Yes, my history was Linux 95-04, Mac 04-15, and now back to Linux from 2015 onwards.
Its been clear Tim Cook was going to slowly harm the brand. He was a wonderful COO under a visionary CEO-type, but he holds no particular "Tech Originalist" vision. He's happy to be part of the BigTech aristocracy, and probably feels really at home in the powers it affords him.
Anyone who believes this is "just about the children" is naive. His chinese partners will use this to crack down on "Winnie the Poo" cartoons and the like...before long questioning any Big Pharma product will result in being flagged. Give it 5 years at max.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that making it harder to abuse children is a bad thing. It’s what is required to do so that is the bad thing. It’d be like if someone installed microphones all over every house to report on when you admit that you’re guilty to bullying. No one wants bullying, but I doubt you want a microphone recording everything and looking for certain trigger words. Unless you have an Alexa or something, then I guess you probably wouldn’t mind that example.
Alexa and iPhones with Siri enabled, and Android phones, are all continuously listening with their microphones for their wake word, unless you've specifically turned the feature off.
The difference is that the Alexa connects to your wifi, so if you wanted to, you could trivially tell if it's communicating when it shouldn't be. When I worked at Amazon, I was given the impression that the system that handles detecting the wake word was implemented in hardware, and the software system that does the real speech recognition doesn't "wake up" or gain access to the audio channel unless the wake word is detected by that hardware system -- and it's very obvious when you've woken it up (the colored ring lights up, it speaks, etc.)
Echo devices also sit in one room. If you're like most people you take your phone everywhere, which means that if it's spying on you, it could literally have a transcript of every word you spoke the entire day, as well as any people you've been around. To make matters worse, it would be difficult to tell if that was happening. Unless you're an uber-hacker who knows how to root an iPhone, or a radio geek who knows enough to monitor their device's cellular transmissions, good luck figuring out whether Siri is listening to and passing on audio that it shouldn't. The problem is that phones have so many apps and responsibilities -- given that they are essentially full computers -- these days that nonstop data transfer on a wifi network from my phone wouldn't be alarming: it might be backing up pictures to a cloud, or syncing the latest version of apps, etc.
I think the dedicated devices like Echo/Alexa are what you should buy if you're the most privacy-sensitive, since they have zero reason to be uploading to the Internet unless you're actively talking to them, and they have zero reason to be downloading unless they're receiving a software patch, which should be very rare. And because they're on your wifi (not cell) you can monitor their network traffic very easily.
It's not unreasonable to expect the speech recognition models to be run locally.
As to the wake word point, I agree. I don't think alexa/siri/etc are currently bad or disrespecting privacy. I actually have a smart home with a voice assistant.
However, my smart home is all local mesh network (zwave and zigbee) based through a FOSS bridge that doesn't talk to the internet. All lights are through smart switches, not bulbs. The end result is such that if the voice assistant service ever pisses me off, I can simply disconnect from it.
If you read my comments in this article, I think I come off as a tin foil hat wearing lunatic, to some degree at least.
But actually, I'm not a super privacy paranoid person. Telemetry, voice recognition datasets, etc... I think those are a reasonable price to pay for free stuff! I just want to have my thumb on the scale and a go-bag packed for when/if these services become "evil" ;)
No, I'm being serious. technology like this could be very beneficial.
there's a good chance that if we continue to improve surveillance law enforcement agencies and justice departments could begin to focus on rehabilitation and growing a kinder world.
right they are like firemen trying to put out fires after the building has been ruined
if it doesn't work we're doomed anyway, so what's the problem?
Its been clear Tim Cook was going to slowly harm the brand. He was a wonderful COO under a visionary CEO-type, but he holds no particular "Tech Originalist" vision. He's happy to be part of the BigTech aristocracy, and probably feels really at home in the powers it affords him.
Anyone who believes this is "just about the children" is naive. His chinese partners will use this to crack down on "Winnie the Poo" cartoons and the like...before long questioning any Big Pharma product will result in being flagged. Give it 5 years at max.