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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday March 14 2020, @03:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-was-that-you-said? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

So how often are smart speakers listening when they shouldn't? A team of researchers at Boston's Northeastern University are conducting an ongoing study to determine just how bad the problem really is. They've set up an experiment to generate unexpected activation triggers and study them inside and out.

The team corralled a group of mainstream smart speakers into a box representing all the major players — four Alexas and one each of her cohorts. We'd love to see them maximize the test subjects by including enough devices of each type to cover all the possible assigned wake words, but that would be pretty expensive.

Then they piped in 125 hours worth of audio from TV shows with rapid-fire dialogue using Netflix. The shows they chose are healthy cross-section of televised entertainment — mostly newer stuff, but some going back a decade or more. Everything from comedy to drama. A video camera trained on the speakers will record any lights that indicate a successful activation. There's also a microphone to pick up anything the devices say in response to the dialogue stream, and a WAP to capture network traffic in and out of the box.

While the results indicate that these devices aren't constantly recording (phew!), they do tend to wake up quite frequently for short periods of time — up to 19 times in a 24-hour period. The worst offenders were the Apple and Microsoft speakers, both of which activated more often than the others. Not all of the activations were short and sweet, though — both the Microsoft Invoke and the Echo Dot had accidental activations lasting up to 43 seconds long. That's plenty of time to record and/or distribute your late-night 16-digit utterances to the QVC operators, or the secret ingredient in your mother-in-law's Quiche Lorraine.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 14 2020, @05:40PM (4 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday March 14 2020, @05:40PM (#971251)

    Our Google Home gets activated by dialogue in movies about 3 times a week, some phrases like "Hey Gorgeous" are pretty obvious how they've gotten confused with "Hey Google", but other times I really can't imagine how it got fooled.

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  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday March 16 2020, @05:27PM (3 children)

    by Freeman (732) on Monday March 16 2020, @05:27PM (#971942) Journal

    I got a google smart speaker / light for controlling that for my birthday a year or two ago. It's still brand new in the package. Not, because it's not cool tech.

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 16 2020, @05:58PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday March 16 2020, @05:58PM (#971953)

      Whatever goes on in our home, I wouldn't mind being put on the six o'clock news. We still have our expectations of privacy, but if someone wants to break that trust they always can. CIA laser reflections off the windows tech has been around for decades, I think ADAfruit or similar has a kit you can use to do it yourself these days - if anyone really wants to hear what's going on in your house it doesn't take much to do that without your knowledge.

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      • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday March 16 2020, @07:18PM (1 child)

        by Freeman (732) on Monday March 16 2020, @07:18PM (#971976) Journal

        If someone wants something bad enough, they're likely to get it. Just, offering up an always listening/recording device seems like asking for trouble.

        --
        Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 16 2020, @07:42PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday March 16 2020, @07:42PM (#971985)

          I see where you're coming from, but I _really_ like being able to turn of the morning alarm by voice command - particularly when I forget to cancel it on a day with no school. Most of the rest of the functions are on gimmick level, and I've expressly not given it access to my thermostat or garage door opener, but for me that weekday mornings alarm is the killer app.

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          🌻🌻 [google.com]