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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely doubt people don't realise that anything after the trigger is sent home, since a "feature" of alexa is that the app let you see each request you made, how alexa answered, and let them know if she got it wrong.

I think it's more a case of "don't care" / "don't realize the risks"

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I'd think the absolute vast majority would not have spent any time wondering about that the slightest. And most that do would just assume that the app asked alexa and retrieved a local log.

So much of what is collected today completely hinges on the fact that the public doesn't even grasp the feasibility nor the desirability of keeping track of them.

People perhaps assume all audio is processed locally and/or isn't stored except ephemerally.

I'd imagine there's a default "we store your data for AI training purposes" that would allow them to keep all audio.

> People perhaps assume all audio is processed locally and/or isn't stored except ephemerally.

Is there info on this from Amazon? I'd assume they do what you mention, have the speech recognition in the Alexa and just send up the words, not the entire audio stream.

Interesting implication of that in this case: if the actual audio is gone and you just have the transcription, is that valid as evidence? Or is it something closer to hearsay

It's cloud based. The device recognizes the wake-word offline and starts streaming to the recognition service. You can access a log of recordings through the app, so they are kept at least for a while.

For the tech crowd, most probably. For the average person, I'd wager most think it's magic and the device is doing all of the vocal processing. I'm assuming this just due to how many friends/family I have to explain how their Siri actually works.

A surprisingly large part of the population is completely oblivious to all of this and they don’t care unless the effects are so directly in their faces they can no longer ignore it.

On going into the app to let it know when it gets things wrong: I’d love to have it just listen for a “thank you” for a few seconds after it does whatever it thinks we’ve asked it to do.

I’m too sarcastic and deadpan for that to be an accurate metric for me.

I have several Alexa devices in my house. I don't care. I'm just not that interesting.

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