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Comment by millstone | Hacker News Reader

> If a user has chosen to share their contacts with Alexa, their names, numbers and email addresses also appear in the dashboard.

So my data is popping up on a dashboard even though I've never once used an Alexa? Gee thanks.

A privacy-respecting design would have been:

1. Contacts never leave the device.

2. Location data is sent anonymously, in subsequent requests not associated with the initial query.

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I think the Echo may be worth more to Amazon than it is to the people who buy them for use as glorified kitchen timers because it allows them to build a social graph which is very useful, when combined with purchase histories, for targeting ads.

I very much distrust it and am not at all surprised by this news story. I think that people need to learn that privacy is not about having nothing to hide, it's about not being taken for a ride.

> A privacy-respecting design would have been...

Not really disagreeing with you, but every smartphone app that has access to your contacts also violates your contacts' privacy. WhatsApp, FB, Google Auto, etc, etc. More than anything, I hate the way this has been allowed as an acceptable practice.

> We should not be sharing their contact information online. So, keep your contacts in a different database. This app saves contacts in its own database seperate from android contacts. This way no other app would be able to access contacts.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/opencontacts.open.com.openco...

Everyone's contacts are already out there on the internet, the cat's out of the bag and you can't change that by going way out of your way to keep your copy air-gapped. The real issue is are you getting value in exchange for handing over your data? Amazon's service isn't something that normal people use to contact friends and you can't get usable directions to a contact's address with Alexa, so IMO the ROI is pretty bad.

Any suggestions for what to do on iOS?

Unfortunately, it's not always so easy to not share contacts with certain services. For instance, WhatsApp works just fine with a telephone number but it actively encourages users to upload their contacts - assumably consumed by (the) Facebook (group of businesses) as part of its social graph.

Contacts are not on the core Echo (not Alexa) device. Contacts are in the cloud.

Location is highly relevant to many frequent queries (e.g., weather) and a common Echo device does not have GPS or similar location-determining hardware. Consumers may choose to configure an address for things like weather and traffic / routing.

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