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Comment by lnxg33k1 | Hacker News Reader

You fail to see how this is responsibility of Alexa? Are you guys just corporate worshippers? Like are we past the point where we expect corporations to invest the time to make their products safe? I fail to see your logic and how this is a parenting issue, like do you expect parents to keep their kids in chains in glass domes? Amazon, Google, Facebook and all crap like that are selling products and apparently they are responsible for the crap their product produce and you guys are just willing to accept that

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The article mentions the mother being there at the time to turn it into a lesson about not trusting strangers or the internet. The child was 10 years old for the incident - at that age most children have been in public school for a few years and quite possibly heard much more horrible "advice" from classmates, and have likely been unsupervised many times around electrical sockets. Hopefully their parents or guardians have educated them about the relevant topics to avoid such an injury. The default of trusting Alexa like a family friend (instead of a potentially dangerous stranger) is evidently not tenable, but I don't see how any internet "smart" device can ever be trusted to that level due to the chaotic nature of the internet (and of humans).

EDIT: I don't mean to conflate kids giving each other bad advice with an internet full of greedy and malicious actors. I just mean that children in public school are pretty likely to hear other children give them potentially lethal advice/challenges/etc. and need to be equipped with the ability to listen critically to strangers, and the ability to differentiate good ideas from dangerous ones. At least in the public schools where I grew up.

I think trusting a device like a family friend has been an error, thinking to compare a school friend giving a bad advice to a kid to a world of corporation surrounding us with unmoderated content to fill their pockets is just laughable if it wasn't just so sad, a parent has to monitor and teach a kid how to survive, these companies need to be responsible for the content published on their platform as they have the ability to reach a huge number of people

> I think trusting a device like a family friend has been an error,

I think I was too verbose and meandering to convey it, but I agree with you on this 100%

Of course we all want children to be as equipped as possible "to listen critically to strangers, and ... to differentiate good ideas from dangerous ones"

THAT IN NO WAY LETS MANUFACTURERS AND SELLERS OF PRODUCTS OFF THE HOOK !!

If you want to make money selling or providing products to consumers, and especially to children, IT IS YOUR JOB #1 TO MAKE THEM INHERENTLY SAFE.

If you cannot make it inherently safe, it is not ready to sell. Period

Stop attempting to insert some defenses you think children should have against bad advice and dangerous products -- it is utterly irrelevant.

The fact that the mom was there and turned it into a learning event was PURE DUMB LUCK. They got lucky this time. They'd better damn well fix it solidly or pull the product.

The fact that this is even a question in a modern society is mind-boggling.

Perhaps I should have made clear that I agree Amazon has some responsibility here in what kinds of things go onto their platform, but to me it seems like a problem with no obvious solution. Particularly as we move toward more dynamic digital assistants that scrape content directly from the internet, I think we will run into more situations like this. To me it just seems like the safest course would be to treat Alexa and other digital assistants more like a courier than a family friend. Parents let deliveries into the house all the time, but shouldn't leave children alone with the delivery person. I'd expect a courier service to fire their couriers (and take appropriate legal action) if they demonstrated problematic behavior toward children on their route, just as I expect Amazon to take steps to prevent what happened here with Alexa, but I worry that the inherent potential for danger is ever present.

Nice, but how is anyone to not leave children alone with an always-on device?

The solution is simple.

If the system is not yet designed, built,& tested to a sufficiently high standard that crap like this will not happen, then you pull it from the market. Period.

It is not like this feature is critical, or even a rounding error on any Amazon data sheet. They have no right to run such an inherently dangerous POS into customers' houses.

And, perhaps vendors will decide to stop using the unfiltered cesspool of the Internet as a free data source to productize. It is a stupid short-cut.

Have you ever thought about taking responsibility yourself instead of blaming corps/gov/others?

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