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by KraftKacke 1987 days ago
Yes, phones do have microphones too. The were a confidentiality risk even before becoming mobile. You also have piping running through your house, which could be tapped, you don't even need microphones, and the EM field emitted by your monitor can be read across the street. So why even care? Why should I encrypt anything, if I can't even prove not living in an all powerful simulation?

Back on topic, it's not a phones intended purpose to snitch on you, they usually do not listen into the room, without extremely malicious manipulation, and more so you simply can not realistically avoid having a phone in your reach, today. If I were talking business I would probably leave the phone outside too, for that matter, and I don't trust cheap communication hardware, either.

In real life drawing analogies by principle doesn't make for a good argument, most of the time, as life is adaptation and compromise, not a path through a logical circuit.

Do you honestly not see an obvious difference between a phone and an Amazon wired device intended to record and remotely analyze what's happening in the room?

4 comments

>Do you honestly not see an obvious difference between a phone and an Amazon wired device intended to record and remotely analyze what's happening in the room?

I sure don't, from a security viewpoint. They are both cloud-connected microphones. Google is just as likely as Amazon to listen in surreptitiously. And my phone is 1000x more vulnerable to someone _other than_ Google listening in due to installable apps.

>Do you honestly not see an obvious difference between a phone and an Amazon wired device intended to record and remotely analyze what's happening in the room?

Do you honestly not see that there's no fundamental difference between the two? A CPU, ram, storage, wireless modems, microphones and a battery all running under software we don't control.

As far as intent, it's not possible to be sure about intent, you have to judge based on the information we have which is the features and capabilities of the device.

Why would a google phone be any less likely to be listening than a google home?
I addressed that point already in the post you're replying to.
You said it's not a phones intended purpose to snitch on you, but it's also not an Amazon Echo's intended purpose to snitch on you, so I'm not sure what point you're making if you're going to assume that the device is used for its intended purpose.
The only obvious difference I see is my Amazon device has a hardware mute/can be unplugged and my phone doesn’t have either option.