Amazon sharing your internet without consent

NavyVet1 said:
I am a long time user here (joined in 2005) with over 1,700 posts but I created a new account to make this post. I am doing this because what I am about to reveal I want kept secret.

This is something I hate to disclose because I do not want pity, I am a paralyzed veteran, a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair and paralyzed from the chest down. I have been stuck in this wheelchair for 30 years (I was injured when I was 24) and I live alone. After I go to bed I am helpless until I get back in my wheelchair. Turning my home into a smart home has been a miracle. From my bed I can control my computer, TV, heat, air conditioning, lights, telephone and even my door.

Some of us do not have a choice.
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I think it is great that this works for you.

I just don't think you should have to compromise your privacy in order to take advantage of these technologies.

That is my problem with the technology. Not the smart technology itself, but the strings that come attached to it, and those strings don't NEED to be there.

This is why we need regulation to prevent the collection of user data.

...and if silicon valley truly depends on it, then silicon valley will have to die.
 
MrGuvernment said:
That option just stops your device from actually connecting to an unsecured wifi network automatically. It does not disable your wifi at all. If your wifi is on, yes it can be identified and found, turning it off and if it is actually off is easy enough to test, just fire up Kali Linux with a supported wifi card and do an airmon-ng scan and see if your wifi devices MAC shows up
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Most mobile devices now generate a random MAC for WiFi unless you specifically choose not to for a specific network.
 
All the more reason to lock down your network as much as possible. I have no hot mics except my phone (can't get rid of that one). I have no alexas or google homes. I run all my TVs, chormecasts, etc on a firewalled off VLAN and dedicated SSID that cannot touch my primary network. My pfense and unifi gear sure as hell isn't spinning up unathorized SSIDs. I swear these companies know people are stupid and lazy and take advantage.
 
Mchart said:
Most mobile devices now generate a random MAC for WiFi unless you specifically choose not to for a specific network.
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Which you can easily view the MAC address from your phone anyways so wont matter if it changes or not. And since when do mobile phones do random mac's out of the box?
 
vegeta535 said:
No doubt. The millennials and younger generations are lazy fuck and willingly happy to give up their freedoms for a little bit of convenience.
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The majority of people I've spoken to say things like "Oh well, I don't care, my life's not that interesting / I have nothing to hide / nothing to see here anyway." Of course, that's not the point.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Which you can easily view the MAC address from your phone anyways so wont matter if it changes or not. And since when do mobile phones do random mac's out of the box?
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Doesn’t work that way with iPhones. The real Mac is not broadcasted out.
 
Aurelius said:
Hah, I know what you mean!

I just think it's funny that people genuinely believe Amazon and Google want a massive amount of garbage recordings in the off-chance they'll maybe, possibly, kinda catch you saying something they can use for ad targeting. It's like basing your income on lottery tickets... the chances of getting something useful just aren't worth the effort.
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You have vastly underestimated the power of data and machine learning. Your "junk" data is actually great sample data to tune the models to learn about human conversation and behavior so that it can be trained to find things that are useful for what they want to know.
 
It's my data/bandwidth - no matter how little or how much - it's fucked up to help yourself or others to it without ACTIVELY asking me first - no matter how encrypted/secured it is

All you apologists want to gloss over this point 'oH bUt ItS sO lItTlE dAtA'

K, let me just use a little of your electricity and home computing power to mine me some bitcoin then - you basically won't be able to notice - same thing 👍
 
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LFaWolf said:
You have vastly underestimated the power of data and machine learning. Your "junk" data is actually great sample data to tune the models to learn about human conversation and behavior so that it can be trained to find things that are useful for what they want to know.
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Is it, though? Voice assistants still struggle to understand you even when you're speaking directly to them — how the hell would they have the technology to pick up incidental conversations? And even then, you still wouldn't need to record everyone 24/7 to train the machine learning system. That and I fail to see how empty rooms and indecipherable murmurs from too-distant chats would really help the system.

This is what's frustrating about privacy issues! People cling to fantasies about things like always-on spying because they want them to be true, not because they have any evidence it's true. We don't get to talk about the meaningful privacy/security issues because folks are too busy convincing themselves that Amazon or Google wants to hear your discussion of whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher.
 
Aurelius said:
Is it, though? Voice assistants still struggle to understand you even when you're speaking directly to them — how the hell would they have the technology to pick up incidental conversations? And even then, you still wouldn't need to record everyone 24/7 to train the machine learning system. That and I fail to see how empty rooms and indecipherable murmurs from too-distant chats would really help the system.

This is what's frustrating about privacy issues! People cling to fantasies about things like always-on spying because they want them to be true, not because they have any evidence it's true. We don't get to talk about the meaningful privacy/security issues because folks are too busy convincing themselves that Amazon or Google wants to hear your discussion of whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher.
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I’m sorry, you’re deluded if you think they’re not recording everything. They’ve literally been caught doing this over and over again.
 
Mchart said:
Doesn’t work that way with iPhones. The real Mac is not broadcasted out.
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I did not know that, checking my iPhone 11 you are right, the one under About is different than showing in my DHCP leases for the phone... sneaky.

But even with that you could still get the hostname to link to the MAC for airmon-ng to see if your wifi is truly shut off or not
 
Shoganai said:
I’m sorry, you’re deluded if you think they’re not recording everything. They’ve literally been caught doing this over and over again.
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Yup, they have. Seems people want to deny it cause their lives are not interesting enough "why would they want to listen to me 24/7", its not the point. IoT devices are a massive invasion of privacy and cause massive cyber security concerns.
 
Aurelius said:
Is it, though? Voice assistants still struggle to understand you even when you're speaking directly to them — how the hell would they have the technology to pick up incidental conversations? And even then, you still wouldn't need to record everyone 24/7 to train the machine learning system. That and I fail to see how empty rooms and indecipherable murmurs from too-distant chats would really help the system.

This is what's frustrating about privacy issues! People cling to fantasies about things like always-on spying because they want them to be true, not because they have any evidence it's true. We don't get to talk about the meaningful privacy/security issues because folks are too busy convincing themselves that Amazon or Google wants to hear your discussion of whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher.
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Voice assistant and recording your conversation for machine learning are two very different things, although they are related and I will explain. Voice assistant is real-time, whereas processing your conversation/data for machine learning is offline. The data that have been recorded can be used for so many things, target marketing, improve user experience, and actually, voice assistant! If the model when being trained has a hard time "understanding" a certain phrase or recording, it can flag that sample. Then, a real human can listen in, and tune the model what the phrase actually is. This way, the model will improve or "learn" so that it will know that phrase and how it could sound like in the future. The model/algorithm can be used in the future to actually improve real-time voice assistants.

Voice assistant is one of the hardest things to do, because everyone has a different tone. pitch, and even accent. I remember at one point Google or Duo Lingo has a project asking people to read a paragraph a day so that it can use the reading to feed its machine to learn different people pronunciation/reading.
 
Shoganai said:
I’m sorry, you’re deluded if you think they’re not recording everything. They’ve literally been caught doing this over and over again.
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OMG dude it doesn't literally record everything it just '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''accidentally''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''" falsely triggers 4,000 times a day and they gladly keep and use that data that's picked up during these "''''""""""""""""""""""""""""""false"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" triggers - it's totally different! 🙄
 
Shoganai said:
I’m sorry, you’re deluded if you think they’re not recording everything. They’ve literally been caught doing this over and over again.
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Please provide evidence, then. No excuses, no waffling. I want your next post to include hard data showing that at least one smart speaker platform is genuinely recording non-stop, on purpose.

Something tells me you won't have any evidence, though. It'd be ridiculously easy to prove if it was actually happening: you'd see data traffic consistent with a continuous audio feed, ports in use that aren't necessary for a passive connection, that sort of thing. For that matter, police who've requested recordings from Echo speakers have so far been disappointed because — shock — Amazon isn't actually capturing everything that happened.

And where have they been caught recording everything? The only stories I've seen have involved quality review teams listening to unintended recordings (i.e the speaker mistook something for the wake word). That's not the same as continuous recording, and the reviews include a handful of anonymized info that would be useless for ad targeting.

Again, this is what frustrates me — there's no real evidence to support claims like these, but people stick to them because it's easier to rage against the fantasy than be moderately concerned by the reality. Yeah, it's important to know what Amazon and Google do with recordings, but let's stick to claims we can back up with data, shall we?
 
Aurelius said:
Please provide evidence, then. No excuses, no waffling. I want your next post to include hard data showing that at least one smart speaker platform is genuinely recording non-stop, on purpose.

Something tells me you won't have any evidence, though. It'd be ridiculously easy to prove if it was actually happening: you'd see data traffic consistent with a continuous audio feed, ports in use that aren't necessary for a passive connection, that sort of thing. For that matter, police who've requested recordings from Echo speakers have so far been disappointed because — shock — Amazon isn't actually capturing everything that happened.

And where have they been caught recording everything? The only stories I've seen have involved quality review teams listening to unintended recordings (i.e the speaker mistook something for the wake word). That's not the same as continuous recording, and the reviews include a handful of anonymized info that would be useless for ad targeting.

Again, this is what frustrates me — there's no real evidence to support claims like these, but people stick to them because it's easier to rage against the fantasy than be moderately concerned by the reality. Yeah, it's important to know what Amazon and Google do with recordings, but let's stick to claims we can back up with data, shall we?
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The Misses used to work for Google, and they listened to literally everything, including phone calls. She couldn't work there anymore for ethical reasons. If you want to live in your deluded bubble, be my guest, but that's on you. And just humor me and look up "xkeyscore" if you're bored. Look up "14 eyes" while you're at it as well.
 
Aurelius said:
Please provide evidence, then. No excuses, no waffling. I want your next post to include hard data showing that at least one smart speaker platform is genuinely recording non-stop, on purpose.

Something tells me you won't have any evidence, though. It'd be ridiculously easy to prove if it was actually happening: you'd see data traffic consistent with a continuous audio feed, ports in use that aren't necessary for a passive connection, that sort of thing. For that matter, police who've requested recordings from Echo speakers have so far been disappointed because — shock — Amazon isn't actually capturing everything that happened.

And where have they been caught recording everything? The only stories I've seen have involved quality review teams listening to unintended recordings (i.e the speaker mistook something for the wake word). That's not the same as continuous recording, and the reviews include a handful of anonymized info that would be useless for ad targeting.

Again, this is what frustrates me — there's no real evidence to support claims like these, but people stick to them because it's easier to rage against the fantasy than be moderately concerned by the reality. Yeah, it's important to know what Amazon and Google do with recordings, but let's stick to claims we can back up with data, shall we?
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https://time.com/5568815/amazon-workers-listen-to-alexa/

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-hom...-to-your-voice-recordings-heres-what-we-know/
 
Balkroth said:
I just assumed I haven't had privacy since 2004 or so.
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In the beginning you could opt out.

It has gotten increasingly difficult to opt out, and it's starting to get to the point where it is not possible to opt out unless you want to live in a pre-electricity world.

All sorts of products on the market now have connectivity enabled b y default, many of them (like cars) cannot be disabled, and they send god knows what data to the mothership.

It's about time we get draconian regulation in place that ends the era of data collection, damn the consequences to the businesses who rely on it or the economy as a whole. It is that important.

Either fix it, or burn it all down.

 
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I'm glad I dumped Ring for Eufy. Not only I don't pay a fee to Ring but nobody is using my internet to torrent.
 
Really the only thing you can do today is choose what eggs to put your basket in (so to speak, just what you want to go all in on really) - even if you 'use' none of these services etc - they all still scour, buy and cross reference all sorts of data without and with their own data - public land records, voting records, credit card financial transactions - boom, user #8065492 is actually John Smith of Oakland Gardens, NY - SpongeBobWriteThatDownMeme.jpg
 
DukenukemX said:
I'm glad I dumped Ring for Eufy. Not only I don't pay a fee to Ring but nobody is using my internet to torrent.
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You are just swapping plague for cholera.

100% of these devices are a problem.

The only possible exception are those designed for offline enterprise use.

As far as camera products go, I might trust Unifi Video, but only the self hosted local version, as their cloud based services have been repeatedly compromized.
 
LFaWolf said:
https://time.com/5568815/amazon-workers-listen-to-alexa/

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-hom...-to-your-voice-recordings-heres-what-we-know/
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That's only the evidence of staff listing to a handful of clips from those recorded, as I mentioned earlier. It does not represent evidence of non-stop recording, which is what I asked for. Not that I expect you to find any.

This reinforces my case — people don't understand how the technology works, and they find it easier to rail against their fantasy ("omg Amazon/Google is spying on everything, all the time") than the more nuanced truth.
 
Shoganai said:
The Misses used to work for Google, and they listened to literally everything, including phone calls. She couldn't work there anymore for ethical reasons. If you want to live in your deluded bubble, be my guest, but that's on you. And just humor me and look up "xkeyscore" if you're bored. Look up "14 eyes" while you're at it as well.
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None of those are evidence Amazon and Google devices are recording around the clock. They just indicate 1. that Googlers listen to lots of things (not that they have 24/7 recording); 2. that the US government has wide-reaching access to the data that does exist; 3. that surveillance data is shared between a host of countries. I'm well aware of XKEYSCORE and the various levels of "eyes" intelligence sharing, but that's not what we're talking about.

Let me reiterate my request more explicitly, since reading comprehension is clearly a problem for you: present evidence that Alexa or Google Assistant is recording everything non-stop. You will not provide vague claims about listening to "everything" based on anecdotes you can't possibly support (not without getting your partner in trouble, at least); you will not divert to tangential subjects like government surveillance. You will provide tangible, specific evidence of what I asked. Understood?

You see the problem? You're arguing based on half-truths, on unsupported extrapolations rather than directly relevant evidence. Yes, Amazon, Google and the NSA are more intrusive than they should be, but that doesn't mean that the worst you can imagine is automatically true. There's so far no evidence to indicate that Amazon and Google are literally recording everything within earshot, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest their recording is actually quite limited (even though it does have problems).
 
Balkroth said:
I just assumed I haven't had privacy since 2004 or so.
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this, its not just an assumption its the truth. Our privacy died over a decade ago, the war was lost and the last 15 years have just been consolidation.

Aurelius said:
None of those are evidence Amazon and Google devices are recording around the clock. They just indicate 1. that Googlers listen to lots of things (not that they have 24/7 recording); 2. that the US government has wide-reaching access to the data that does exist; 3. that surveillance data is shared between a host of countries. I'm well aware of XKEYSCORE and the various levels of "eyes" intelligence sharing, but that's not what we're talking about.

Let me reiterate my request more explicitly, since reading comprehension is clearly a problem for you: present evidence that Alexa or Google Assistant is recording everything non-stop. You will not provide vague claims about listening to "everything" based on anecdotes you can't possibly support (not without getting your partner in trouble, at least); you will not divert to tangential subjects like government surveillance. You will provide tangible, specific evidence of what I asked. Understood?

You see the problem? You're arguing based on half-truths, on unsupported extrapolations rather than directly relevant evidence. Yes, Amazon, Google and the NSA are more intrusive than they should be, but that doesn't mean that the worst you can imagine is automatically true. There's so far no evidence to indicate that Amazon and Google are literally recording everything within earshot, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest their recording is actually quite limited (even though it does have problems).
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You are part of the problem. Maybe they aren't recording everything, but they do record things, they are a security risk on so many levels that are outside your control its insane and the EULA blocks all your legal remedies. (employee malfescense, system failure, hacks, selling data, etc). Outside of disabled needs why whould anyone with an active brain buy one of these?

If the Apple Vs Epic lawsuit has taught people anything (I doubt it) it should be that these tech juggernaughts are doing a lot more, and are more entagled, than you think.
 
Aurelius said:
That's only the evidence of staff listing to a handful of clips from those recorded, as I mentioned earlier. It does not represent evidence of non-stop recording, which is what I asked for. Not that I expect you to find any.

This reinforces my case — people don't understand how the technology works, and they find it easier to rail against their fantasy ("omg Amazon/Google is spying on everything, all the time") than the more nuanced truth.
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If the devices have not been non-stop recording, how can the staff listen to mundane conversations? Sexual assault?Think deeper.
 
Aurelius said:
None of those are evidence Amazon and Google devices are recording around the clock. They just indicate 1. that Googlers listen to lots of things (not that they have 24/7 recording); 2. that the US government has wide-reaching access to the data that does exist; 3. that surveillance data is shared between a host of countries. I'm well aware of XKEYSCORE and the various levels of "eyes" intelligence sharing, but that's not what we're talking about.

Let me reiterate my request more explicitly, since reading comprehension is clearly a problem for you: present evidence that Alexa or Google Assistant is recording everything non-stop. You will not provide vague claims about listening to "everything" based on anecdotes you can't possibly support (not without getting your partner in trouble, at least); you will not divert to tangential subjects like government surveillance. You will provide tangible, specific evidence of what I asked. Understood?

You see the problem? You're arguing based on half-truths, on unsupported extrapolations rather than directly relevant evidence. Yes, Amazon, Google and the NSA are more intrusive than they should be, but that doesn't mean that the worst you can imagine is automatically true. There's so far no evidence to indicate that Amazon and Google are literally recording everything within earshot, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest their recording is actually quite limited (even though it does have problems).
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That is fine if you believe it or not. Feel free to continue using those devices. I don't find any value in them to risk my privacy for them. Yes I am well aware of my phone but it is a necessity nowadays. Those devices are not.
 
Aurelius said:
None of those are evidence Amazon and Google devices are recording around the clock. They just indicate 1. that Googlers listen to lots of things (not that they have 24/7 recording); 2. that the US government has wide-reaching access to the data that does exist; 3. that surveillance data is shared between a host of countries. I'm well aware of XKEYSCORE and the various levels of "eyes" intelligence sharing, but that's not what we're talking about.

Let me reiterate my request more explicitly, since reading comprehension is clearly a problem for you: present evidence that Alexa or Google Assistant is recording everything non-stop. You will not provide vague claims about listening to "everything" based on anecdotes you can't possibly support (not without getting your partner in trouble, at least); you will not divert to tangential subjects like government surveillance. You will provide tangible, specific evidence of what I asked. Understood?

You see the problem? You're arguing based on half-truths, on unsupported extrapolations rather than directly relevant evidence. Yes, Amazon, Google and the NSA are more intrusive than they should be, but that doesn't mean that the worst you can imagine is automatically true. There's so far no evidence to indicate that Amazon and Google are literally recording everything within earshot, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest their recording is actually quite limited (even though it does have problems).
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LOL! Are you seriously looking for Amazon and Google to come out and admit guilt? Are you really looking for them to say, "Yes, Aurelius, we have been recording you non-stop, 24/7, for the last 5 years?" Is life really a Black and White thing? That you cannot infer based on evidence or circumstances?

Do you know that many companies pay fines to the government after being caught, yet they never admit any wrongdoing? Do you know people have been caught, redhanded, for various crimes such as sexual assaults, robberies, etc, and they still plead not guilty?

Good luck with your search for "hard evidence"!
 
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