Tech Is Listening, and That's Not Good

Personally, I'm not interested in having Internet-connected devices around the office or house listening to me. No good can come of it unless I'm trying to prove that someone said something specific to me. For that I can rig up my own wire.

This means no Siri, no "OK Google," and no Alexa, among the various devices that want to eavesdrop. It may be convenient, but it's also creepy and a huge security flaw.

 I've been joking about voice recognition since some of the earliest attempts in the 1980s to make it work well. At some points in the never-ending conversation, numerous pundits were predicting no more keyboards.

This was wishful thinking based on the series Star Trek, where Kirk or Spock would command the computer. "Computer find the location of McCoy on the ship." This was followed by the computer saying, "working, working" followed by the result. This was our future.

In the 1980s and 1990s, IBM was one of the leaders of this technology. The company had prototyped new PCs designed to be speech-centric. They would listen and talk back at you. I was told there was a warehouse full of them, but the company bailed out—probably after realizing the technology barely works.

As of 2015, the technology works very well. I use speech recognition to formulate short text messages. But it is still flawed. It works far better in a quiet environment than a noisy street, where it hardly works at all. And it simply cannot understand certain words and phrases, ever.

The current iteration of this technology has a huge security hole in that it can be triggered by virtually any voice. Find someone with a phone that has Google Now installed. Say "OK Google" around it and you have activated someone else's phone.

I discovered this during a discussion on the No Agenda Podcast  which included us saying "OK Google." It apparently triggered listener's phones everywhere. Complaint letters poured in.

What kind of technology is this? Combining it with dangerous commands would be disastrous.

In the 80s, my idea of a joke was to rush into an office and yell at the top of my lungs: "Format drive C! Yes!" The joke is now dated, but the concept (and the security hole) remain.

A similar joke was reiterated on a Ford commercial attempting to promote Microsoft Sync, whereby the passenger began telling Sync to play certain lame songs to embarrass the driver. The commercial was funny, but was unexpectedly foreboding and revealed the problems with such systems. In hindsight, the ad should not have been aired.

As smartphones' voice command mechanisms improve, how hard would it be to see an idle phone and tell it to "cancel all my appointments" or "erase my contact list?"

Siri in many ways is very powerful and can set up reminders and send notes. Hate notes, for example. Announcements that you are quitting and the company sucks would be hilarious. With the Internet of everything you will probably be able to turn on the lights of your house and set the temperature with the phone. "OK Google set the thermostat to 90." "OK Google, turn on all lights."

If there are specialized commands, you'll be able to learn them because the rubes who use these systems love to show off. They'll say the commands in front of you. It's a form of audio "selfie."

Not to be an alarmist, but voice recognition is going to kill someone someday if these security holes, which have been ignored for decades, are not fixed. In the meantime, disable the feature.