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Comment by rubyfan | Hacker News Reader

The stakes are so high for Amazon to tell the truth here. If they were lying then there would be outrage among users, media, competition, etc.

I’ve dealt with many people from Amazon in my professional life and based on their handling of customer data I believe Amazon take seriously the trust customers place with them. Amazon believe the Alexa and Echo platform will grow their retail and service relationships with customers.

I don’t think they would throw that away to fool us all into believing a fake mute button - for what?

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I think both you, and the parent you're responding to are correct. Amazon is not evil, they're merely self-interested. This can lead them to do some evil things, but they are not a cartoon villain, twisting their mustache in shadows.

On the other hand, it's important to verify claims, and Amazon should be very happy about this verification. It proves that their claim could be trusted. Some other conclusion could have just as easily been true.

Couldn't they have implemented mute in software? There would be little outrage if they had (users don't care about the difference) but spy agencies (e.g. NSO Group) would have a backdoor.

The fact that they used a hardware switch means they did it the right way.

By contrast my Logitech camera has a light to show when the camera is running - but the light can be disabled via their software which makes me uncomfortable with fully trusting the light.

When we discussed this - at long length - during the original Echo development program, we consistently came to the conclusion that it should be hardware, not software, to maintain customer trust.

IMHO, This was the correct choice.

No one I know would trust a software mute.

Yeah... I thought it was pretty clear. While still hoping that we could build something (product & reputation) that users wouldn't want to turn off.

Are you still involved? If so, is there some way I can request a feature to turn off all of the "by the way" and other follow-ups? I find them incredibly annoying. I usually answer "no and don't ask again" but it doesn't seem to understand.

I left some years ago. Yeah, not a huge fan of these "by the ways" but agree that having them would be less bad if there were a "don't ask again."

My question for you is why not advertise this loudly? Or, maybe you did and no one cared? Because presumably it's a bit more costly per unit to do it this way, and very few people are ever going to understand and care.

Not that I think you made the wrong choice, I think it's a good one, but I'm just curious how many consumers you thought would actually understand it, or how that information would be distributed

It's a balancing act. We built it, to build trust. But talking about it too much would - we thought - highlight concerns and increase worries that we hoped (most) users wouldn't have.

As an example, we were very clear and upfront in the original product detail page that users' voices went to the cloud, as we were not trying to hide that. Even so, some people tried to play a bit of "gotcha" and fear-mongering about the fact, as though we were not being transparent.

Appreciate that, a lot.

Particularly with software auto-updates, a software mute is simply untrustworthy.

True. And in the early (internal) alpha days, false positives for wake word detection were quite high. So we felt the pain from eating our own dogwood; even though we spent huge amount of science / engineering resources on reducing those false positives, we knew it would never get to zero while maintaining acceptable true positive rates.

I know you. :)

#doppler4lyfe

Took me a couple of minutes to figure out who you are :)

Still proud of this product!

This is a good point, I had suspected that the mute function was, in fact, implemented in software.

That they went ahead and implemented in hardware is encouraging. Someone over there took the feature seriously enough to take it this far. I am sure it added cost over a software-only solution.

Software based mute means a compromise of the kernel would destroy the control provided by a software mute.

They could have, but I believe in the past they have claimed it to be hardware.

I'm honestly not sure what the public response would be. I'm inclined to believe the revelation that the microphone is always on would not effect bottom line too much. Though maybe if a good meme campaign materialized people would join in on the public flagellation. But I bet more on people appetite for a public lynching than sacrificing their own convenience for long term considerations

> I don’t think they would throw that away to fool us all into believing a fake mute button - for what?

True, but what is the incentive for Amazon to behave given their dominant market position? Customers might not have viable alternatives.

They don't have a huge market lead if at all (i've seen conflicting reports) and there are 3rd party Alexa products that compete indirectly. Considering how many new devices they churn out and how cheap they are to replace, probs good to maintain public opinion for years

Amazon is treated as if it were Google, despite not having quite the same track record. Amazon has walked a thin ethical line in terms of managing their labor force, but I haven't seen the same level of involvement in things like PRISM.

"outrage among users, media, competition, etc."

You really believe this? Still?

Amazon is so big that the loss of outraged users is a rounding error to them. Ford used to let cars off the line missing bolts. They're still here because their pockets are deep enough to wait until people forget.

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