Eavesdropping?

September 19th, 2020| Topic: RaMbLeS | 4

There you are, sitting down, calm and collected, minding your own business, watching TV, troubling no one, when out of nowhere a voice pipes up:

The distance to the moon is 238,900 miles.”

You jump out of your La-Z-Boy. Spill your iced tea on your jeans, on the TV remote, and on the carpet. Chaos ensues.

Who was that?

Apple’s Siri. Or Amazon’s Alexa. Or your favorite Google Home person, “OK Google.”

No one likes it when a stranger interrupts our activities. Particularly when they come up with thousands of miles to the moon, or the zoological name of the cockroach (which, by the way, Siri tells me is Periplaneta americana), or how to cook escargot. No, leave me alone, I say.

These things are happening with increasing and alarming regularity. So proclaims a new study from Northeastern University: “When Speakers Are All Ears: Characterizing Misactivations of IoT [Internet of Things] Smart Speakers,” in the proceedings of the 20th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.

As these gizmos proliferate in our homes, offices, and public spaces, it appears they are listening to us all the time.

There have been a slew of recent reports about devices constantly recording audio and cloud providers outsourcing to contractors transcription of audio recordings of private and intimate interactions. Recent shifts to working from home make these issues more acute, as business conversations previously confined to places of work may be recorded by home devices.”

“Seriously” and “Hey, sir” triggered Ms. Siri. “Election” and “I like some …” woke up Alexa. “Good girl” and “Goofball” roused Mr. O. K. Google. And even just random words.

The researchers exposed these electronic housemates of ours to hours and hours of Netflix shows, like Gray’s Anatomy, The Office, , Big Bang Theory, Narcos, West Wing, and so on. And they found that such mistaken activations of smart speakers, even when it wasn’t you who uttered the “wake word,” occur between 1.5 and 19 times a day, 1.43 times for every 10,000 words spoken.

Are activations long enough to record sensitive audio from the environment?

Yes, we have found several cases of long activations: 10% of the activations were at least 8–10 seconds long. During our experiments, we have also seen rare cases of activations lasting up to 43 seconds. And we found that almost all activations that are detected locally (device lit up) are also sent to the cloud.”

Well, at least, you can turn those things off.

Not God. He always listens. No shutting his ears off. Thankfully!

The LORD has heard my supplication,
The LORD my prayer He accepts.
Psalm 6:9

Earlier in the psalm, the psalmist had asked for help.

Be gracious to me, LORD, for I [am] frail;
Heal me, LORD, for my bones are terrified.
Psalm 6:2

It isn’t coincidence that “be gracious” is the Hebrew verb khanan and “supplication” is tkhinnah (both related to khen, “grace”). Neither is it accidental that those are the only two verses in the psalm where “LORD” occurs twice. He hears. And gives grace to my plea for grace.

And the sufferer had beseeched God:

Return [shuv], LORD, rescue my soul;
deliver me because of Your lovingkindness.
Psalm 6:4

And notice how the prayer is answered by a listening God:

All my enemies, they will turn back [shuv].
Psalm 6:10a

Oh, and earlier, the psalmist in his time of trouble had asked God in a burst of emotion:

Yahweh—how long?
Psalm 6:3

And the answer?

All my enemies …
they will be ashamed suddenly.
Psalm 6:10b

God listens. Carefully. And makes no mistakes with his grace!

SOURCES:
Consumer Reports; Northeastern University; ZDnet