Big Brother is Listening

[buzzingrobot]

People want to use voice commands. That works by sending the command someplace and returning an answer.

My phone is not 'listening' to me all the time. It has a voice-actuated microphone (been around for decades). It's programmed to respond to a specific trigger in a specific manner.

Makes little sense that people are being paranoid about something like this when they're constantly beaming there most private communications on the public airwaves.

[pfeiffep]

Now Samsung is also invasive

[mooreted]

Yep, it just goes on and on. Hmm, I don't know how we started spamming you, we sure didn't mean to.

[tgalati4]

As machines get smarter (and people get, well, you know, less smart) these things will happen.

[pfeiffep]

I prefer to think of it as a different kind of smart; but maybe that's the problem - as a society we 'trust' technology and these new inovations just a bit too much!

[buzzingrobot]

I prefer to think of it as a different kind of smart; but maybe that's the problem - as a society we 'trust' technology and these new inovations just a bit too much!

People are typically ignorant of the way technology and the internet works. We are naive if we imagine the data collection capabilities inherent in the way the net works will not be leveraged for profit.

[PondPuppy]

The voice command thing is quite odd -- some people, and make that most of the ones I work with, absolutely despise it. We carry company-provided cells and periodically someone will accidentally turn on voice activation. (These are semi-industrial phones, and have a button combination which activates the voice feature.)

Phone: "Please say a command!"
Human: "[dirty word]"
Phone: "I could not understand that command. Please say a command!"
Human: "[bad dirty word]"
Phone: "I could not understand that command. Please say a command!"
Human, grappling with phone: "[very, very bad dirty word]"

And so forth.

Other people apparently find voice activation quite handy. They're just people I don't know, I guess. (Yes, I understand that people with certain disabilities could find it essential to use voice commands to control their devices.)

From a security standpoint, my concern would be that if a microphone is controlled by software, then in some subset of applications that software will have vulnerabilities. And so, when hacked, a voice-activation can become an always-on voice monitoring system. Of course.

[mooreted]

I am one of those that doesn't want to talk to a computer or a phone bot the same way I don't want to talk to my hammer.

[tgalati4]

And how do you know that the picture that you are viewing on your SmartTV is not modified in some subtle way? The Voice control picks up the word "Pepsi" and every time a "Coke" commercial comes up it gets substituted for a "Pepsi" commercial. Now we have the cyber battle-of-the-commercials.

You have probably seen the disclaimer before a movie: "This movie has been modified to fit your TV."

Now we will see: "This movie has been modified to fit your personal conversation habits."

[davidvandoren]

We all should demand all phones to be equipped with a mechanical old fashion microphone on and off switch.
A camera lid would be nice too.
So, every phone has at least two buttons, one for turning the phone on/off and one for the mic.