That Amazon, Google, and Apple are listening to the always on recording devices should surprise no one. That's how this works.
From the article : "... workers said they use internal chat rooms to share recordings they find amusing.
When workers come across a background conversation about personal information – like bank details – they are supposed to make the audio file..."
@RomeoTBravo What you suggest already exists, Mycroft, its opensource, runs off your own server.
@freemo @SecondJon Nice! Thanks.
I vaguely remember hearing about this, but I hadn't pursued it.
@SecondJon It stuns me how willing people are to install a live microphone in their home, known to be regularly transmitting what it hears.
I grew up at the end of the Cold War. Didn't that used to be called "a bug"?
There's got to be a layer in between that I trust, a layer that listens and transmits only when I approve it, and leaves me an audit trail of what it sent.
As it stands, though, I can certainly believe all the heavy processing, all the speech recognition, has been off-loaded to the "back end" (ie., Amazon, Google and Apple's computers) and that is truly disconcerting.