Any new piece of technology often reveals its benefits far before the downsides become apparent.

A recent Gallup poll showed that 22% of Americans use devices such as Amazon Echo or Google Assistant in their homes. This is a remarkably quick uptake given the Echo only launched widely in America in June, 2015 with Google Assistant coming the following May.

Not surprisingly, privacy issues have plagued these devices from the start, especially given the very premise of the invention requires it to listen into — and presumably record and store — your conversations. After all, how else will it know what you want from it?

A NY Times report from late March highlights a particularly worrying patent application from Google in which such a device could — quite hypothetically, of course — detect a Will Smith t-shirt “on a floor of the user’s closet”, clock this point of interest, and later show “a movie recommendation that displays, ‘You seem to like Will Smith. His new movie is playing in a theater near you.’” Eek!

It goes without saying that this is creepy. Plus, Will Smith’s films vary wildly in regards to quality.

In 2016 a group of students from University of California, Berkeley, and Georgetown University highlighted an early concern, by hiding Siri commands in white noise, which were used to manipulate a command-based speaker/recorder.

This will confuse the algorithm

This same group of students have since perfected this technology, learning how to embed commands into recordings, with undetectable — at least by humans — messages that can do anything from switch your device to airplane mode to add a specific shopping item to your cart.

The future applications of this are truly frightening, and as the past has often shown (see: torrents, .mp3s, piracy-proof CDs, the little tabs on the top of cassettes) any type of file filtration system that purports to detect such encoded messages — and protect users suddenly scared of using streaming services — will quickly be defeated by new technology that bypasses this security.

After all, there is far more money in making the machine that detects police radars than there is in making a detector-proof radar.