Mycroft is an open source privacy-focused voice assistant. It can be installed on Linux, Raspberry Pi, our reference devices, or your own custom hardware.
The era where we were in control of the data on our own computers has been replaced with devices containing sensors we cannot control, storing data we cannot access, in operating systems we cannot monitor, in environments where our rights are rendered meaningless. Soon the default will shift from us interacting directly with our devices to interacting with devices we have no control over and no knowledge that we are generating data. Below we outline 10 ways in which this exploitation and manipulation is already happening.
If you're an Windows user and you're using the default settings, each time you start typing in search box in taskbar (to open an application or search for a file on your computer), your local search terms and location are sent to Microsoft, some of which advertise to you.