Amazon researcher explains science behind Alexa's newly announced whisper mode

That’s not “programming language feature discussion”. It’s obsessively off-topic behaviour.

The point is, they subject you to the same threat as an Alexa. You can’t say “Europeans don’t use Alexa because it could XYZ”, and yet they use phones which could also do XYZ.

The Amazon echo isn't even that mysterious; it has low-power hardware to listen for the wake word and doesn't even power up the main CPU until that point. And you can always monitor the network traffic. The fears are massively overblown for home assistants. Mobile phones, by comparison, track your position in real time everywhere you are and send that information to paying 3rd parties all the time.

The assistants in phones work in exactly the same way as the assistants in home appliances, no? They start recording when they hear their voice trigger.

Both classes of devices require trust that their maker won't invoke this functionality when it's not asked for, has hardened this functionality against bad actors, etc.

Europeans are more inclined to think that if there's a problem, it is very logical for the government to step in and solve it because that's government's function after all. Americans are more likely to think private citizens should solve it if possible because government should be small whenever possible.

When it comes to privacy, an American might value privacy but think the best solution is a buyer beware approach. Such as, if you don't want to risk Amazon / Alex spying on you, don't buy an Echo. To many Americans, having to take on the entire burden of being responsible for their own privacy is the lesser of two evils because government intervention is to be avoided.

As an analogy, consider attitudes towards medication. Some people dislike taking any medications at all if they can avoid it. If they have a headache, they will usually just deal with the pain instead of taking a pill. If their doctor wants them to go on prescription medication for high blood pressure, they will hope to find a way to manage it without drugs. Then there are other people who have a more balanced approach and have zero problem taking medications as long as they have been studied well and found safe. Americans are more like the people who avoid medications whenever possible. Sometimes they avoid things which could actually have been pretty beneficial. But they don't avoid them because they think the problem isn't a problem. It's because they don't like that type of solution.

The first moment that somebody finds a home assistant sending massive streams of data to the mothership then we talk about it. But until then it's just a "debate" without any facts at all just wild incorrect speculation.