Hacker News Reader

Comment by softwarefounder | Hacker News Reader

Pays Amazon for a listening device and installs in home...gets upset when it listens.

That seems overly simplistic to me.

It's like saying that someone buys a car that's powered by an explosive liquid, and then complains when all the gas in the tank explodes at the same time.

Both a car and an amazon echo have a switch that turns that functionality off.

I feel like you're being purposefully reductive here. You know they're different right? The entire value proposition (and marketing strategy) of Alexa and related devices is that they are voice activated, so you don't have to physically interact with the device to make a request.

Given that, it would be ridiculous to expect paying customers to switch it off when not in use. The onus on Amazon is to protect their customers' privacy while the device is being used as intended.

If you really want to pick apart the car analogy, maybe this is closer to having automatic start and driving capability on a car, but the car sometimes randomly starts and drives away. Are you really going to blame the customer for that, even though they could disable the feature every time they exit the car?

The car analogies are usually quite poor. However, it depends on your use case. Echo Dot's have a mute button which prevents monitoring, or at least it seems so. I'm not an echo power user, so my needs are definitely different than for intended uses like home automation.

I think for some, at least users like me would like a feature similar to "su". I'd like to confirm that Alexa should start doing stuff if it has not been confirmed for x number of minutes. I think the real problem with these home assistant devices is they are not designed with a confirmation message. This would be annoying in some cases, but surely a balance can be struck.

I'm not trying to be reductive at all about the car analogy. When you turn on a car, you acknowledge that the engine is running. You can also mute an echo if you have the foreknowledge that you will not be doing activities that require voice activation.

Obviously I'm being facetious.

But there is a hilarity of, on one hand being privacy centric, and with the other hand, planting a listening device in ones home.

I don't know about her but I would be upset not because Amazon recorded private conversation but because they sent it to some random contact on my contact list. I don't want to bother my contacts with my inane ramblings in the privacy of my room.

I would think what if that was not the only time this happened, what if something else was sent to someone else but that person did not did nothing about it, what if the data was sent to some server and logged, what if all it hears is transcoded to text and stored on some dev box logs now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com