this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but...
There's also this
Sure, but that’s not the commonly repeated conspiracy, even by non technical normal people, that everyone’s mics are listening all the time and they’re being used to serve you ads or whatever. The scale of this is not at all comparable to what I’m talking about. Yeah, I’m sure sometimes devices are inactivated inadvertently, those responses are uploaded, and people have listened to those recordings when they didn’t have permission. That is a far cry from all devices listening nearly all the time, using some surreptitious method to upload the data, and what was being recorded being used for some nefarious purpose.
Again, I’m not excusing these devices for being a privacy nightmare, but I just think it’s extremely implausible that Alexa, Siri, Google, etc. are always listening and nobody has discovered a device uploading.
The real privacy nightmare is that recording your conversations is completely unnecessary to build a richly detailed profile of you and your contacts. Regular old device / browser fingerprinting and a few people in your group sharing contacts with apps is enough for that, and it’s not a top secret conspiracy.
Per that article, it only happens when it thinks it's been activated, and only when you opt in. Not much of a bombshell.
Emphasis on "when it thinks". Not much point to a privacy control that the device can just ignore for unspecified reasons, and they had 150+ instances of that occurring in this data set.
~150 inadvertent activations is pretty low for the number of devices times however many years it spans.
From the linked article
15% of the recordings these reporters listened to were "inadvertant." I'd say that's pretty high.