Alexa, Ring, and Astro: Where's My Privacy, Amazon? | Hacker News Reader

Alexa, Ring, and Astro: Where's My Privacy, Amazon?

zdnet.com

74 pointsLinuxBender38 comments

I genuinely cannot understand the mentality of purposefully wiring your home with microphones connected to the cloud, and then becoming worried about privacy.

Like, you’re doing this to yourself. Amazon did not hold a gun to your head to install Alexa everywhere. Maybe just … throw them out? Also, if you’re worried about the privacy implications of the Astro, don’t buy it.

The owner isn't the only party involved here. Anyone entering their house (or ringing their doorbell) becomes an (unwilling) participant in this surveillance apparatus.

You're not just doing this to yourself, you're doing this to everyone you're interacting with at home, on your doorstep, or on speaker phone.

I have a smart phone so I’m only so immune to this invasion but there is no way in hell I’m trusting Amazon, a company I’m learning to despise, with a microphone or camera in my house.

The privacy cost of these devices is largely hidden. People are really bad at judging the long term and secondary/tertiary effects of their actions, they only see the immediate benefit. This is how the dystopian surveillance state grows.

If people can’t figure out that bugging your own home is a bad idea, then we’re doomed. That was obviously bad from the get go, I’m shocked anyone did it.

Also, isn’t the echo dot like, $25? How did people not look at that and go “hmm, how is it that cheap?”

> “$25 ... hmm, how is it that cheap?”

because it is $5 of cheap electronics?

All I’ve ever been able to discern about it is that people will sell the farm to never have to think about something, even if that something is a grocery list.

Totally agree. The last thing I would do is allow an ad company or online seller invade my home with their closed widgets.

The entire point of these devices is to provide a window for the corporation into your home, so that Amazon can better sell you things. They're not doing you a favor by making the product; the product is an excuse to uniquely position them to observe your behavior in a domain previously unavailable (meatspace).

Expecting "privacy" from such a device is absurd. You waived it when you bought the device.

> But so far, I have resisted the notion of having cameras all over the place, peering inside the home's interior spaces. Sure, I have some Ring devices guarding the front of the house, but there's nothing recording inside.

> I live in a gated community with only one way in and out, and I'm alerted immediately if someone should be let through if they aren't on my regular list.

The whole tone of the article as I read it was Security & Privacy for me, not for thee (people in my community, my dogs, my hypothetical kids).

> The whole tone of the article as I read it was Security & Privacy for me, not for thee (people in my community, my dogs, my hypothetical kids).

I sometimes jog and walk at night, especially when I had clients outside of my timezone. Some busybody reported one of their Ring videos of me walking past their house at night to the police, and for a while there I'd be stopped by beat cops for simply walking around my neighborhood.

It's a surreal feeling knowing that you're being surveilled by just leaving your home and walking around the block.

While I'm not a huge fan of these devices, that more seems like a cultural problem than anything else. Why on earth would anyone be concerned about someone walking at night? That seems... normal.

I'm pretty sure when I go for a walk (since WFH, mostly late at night) I show up on _hundreds_ of cameras, mostly business and traffic CCTV systems (it's an urban area). That doesn't bother me. It would very much bother me if my neighbours were reporting me to the police, though; that's a neighbour problem, not a camera problem.

Ring and Nextdoor turns people into paranoid nutters. Unfortunately the impact of these services is much wider than the users themselves, as your story shows.

I imagine they were tat way before just now we’re seeing it.

Possible. My personal experience is that these apps increased my anxiety significantly until I got rid of them. I live in an incredibly safe city, and yet they were making me feel unsafe.

So I replaced my ring with a more privacy protecting and social media-free alternative, because video doorbells are very convenient still.

You mind recommending your solution? I'm running a cheap Wyze cam in my front window (with a view of the porch, and RTSP firmware to stream to MotionEye) But it's still Wyze, kinda sucks, and I'd rather have an actual fisheye camera and doorbell rather than a creepy camera peering out the window.

I’m using an Amcrest AD110 for my doorbell, and Reolink for external cameras. The Reolink cameras are PoE and behave nicely on my network. I’m also running a nicer network setup that lets me put these cameras on another vlan for security.

Currently I’m experimenting with Frigate as my NVR for object identification and clip tracking.

From the article: "I have five Alexa-compatible smart speakers positioned in different parts of the house, so I have full coverage to deal with home automation issues. I also have a Google Home in the kitchen, plus multiple Siri-enabled mobile devices (Watch, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV). And of course, I have webcams for doing Zoom calls and the like on my Mac workstation and on my iPad and iPhone — all of which aren't on unless I want them to be, presumably."

Um.

Isn’t half the point of buying one of these smart assistant cans to have the same thing everywhere so that they all hit the same service? I don’t want to come home and spend hours a week negotiating between Alexa, Google and Siri.

(I suppose you could tie everything into Home Assistant but does anyone that doesn’t enjoy playing with home servers like me do that?)

I don’t want to come home and spend hours a week negotiating between Alexa, Google and Siri.

Oh, soon they'll work it out between themselves and just tell their humans what to do and when to do it.

And then inform on the humans if they don't do what they're told.

I have one of each and want them to have conversations with each other.

Me: "Turn on the lights"

Google: "Aleaxa, turn on the lights"

Alexa: "Ok Google"

There was a story many years ago about an answering machine talking to an advertiser machine.

Andy Jassy's response to AWS AI abused by US Police Departments is telling [0], while Dave Limp is even less diplomatic about Amazon Ring's use by the law enforcement [1]. At Amazon, a popular credo goes, "there's no fighting gravity", which in one sense means that the prevalence of technology (ubiquitous computing) is inevitable, and so, resisting it is bad for business. That is the long story short of where our collective privacy went when it comes to BigTech.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUSFU8RRztI

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVVlrtAe5X8

Your privacy belongs to Amazon, period.

I have 3 Echos and 1 Ring etc. They're all collecting dust. I should never have bought them in the first place.

My family member works for Amazon(actually developing Alexa-based products for years), and we don't use Amazon gadgets in our own place.

What a wretched world we live in. Developing products we'll never use ourselves. Teaching our children how to best above the poisoned fruits of our labor. Where is the exit?

It's indeed IRONIC.

Bill Gates limited his kids PC time, Steve Jobs limited his kids for ipod/iphone usage, while they're making billions out of those devices/software.

I won't be surprised those game developers that when they got home, first thing is to make sure their own kids won't get addicted to the games they're making.

Same to facebook, instagram etc. Mark Z probably will advise his own daughter spending less time on facebook soon.

We're bundled together for hell I think.

I'm similar to the author -- I have several Alexa devices inside the house (one is a video device, I only enable the camera when I'm using it for a video call). I have several Ring cameras outside the house. But I have no desire to have cameras (not even a cute, dog like roving one) inside the house while I'm here, even if I told Amazon not to record anything while I'm home.

When I go on vacation, I do plug in an inside camera that covers the two entry doors, but it's unplugged when I'm home.

Literally full house Alexa coverage and writes an article about amazon privacy…hmm

>>Alexa, Ring, and Astro: Where's My Privacy, Amazon?

Who forced you to buy them? End of the story.

Who forced my neighbor to buy a Ring? Should we have any confidence that my neighbor's Amazon state of the art far field microphones don't also pick up the vibrations from my house / condo?

There is nothing I can do about it short of becoming obscenely rich and buying a large enough property that Amazon's spying tech can't physically penetrate.

Just to be clear, this is the corporation we're talking about:

> Amazon says it does not eavesdrop on customers' conversations to target advertising at them, after it emerged it had patented "voice-sniffing" tech.

> The patent describes listening to conversations and building a profile of customers' likes and dislikes.

[...]

> However, the patent describes an algorithm that can listen to entire conversations, using "trigger words", such as like and love, to build a profile of customers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43725708

This poses an interesting question: couldn't anybody disrupt this devices temporarily inside their property with a personal wifi jammer or something like that? What would be the alexa response in that case?

I don't know the tech answer.

Socially speaking, I feel rather strongly that it should be elementary courtesy to shut off the panopticon if I visit your spyware-infested house. I didn't consent to Amazon building a profile of me, can you please stop being a creepy asshole on behalf of Amazon?

Any kind of jamming equipment is illegal in many places.

So could you? Maybe. Should you? Well, I suspect you're more likely to get punished for jamming frequencies than for spying on people...

The consumer hardware sector has proven over the past decade that it has no interest in protecting user privacy, and unfortunately it looks like the United States has a whole lot to gain in complacency. Pretty much anything FAANG-related is inherently insecure, if only because there's statistically no way that three-letter-agencies don't have them tapped.

I hate to say it, but we're living Stallman's future now. Post-privacy is the present, which makes it a little sad to read articles like this where people just ASSUME that their Zune, FireTV, Apple Watch, Facebook Portal and Roku aren't spying on them all the time. I guess this is the real cost of abstraction: users, so far removed from their software that they can't even tell which data is going in or out.

My zune definitely isn't spying on me. To do that, the zune related servers would have to still be up

I would be concerned if any Zune was spying in 2021!

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