If this is a medical facility, I’d never trust them ever again if I saw an echo there.
Dentist office I went to has a private room with an Echo, they use it to switch playlists without having to touch anything, I guess. Figure they didn’t really think it through…
But yeah I was a bit uncomfortable with that. Not that anything private was discussed, I simply had a cavity filled. They’re excellent dentists tho, best I’ve ever seen, so I won’t be going elsewhere.
Maybe mention the potential privacy issue if they’re still using echo on your next visit. They might’ve not aware of it.
Yeah, don’t go looking too hard whenever you’re in a hospital or anything. The number of vulnerabilities I can spot with as little infosec knowledge I have is deeply concerning
You’re all missing the real kicker here - this sign is only here for the HIPAA auditor. Everyone knows that no one is actually going to mute the thing.
Also muting it probably doesn’t stop it listening, it just stops its response.
No, there is a button to make the Echo stop listening.
If you want to prove me wrong, it should be incredibly easy to press the button and record the Echos network activity. If you’re right you’d still see network traffic. But nobody has been able to show this so far. I wonder why?
Yeah I read the other comments after making mine. However everyone keeps calling it a “physical” button, and I don’t think that’s accurate. It won’t be a physical switch that opens a circuit, it will be a button that operates a transistor that opens the circuit.
Still, I see no good reason to trust the device - especially in a medical setting.
There’s not much difference between a direct switch and a transistor, both will cut the signal and neither is over rideable by software
This is disingenuous at best and incorrect at worst. The mute button on the Echo is just that, a button; it is not a switch. It is software-controlled and pushing it just sends a signal to the microcontroller to take some action. For instance, one action is to turn on the red indicator light; that’s definitely not physically connected to the mute button.
Maybe another response of pushing the button is to disable the transistor used for the microphone, but it’s more likely that it just sets a software flag for the algorithm to stop its processing of the microphone input signal. Regardless of which method it uses, the microcontroller could undoubtedly just decide to revert that and listen in, either disabling or not disabling the red light at the same time.
But I personally don’t think it listens in when muted. I don’t think it spies on us to target ads based on what we say around it. I’m not worried that the mic mute function doesn’t work as intended.
But I fully understand that it is fully capable of it, technically speaking.
Or maybe you don’t install a data mining spy device in the office?
It’s fascinating how people know that these devices break their privacy, yet they keep using them.
Some people just don’t care about their privacy and I’m not judging them, you do you!
Professionals should care about their client’s privacy though. That shouldn’t be a debate.
People that don’t care about their privacy is exactly what makes it so hard to just exist privately. I shouldn’t have to give up my rights because other people don’t care about them
