microphone itself. [0]
Although it does require knowing what the underlying natural sound to be modulated is (some processing required).
Robustness to background noise doesn’t necessarily help either.
I'm not so sure, a reasonable low pass filter is probably not going to very aggressively attenuate 25kHz, so you can be pretty confident that pumping at a very loud 25kHz tone will screw up the mic. Remember, once the microphone is clipping the job is done - you're not going to recover the signal, so it'd be very hard to recover using digital filtering after the ADC.
Try adding a loud ultrasonic sine wave to speech in your favorite audio editor, and then hard clip it. Most of the distortion can be filtered out without too much damage to the speech by looking at the spectrogram and notch filtering unwanted frequencies. I imagine modern AI could do the same thing automatically.
But high-pass filtered white noise + clipping will make the speech unrecoverable if it's loud enough.
This is a cool and super creative project, but I think the simpler solution would be to not buy a device that listens to all of your conversations at home, or at least switch it off when not needed. And if you're exposed to such a device as a guest in someone else's home or office, kindly ask the owner to switch it off and explain why you think it's not good to have such a device listening to all conversations you're having.
It would also not be so hard to make such devices more privacy-friendly e.g. by giving users are clearer indication of when they're listening to you and when they transfers data to the cloud. I think Amazon already allows you to review and download all audio conversations they have from you (in theory this is mandatory in the EU).
This is what I don't understand. Everyone runs around terrified of these smart speakers but have no problem talking around their phones which have mics, their computers which have mics, other devices which have mics, CCTV cameras which are ubiquitous, etc
Do people realistically think attackers are going to start burning zero days against these things to listen to the average Joe's kitchen conversations or bedroom chatter? What is the threat model here?
I follow, but what exactly is the real privacy threat here? If we look at an echo for instance:
* The device is hardwired to light up whenever it is listening so you can't be eavesdropped on without some indicator.
* The device only transmits when it is in listening mode. This has been validated independently by multiple people.
* The device has a mute function (granted, software).
* The device can be registered under a bogus account.
* You can turn off all phone call capabilities / external listening capabilities.
* You can pihole it so it won't reach back to Amazon's ad services.
* You can delete any conversation you don't want stored manually, including one click deleting your entire history.
* You can have all content automatically deleted after X days.
So what exactly are people concerned about? Out of all the convos someone could have, a negative one just happens to probabilistically be recorded, you don't notice, and within 90 days someone in law enforcement or entity X figures it out and uses it against you? Someone at Amazon decides to look through your stored conversations and sees you turn on the lights at 5 PM each day?
I'm not saying there are 0 privacy implications with this device, as any device that has a mic and can record remotely has privacy implications. I just feel like the level of angst generated by smart speakers isn't warranted in the grander scheme of things.
Well it’s totally fine to have that opinion and use those devices, personally I wouldn’t though.
Privacy is a niche topic right now and it might stay that way, but I think more and more people will become concerned about what large companies know about them. Each individual service and datapoint is not very critical as you say, combining data from multiple sources and using the data in unexpected ways can quickly reveal very intimate things about a person though. Companies like Amazon, Google and FB do not mainly use your data to “improve your experience”, they use it to nudge you into behavioral patterns that benefit their business model (i.e. look at more ads or buy more stuff). I doesn’t take so much imagination to see how this might harm you e.g. because you develop unhealthy spending habits or waste large amounts of time on social media. And the more data a company has about you, the easier it is for them to manipulate you. So for me it’s not about defending against an unknown attacker, it’s defending against companies using my data to manipulate me, which they might do even if they keep my data very, very secure.
No, you tell Apple and Google that the microphone needs to be off except when the user activates it (eg. answering or making a phone call). This might be acceptable to society depending on how many people want non-handheld voice activated devices in public.
As far as I know, phones don't permanently listen and transmit data to the cloud, like most home assistants do when they're (accidentally) activated by a cue word.
All modern iPhones and many Android phones can also activate either Siri or Google Assistant when they hear a cue word. And if that gets triggered accidentally, they'll send what they record to the cloud. Exactly like dedicated assistants.
I am interested in the Reflectacles, but I’ve already bought glasses this year. Is there a way to coat / paint an existing glasses frame with a material that would interfere with IR cameras and visible light cameras?
This sounds like a device designed to torture animals. If someone brought this into my house and turned it on around my dog I would probably ask them to leave.
Likewise. And I am sympathetic to the idea, but this is the wrong way to go about it. Too many innocent bystanders.
It does reignite the debate over what is acceptable. Cost of putting microphone in anything is negligible. Connection to internet in many things is assumed so even if microphone is unused, it could be turned on with an update.
Then again, my social circle met yesterday and they have multiple devices controlled by voice. It didn't stop anyone from saying things that would not look good if broadcast in public. It is weird, how easy it is to forget about it. Probably because you think it is your space. I would not dream of messing with their devices. I am a guest. I opted to be there.
I tried to think about it rationally. I can't give them too much shit. Between me and my wife, we have 8 devices in house now that have microphones and/or cameras in.
Ok google is off. Siri is off on phone, but on watch it is activated by a button, so there is semblance of control.
I could see this being used in e.g. the white house, just in case a foreign adversary has somehow managed to slip a bug in there. Or maybe because the president insists on using an unsecured Android phone.
Assuming you mean a digital lowpass filter; this won't work. The ultrasonic input is saturating the microphone. In this situation, no amount of digital filters can recover the desired signal (the speech). If there was a physical low pass filter (not sure if these exist) that was placed over the microphone, that would work
Nah, it's physically jamming the spectrum. Unless someone can come up with a microphone that only resonates in the audible range, this technique will always work. It's akin to pointing a really bright light at a camera.
While really white bright will jam your eyes too, an ultrasound will not jam your ear, hence this is actually easier to overcome. Just use dumb microphone, that will cut frequencies over 10Kz and have the unintended secondary effect that Alexa will be even cheaper.
why not have any eavesdropping devices in the first place. when somebody invites me around, I usually ask if they own one of these things and I regretfully decline the offer if that's the case and instead invite them to my home.
yeah I agree. my question was, more completely, "if you have one of these things, why carry the countermeasure around instead of putting it next to the device?"
Maybe they trying to pitch it as a fashion thing - like a social/personal statement. All these mitigations seems strange to me since mitigations are always an attack surface too.
