| | |
|
MattDialSecondEssay 3 - 11 Jan 2020 - Main.EbenMoglen
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondEssay" |
|---|
| |
<
< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | Voice Activation and Its Fundamental Disagreements with Privacy | | | It’s a trope of many science fiction movies, and seemingly necessary for any futuristic society. In many science fiction movies, having a voice-activated digital assistant is a staple of a futuristic society- the utopian vision of technology seems to move interaction with it from our hands to our voices. The modern realization of this idea, however, has come with myriad privacy concerns- namely, in order to activate such an assistant with your voice, it has to be listening. Herein I will look at whether a voice-activated digital assistant is possible within a legal framework prioritizing privacy. | |
>
> |
"It" has to be listening, and it has to be a third-party service platform, because we don't make this obviously federated service a federated service. If the assistant were running on your server, it would be listening to you within your network, not listening to your and putting its data elsewhere. That would change the calculus significantly.
| | | The Current (Broad) Legal Framework
Assuming operation within a legal system prioritizing privacy is perhaps the first hurdle to overcome. We do not currently exist in an environmental law model for privacy of data, at least here in the United States. While the Supreme Court has recently stated in the most analogous case that Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure concerns relating to law enforcement can apply to data-collecting such as cell-site location information, police can still access this data through a “probable cause” warrant. Carpenter v. US, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018). Never mind that the digital assistants are collecting this data either way. | | | Attempts to balance privacy concerns with the basic functions of a smart speaker or smart phone’s digital assistant fail with or without “protections”. As currently implemented, the products function as intended and track your voice data, but there is little to no privacy afforded. Activate a physical barrier like the kill-switch, however, and the product ceases to provide its stated function. The smart speaker or digital assistant is a design that cannot be compatible with any basic idea of secrecy or anonymity required for a private existence. These concerns are baked into the very design of all these digital assistants, and there isn’t any current defense against them other than simply not using devices that contain them. Even if science fiction predicted that the future would mean technological commands getting out of our hands and into our voice-boxes, it did not fully predict what would follow along with that future. The basic idea of a digital assistant with whom a human user can interact and interface is perhaps still promising, but as for the initial activation method- tried and true mechanical activation is the best bet. | |
>
> |
Activation is only one of the aspects of the problem once the assistant is a service delivered centrally from a platform rather than running on a Raspberry Pi of your own. But on the other side of that architecture of the service, the problems don't look too bad at all. So why don't we have federated voice recognition and "skills" that implement service models for voice browsing through personal hardware? It's that Google et al. consume free software and emit some, but don't emit software that runs their services. A competitor built around designing free software services also scalable for industry, whether that were in Europe or in India, would be a geopolitical force for change. We've done it before.
| | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines: |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |