> I don’t like the idea that anything I say in a public setting...could end up in a transcript summary on someone’s personal device.

My friend, if there's a reporter standing behind you, it could end up on the nightly news. And it's been that way forever. Certainly, a plethora of terrifyingly broad data collection greatly exacerbates the problem, but it's not a new problem.

> bla bla bla...Amazon Echo...listening in on us without our knowledge or consent. I've lost track of how many times I've experienced or heard others...discussing a particular topic...and then as soon as they get on Facebook...they see posts and ads featuring the very topic they were discussing.

There are lots of real problems with surveillance tech, but the stuff about smart speakers specifically is still a dumb conspiracy theory. People are CONSTANTLY testing the hardware in these things and watching network activity. They really are not listening to you, and blindly repeating this claim greatly harms your credibility.

> bla bla bla...George Orwell envisioned in his dystopian novel 1984

Okay, new rule, these articles need to pick at least one other dystopian novel. There are so many. What's wrong with Fahrenheigh 451, where the government had everyone look out their doors in a mass manhunt? That's a good one! Use it to talk about Ring cameras or something.

>My friend, if there's a reporter standing behind you, it could end up on the nightly news. And it's been that way forever.

Can't tell if this is meant to be ironic or not. Are you seriously comparing a future consumer product to be potentially sold in the hundreds of millions with TV news reporters?

That's the most HN spin I've seen this year

> My friend, if there's a reporter standing behind you, it could end up on the nightly news

It's a matter of scale. Now everybody with a device is a reporter.

Re smart speakers / Google Assistant etc I think there have even been some lawsuits about inadvertent recording. I think they get it right most of the time, so my impression has been the lawsuits are about the mistakes.

That all said, as a technologist in the past I could say "of course they aren't recording you and data mining your conversations" because that's obviously an expensive and complicated proposition when much cheaper forms of data mining exist. But with AI advancements I think that calculus could change - the systems that could do this are already being built for other reasons; the main reason to not do it is cost but that's being eroded.

Performative nitpicking is tiresome, why equivocate? Either you agree with the thrust of the argument and are looking to strengthen it, or you disagree. Which is it?

> Certainly, a plethora of terrifyingly broad data collection greatly exacerbates the problem, but it's not a new problem.

I argue that this is a false equivalence. When the scale of something changes by an order of magnitude (or multiples thereof), it’s no-longer the same problem/circumstance.

> the stuff about smart speakers specifically is still a dumb conspiracy theory

We know for certain that they do listen to us even when they shouldn't and send that data https://www.techradar.com/news/your-smart-speaker-could-be-a...

We also know that there have been multiple instances of employees and low paid contractors listening to people having sex and talking about very personal things.

I don't think concerns over smart speakers spying on us qualifies as a "conspiracy theory". People looking for a conspiracy theory are better off digging into how this happened https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/amazon-alexa-c...

If our devices were never listening to us in secret things like audio beacons wouldn't have been invented https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-th...

Every single time any article about how terrible things are / how its getting worse, someone always pipes in about how "this has always been a problem" - which is a completely useless observation that in practice only has the effect of normalizing the terribleness.