| I am not really worried about privacy, but this smacks of false equivalency. > You carry a smart-phone that presumably has GPS, a microphone, and a camera everywhere you go. There's a camera and microphone on your laptop too. Both are cloud connected. If the NSA (or any other super-power) wants to spy on you, they can and will. People are regularly discovering and shaming companies for transmitting more information than necessary from smart phones. It's true that the NSA could zero-day your phone, but you've still got opportunities to detect or react to that. If nothing else, put your phone in airplane mode. This device, on the other hand, is designed to transmit everything it hears. There is no way to tell where that data goes and it may be difficult to determine exactly what it contains. Where it's possible to determine if your phone is sending unauthorized data, it seems very hard in this situation. I don't trust amazon more or less than anyone else. I think we should just be honest about the nature of a device. A phone has an "offline" mode, this does not - its whole purpose is to be an omnipresent microphone. Those are two fundamentally different things. |
Not necessarily true, a catch phrase programmed on-board is used to activate the device. If the device was constantly transmitting voice data to Amazon I would have to guess that the leakage of data would be picked up and could be exposed. I still don't think the smart phone analogy is dissimilar, if not worse than the Echo in terms of the privacy implications. What if a catch phrase was programmed into your phone (for instance a list of words a 'terrorist' might use), and it only sent recorded/geo/image/contact information for a short time after it was used? I don't think that would be an easy privacy compromise to spot if you didn't know the catch phrase. Not to mention that many people's smartphones are constantly transmitting location data to Google, without complaint.