And it’s not just one mic, but many-most laptops ship with “far field” capabilities specifically designed to pick up and recognize your voice at a distance, even across a crowded room.
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Microsoft’s Surface lineup lacks hardware controls for disabling either the camera or the microphone though you can disable them in the Windows 10 Settings menu, we’re back to the question of whether both are really off. While some notebooks now include dedicated keys to mute the mic, including the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon , far more are making it potentially easier to spy on you. Unfortunately, not all notebook makers appear to be giving the mic issue as much care as the camera shutter. …But they’re not doing enough about hot mics In the right context, especially a business environment, information captured from a hot mic could be incredibly damaging. Lenovo’s ThinkShutter is a physical shutter that you can slide over to block the Webcam.īut don’t discount the even greater impact of someone overhearing what you have to say: your finances, college plans, sales pitches, an R&D breakthrough, your company’s five-year-strategy, legal troubles. Consider the official and unofficial “privacy shutters” that adorn notebook PCs today-everything from adhesive tape and Post-It Notes to more sophisticated solutions, like the ThinkShutter on some of Lenovo’s ThinkPad notebooks for businesses. While few laptops control their microphones as easily as smart speakers do, controlling webcams is an established practice. PCs already protect you from spying webcams…
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Your PC simply gives assistants like Alexa another way to collect information. Even if it turns out that you haven’t asked anything of Alexa, the recording still exists. If you were an early adopter of a device like the Echo Dot, those recordings go back years.Īnother fundamental problem is that when Alexa isn’t sure whether you’ve summoned her, she errs on the side of Amazon, not you, Fowler found. As Geoff Fowler of The Washington Post has chronicled, Amazon’s Alexa squirrels away dozens or hundreds of interactions she’s sampled. We know that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft aggressively collect as much data as you’ll allow. We don’t know much that button is actually used, but there’s an important reason to have it. That’s evidenced by the fact that most smart speakers like the Echo Dot now include some form of physical button for disabling the microphone. Here’s the thing: Even if they buy always-connected smart speakers, consumers do care about privacy.
The 2nd-generation Amazon Echo has an array of seven far-field microphones mounted on top, but also a button (at left) to turn them off.
(Yes, there are now two digital assistants capable of listening to your every command, built right into your PC.) Alexa’s inability to listen in was viewed as a critical shortcoming. Consider the customer responses before the other major assistant, Amazon Alexa, responded to wake words within Windows 10. At least a subset of users seems to think that a device that isn’t always listening to them is in some way defective. Consumer expectations may be another driver.