California fires: smart speakers and emergency alerts

Mon Oct 16 03:08:50 UTC 2017

It is theoretically simple to:

 	1. Turn the address of your Smart Speaker into coordinates
     2. Receive ALL alerts and only act upon those that apply to your
        location

This way it isn't creepy, because the emergency alert wasn't targeted to
you, but your device was aware enough to determine that you are in the
warned area.

Taking this further, let's have manufacturers build the location awareness
into the device, rather than the upstream service (e.g. Amazon, Google,
Apple). Your smart speaker receives a stream of ALL the alerts, and if you
are in a warned area, and you enable them, they alert you.

With the processing power on these speakers, and the likely small quantity
and amount of data per alert to determine if it applies, it should be
achievable while still protecting your smart speaker location.

Beckman

On Sun, 15 Oct 2017, Sean Donelan wrote:

> It would be creepy if an emergency alert was too targetted.  It may be better 
> to keep it larger than a mile radius, rather than a single house.

Jean-Francois Mezei wrote:

> So, assuming its Speaker is geolocated, Google would know if an alert is
> applicable to its location and be able to send it to the unit.

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Peter Beckman                                                  Internet Guy
beckman at angryox.com                                 http://www.angryox.com/
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