I generally laugh when I see the media and most people saying that Amazon and Google are listening to you when you don’t know it. It’s simply not true. I try and correct people that don’t understand how the technology works. A lot of the time the conversation doesn’t get very far. People don’t trust technology and with good reason.
Most people have no idea how any of their devices actually work. We’ve gone very quickly into a world of magical devices that just, “do things”. It has always been one of my big gripes about Apple devices. Apple makes their devices so easy to use, that consumers don’t have to know anything about them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for capitalism. This plan is great for selling things to the masses, but not so great for the future when things will only become more complex. We should be upping education instead of ignoring it.
At one point recently the presumption was that to hack a smart device you had to have physical access to it. Now we have a whole different problem that allows 3rd party skills to spy on you, due to Amazon and Google not thinking their security through. This has apparently been solved pretty quickly, but it goes to show that technology is not the problem and that all these devices that we have are reliant on developers. Developers are just people. People are fallible. We can’t remove human error from the technology equation. We make mistakes. Well, we can remove human error from technology… but as so many stories and films have shown us it’s a really bad idea.
The article below from Ars Technica is something you should read and pass along. It’s important for people to read and understand how security works and figure out what devices they want in their lives, and how to avoid being defrauded by others.
The sound of silence is actually the sound of a malicious smart speaker app listening in on you.
