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Miguel Afonso Caetano"[A] team of researchers recently set out to determine just how much companies like Amazon, Apple and Google are using the data gathered through their voice assistants to profile us –– track and monitor our behavior –– across the internet. (...) The study focused on the behaviors of the three biggest voice assistant platforms: Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant. What researchers found was that how concerned you should be about your smart assistant profiling you varies greatly depending on which device you use.But in order to figure this out, they had to essentially trick voice assistants into profiling them.They downloaded publicly available information that Google compiles on every user based on their searches, like gender, age range, relationship status and income bracket. Using those labels, they were able to design questions that could easily convince the platforms that they were, for example, married, had children or were a homeowner not a renter.The researchers then recorded themselves asking these questions and replayed the audio to voice assistants over and over again. Over the course of 20 months, they conducted 1,171 experiments involving nearly 25,000 queries. (...) What they ended up finding was that Alexa exhibits the most straightforward kind of profiling behavior: It’s all based on your interest in products. (...) However, with Siri and Google Assistant, things are more complicated.After reaching out to Apple to get their data, the company insisted “they had no data on us,” Choffnes says, “which means we couldn’t even test anything or prove any hypothesis about whether there was any profiling happening.” (...) Meanwhile, Google Assistant was the strangest of the bunch. The researchers found that it was clearly profiling its users but often incorrectly." <a href="https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/03/17/voice-assistant-profiling-research/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank">https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/03/17/voice-assistant-profiling-research/</a><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/VoiceAssistants" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#VoiceAssistants</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/IoT" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#IoT</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SmartObjects" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#SmartObjects</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Amazon" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Amazon</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Alexa" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Alexa</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Google" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Google</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Apple" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Apple</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Surveillance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Surveillance</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Privacy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Privacy</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/DataProtection" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#DataProtection</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano<a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/UserAgents" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#UserAgents</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/IoT" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#IoT</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SmartObjects" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#SmartObjects</a>: "User agents can be well-designed or they can be poorly made. The fact that a user agent is designed to act in accord with your desires doesn't mean that it always will. A software agent, like a human agent, is not infallible.However – and this is the key – if a user agent thwarts your desire due to a fault, that is fundamentally different from a user agent that thwarts your desires because it is designed to serve the interests of someone else, even when that is detrimental to your own interests.A "faithless" user agent is utterly different from a "clumsy" user agent, and faithless user agents have become the norm. Indeed, as crude early internet clients progressed in sophistication, they grew increasingly treacherous. Most non-browser tools are designed for treachery.A smart speaker or voice assistant routes all your requests through its manufacturer's servers and uses this to build a nonconsensual surveillance dossier on you. Smart speakers and voice assistants even secretly record your speech and route it to the manufacturer's subcontractors, whether or not you're explicitly interacting with them:"<a href="https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano<a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/CyberSecurity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#CyberSecurity</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AI" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#AI</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Iot" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Iot</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SmartObjects" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#SmartObjects</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Hacking" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Hacking</a>: "For a start, review all the devices in your home that connect to the internet. Try to identify AI-powered features, such as learning user behaviours or processing large datasets. These are common in smart speakers, home security systems and advanced wearable technology.Secondly, explore the functionality of your devices and disable irrelevant or unnecessary AI features. This simple step could prevent AI from gathering personal information and its possible exposure.Thirdly, when you purchase a device, examine the manufacturer’s security disclosure, often found on their website under titles like “Privacy”, “Security” or “Product Support”. It can also be found in user manuals and, sometimes, directly on the product packaging.Make sure you understand what sort of AI technology the device uses and how data is collected, processed, stored and protected. What are the safeguards? Did the manufacturer use industry standards or subscribe to strong security guidelines like the European Union’s data protection regulation, GDPR?" <a href="https://theconversation.com/ai-is-making-smart-devices-watches-speakers-doorbells-easier-to-hack-heres-how-to-stay-safe-223738" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://theconversation.com/ai-is-making-smart-devices-watches-speakers-doorbells-easier-to-hack-heres-how-to-stay-safe-223738</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano<a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Cybersecurity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Cybersecurity</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SmartObjects" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#SmartObjects</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/LG" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#LG</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/IoT" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#IoT</a>: "An LG washing machine owner and self-confessed fintech geek has asked the Twitterverse why his smart home appliance ate an average of 3.66GB of data daily. Concerned about the washer’s internet addiction, Johnie forced the device to go cold turkey and blocked it using his router UI. Had the LG washer been hacked, hijacked, or otherwise tampered with over the net – or is this the average data consumption for a modern smart appliance?"<a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/your-washing-machine-could-be-sending-37-gb-of-data-a-day" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/your-washing-machine-could-be-sending-37-gb-of-data-a-day</a>

Miguel Afonso Caetano<a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Surveillance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Surveillance</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/AdTargeting" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#AdTargeting</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SmartObjects" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#SmartObjects</a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/IoT" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#IoT</a>: "MindSift, a small New Hampshire-based company, is part of a new push that aims to target ads by listening to peoples’ everyday conversations through microphones in their smart devices, according to a review of recently deleted sections from MindSift’s website and comments made on a podcast unearthed by 404 Media.MindSift has been deleting details about its technology from the internet in recent days, but two of the three founders of the company go into detail about their technology on a small podcast they cohost called “Real Business Roundtable” where they give advice to entrepreneurs."<a href="https://www.404media.co/mindsift-brags-about-using-smart-device-microphone-audio-to-target-ads-on-their-podcast/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.404media.co/mindsift-brags-about-using-smart-device-microphone-audio-to-target-ads-on-their-podcast/</a>

Poetry NewsOrdinary things made Smart with liquid metal coating Future coming soon<a href="https://mastodon.cloud/tags/liquidmetal" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#liquidmetal</a> <a href="https://mastodon.cloud/tags/smartobjects" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#smartobjects</a> <a href="https://mastodon.cloud/tags/futuretechnology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#futuretechnology</a> <a href="https://mastodon.cloud/tags/haiku" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#haiku</a> <a href="https://mastodon.cloud/tags/poetry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#poetry</a><a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/liquid-metal-could-turn-everyday-things-like-paper-into-smart-objects/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/06/liquid-metal-could-turn-everyday-things-like-paper-into-smart-objects/</a>

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