*Doesn't take genius to figure this one out, but, well, people really dig 'em. Also there's a microphone in your phone, by the way, and you carry that all over the place, including inside other people's houses.
Uh, well, there's a microphone inside your house that's always on, basically
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Recommendations
In addition to rigorously applying constitutional privacy protections as outlined above, the following steps should be applied to IoT microphones:Speech fragments transmitted to companies should be retained for the minimal necessary period, should not be shared absent a warrant, and should not be used for other purposes.
Companies should do whatever necessary to ensure their users have a clear understanding about what data is kept and for how long. That means fine print buried in a click-through agreement is not enough.
Users should have access to any of their audio recordings that a company retains, and the option to delete them. Commendably, some companies (Google and Amazon, for example) already do this. It needs to become at minimum an expected, standard best practice.
It should become standard for microphones to feature a hardwired, non-software-modifiable LED indicator light that turns on whenever a mic is on (defined as transmitting electrical signals to anywhere else). It might make sense for there to be another, separate indicator when software is recording and/or transmitting signals to the Internet. The more transparency to the consumer, the better.
It should also become standard to build in a hardware power switch that physically cuts off electricity to a microphone so that consumers can stop a microphone from recording. As much as possible, the power interruption that that switch effects should be tangible or even visible, so that customers can feel complete certainty that the microphone cannot record, akin to the certainty that comes from putting a bandage (or ACLU sticker) over the camera on one’s laptop.
To the greatest extent possible, the code governing the operation of microphones should be public…. (((etc etc)))
