The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available
discuss.systems
discuss.systems
https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
The process is still complicated enough to be "enthusiast" (aka nerd) territory but it is getting better with every release. It will still be here in 10 years, nobody can take it away from us.
They hardcoded the wake words in hardware...
Why not just use LLM common sense to say "does this really sound like a purposeful activation?"
Or put a GPU in there, or export the call to your PC like they require for text to speech?
For being a DIY thing, they made it inexplicably hard to D
The alternative for a dedicated low power device is to have trained a model to run on smaller micro controllers so that it can run locally on low powered devices (https://github.com/kahrendt/microWakeWord) this is what they have chosen for their dedicated devices.
This choice also comes with much higher default privacy. Which is great as home assistant offers cloud integration and the fact that they put privacy first in this area makes it much easier to trust they do the right thing in other areas.
A brief run down on the subject https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/about_wake_word/
As an aside, I get what you mean in the context of my earlier comment, but just to clarify for anyone reading, you can use alexa and Google home devices with home assistant (eg to send commands and as media players, I believe), but you can't "deamazon"/"degoogle" them and just use the hardware with home assistant, which would be great if we could!
Beyond that, I assume there's some confusion about what each can and can't do? I certainly can't remember which is which... But I don't actually own one.
If you don't have full control over your data, someone else does - and will do as they please with it, eventually.
Does Home Assistant also have these features?
Music - yes, albeit a bit finicky to set up.
There's an addon called Music Assistant that controls the music, you can connect it to your provider of choice (local files, Spotify, etc), and you can let it connect to several types of sinks.
OOB the HA only knows a few commands (pause, next, etc) but there are some community driven effort to improve the support, such as "Play the album Dark side of the moon". [0].
This blog post is a great illustration of what I mean: https://blog.jlpouffier.fr/chatgpt-powered-music-search-engi...
They are cool little devices, but they have a while to go before they can replace the Alexa’s.
Without those features I can just replace Alexa with nothing because we do not use any other features.
"I'm proud of the approach that Amazon takes to privacy. Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon, and this customer obsession (the #1 leadership principle) permeates the organization."
The comment further talks about the mute button on the original Amazon Echo (i.e. Alexa voice assistant) being hardware-based : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19208670
Using voice commands to control music has always seemed like a sisyphean task to me. You're using a control method that directly conflicts with the state you'll generally use it in and song/artist names are so dense and confused that oftentimes you'll need multiple commands to hone in on what you actually want.
My "smart speaker" (aka desktop computer with massive speakers) is simply controlled by spotify sync which is absolutely not amazing but it's also not not terrible and far easier to control than times I've tried shouting at voice devices in the past.
The mic in these home devices is, imo, 90% for cooking and 7%[1] for other alarms and timers - they're relatively poor music platforms and only moved into the space because of how subsidized they were by Amazon and other companies.
1. (edit) bumped down from 9% to 7% because smart lights and thermostats are also quite prevalent.
I am curious. Are you sure you got them all?
But can you safely do this with multi room devices?
As far as I can tell, it's all part of the plan to attract idealists for cheaper and get better bang-for-buck from their "committed" workers until such time as they can no longer deny their shady practices. By the time the original engineers leave, they have enough of an established framework that they can hire mercenary contractors or whatever to keep things going.
I was very "I will only work for moral companies" and I still feel that way. But when I was laid off for almost a year, well, I did apply at Amazon knowing all about them. Didn't quite apply at Google / Meta (didn't really want to do website / HTML stuff) but it was getting harder to resist..
In my experience, this moment is when the company goes public.
Just remember that "privacy of customer data" is ambiguous, and can be used to mean different things to different people. Some folks think anonymized data is ok. Some people scrutinize the privacy policy and greenlight a product. customers read it and don't know what to think (by design)
As a customer, I don't know who they share my information with. Many or most products on amazon require your name and address (maybe phone number?) to deliver the product.
And I've had companies who've sold me stuff on amazon email me directly on several occasions. I have one email address I've given only to amazon, and the email did not go through an amazon redirector.
But, despite the fact that it literally costs nothing, these have sold quite well, and if folks haven't got an echo they've got a Google Home, or a Siri, or something else. They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.
It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government. The person who is in a position to protect the interests of the customer, whether or not the customer 'cares', has a moral obligation to take care.
When the supplier chooses not to protect the interests of their customers, regulation steps in to create a consequence for that bad behavior.
I know people who hate this reality because they feel it is up to the customer to "decide" whether the risk is worth it, but those same people are not moving to Somalia to live in a land with zero effective government and regulation either. It generally comes down to a discussion that "some regulation" is good except for the regulation that is interfering with "their" plans. A very self centered point of view but all too common in my experience.
It's worse than that. It's adversarial propaganda.
People actually do care about privacy, but they also care about other things, and they don't always know about privacy.
If Amazon tells you that they're recording what you say at all, it's buried in a hundred page ToS that nobody reads, and then what they do with the information isn't even clearly specified. If people understood that they're using it to determine which products to show you so you're more likely to buy the ones with higher margins, and that's costing you $1200/year, people would care about that, but they don't even realize it's happening.
If the market is consolidated into two companies and they're both invading your privacy, or there is one company that doesn't but their product costs $500 more and the customer doesn't have $500 more, it's not that customers don't care, it's that they have no viable alternatives.
If they start using a product before it starts invading their privacy and then later it does, but that product is something like Microsoft Windows and by then they're so thoroughly locked into that platform that short-term extrication is infeasible, they grit their teeth and whinge about it because they wish there was an alternative, not because they don't.
Casting this as "people don't care" gets it wrong. If there are two otherwise-identical fungible products and one of them invades your privacy and the other one doesn't, not doing that is an advertisable feature. In a competitive market it's a competitive advantage. But if the incumbents can convince would-be competitors that it isn't then they don't have to face that competition, which is the purpose of the propaganda.
And in the markets where competition is lacking independently of this, the "regulation" needed is antitrust, because uncompetitive markets have more than just privacy problems.
That may definitely be the case sometimes, but I certainly don't mean it like that. By normal person standards, I'm pretty extreme about privacy: no social media, (no, HN doesn't count) pihole, ublock+custom lists, noscript, as few services as possible, frozen credit, DNS resolver rather than a single 3rd party service, etc.
I strongly lament the lack of interest in privacy. The point of my statement is that people can't even be bothered to care about privacy when it costs them nothing. Given this, I can't imagine them actually caring about privacy when it actually inconveniences them. There's just no chance of it. I don't want things to be that way, but it's clear there's nothing I can do about it.
Between pornography ID laws, anti-bot mitigations on websites, and the rise of smart phones + apps, it seems pretty clear that the death of privacy on the internet is just around the corner. And people will welcome it. I'm not happy about this, and may be less happy about it than much of HN. But I think it's pretty inevitable.
What's more, we don't want to care about things. In fact a lot of pain we are experiencing now is precisely that we are being forced to care about things we haven't had to for decades, arguably centuries. It sucks. Life is better when the plumbing "just works" precisely because then we don't have to care about it and can focus on other more interesting parts of life.
There has been a critical breakdown in the trust people have in the experts that advocate for them. The damage started with a flurry of self-inflicted wounds and then those wounds were mercilessly exploited by those seeking tactical advantage. What makes this especially evil is that these mercinaries use people's natural ambivalence to damage the very institutions that made their ambivalence possible! They are tricking people into acting against their self-interest.
The real solution is neither to defend damaged institutions nor to seek their utter destruction. The solution is to heal those wounds and take strong action to avoid future damage. That's the only way people can go on not caring so they can focus on more important things.
... including the War on Drugs. We should be very cautious about asserting our value system over the value system of other people who are customers of these tools, lest the end result is a situation where people are no happier (and not much safer).
People don't care about anything by default. They have to learn about threat-models and how to mitigate those threats. Usually this only happens after getting burned personally. (To learn from others is still learning, which people also don't care about.)
This topic comes up in politics all the time. There is this hurt and offended reaction to people embracing authoritarianism, often becoming nihilistic. But the practical truth is that people don't care about philosophy or politics. Human society's default is authoritarianism. Rather than be upset at this impulse, it would be wiser to acknowledge with amazement that we managed to try something different. Civilization will struggle with it's default settings for as long as civilization exists, and our role is fight against them, knowing the fight is never over.
I'd say it's quite the opposite. It takes a lot of force and coercion to maintain authoritarian institutions precisely because it's not natural. Most of us have had a lifetime of schools, churches, and jobs drilling conformity and blind obedience into us.
For some (for me) there is a psychological allure to the idea that left to our own devices we'd self-organize in an enlightened way. But the experiment has been done over and over and over again, and that's not what happens. I realize it's painful to accept something you don't want to be true, but that's no reason not to face up to it. Better to face the challenge open-eyed than to have false assumptions undermine you.
This is a very interesting question -- Thomas Hobbes would disagree with you here.
Of course there's also the bit that historically, when unrest or a revolution comes, the people who think they can manipulate it to end up in charge are usually the people who end up getting stood up against a wall and shot, too.
I do not think so
I think freedom
Some people have enjoyed the benefits of government agencies that promote consumer protections. At some level, maybe we hear about or even directly benefitted from some consumer protection agency, and assume the government has our back. Maybe it is naive, but I still think that assumption is there: we don't have to care because it is someone else's job to care about privacy. How could it be put on sale if it is not safe? They test cars, for safety, they test food for safety, etc. They must test these things, too, right?
This is clearly not the case, though. The government works for big tech. The US government is even shutting down consumer protection agencies at the behest of big tech and leaving us to their whims!
By your logic, we should not care about climate change either.
"People don't care about privacy" doesn't mean that regulators and the tech community should not lead a charge.
Same can be said about climate change. Sure they worry and complain, but when pointing out concrete measures they can take, basically nobody does.
Complaining is easy.
Except for corporations who want to exploit us to no end. I’m sure they love this type of defeatist attitude. There’s no one easier to take advantage of than someone who confirms they have given up and won’t fight back.
More importantly though, those that do care should do as much as they're willing to do to help avoid making it worse.
For some that means choosing to only buy products made with natural materials, growing/raising their own food, drinking rain water, etc. For others that means not using plastic straws.
There's no perfect answer and no one really knows what will happen in the future or how to best change it. Regulators fall into this camp too, they don't know the future and they can't accurately predict precisely what must be don't. Expecting this of them is a fools errand and demanding everyone do what they say is oppressive at best.
It will always work. The opportunity to blame your neighbor for climate change for not being as conscientious as you is the archetype of a liberal wedge issue. You can yell at them on social media. But regulate my company? Akshualy you're killing jobs?
There are things they would care about, but they don't care about those things.
And they don't care about privacy in the abstract.
They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up?
> they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy
Yea, so, looks like they do care.
> they never would have purchased this product in the first place
They were lied to, baited in, and the terms switched. Your assertion is ridiculous and one sided.
> Social Media,
I'm sharing things with my friends not with corporations.
> All of those are terrifically difficult to fully avoid or mitigate
Two browser plugins mitigate it entirely.
> They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.
They're not sophisticated enough to understand the landscape around them and assume the laws are actually being enforced. What a corrupt position you have taken here.
Continued human behavior online. The actual behavior of users does not suggest they consider, on average, that their privacy is being violated every time they put more data into Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.
If you want to use this as a case study, come back to this topic in a year and see if Alexa sales and / or usage has gone down or up. It's at about 600 million installed units and 77 million users right now (and that's after someone's Alexa dataset was used as evidence in their murder trial two years ago... If people cared, wouldn't the line go down, not up?).
And as I pointed out there are not 600 million active installed Alexas, noone (outside Amazon and LE) knows the number of active current Alexas or current households with 1+ active Alexa. A better way to estimate usage is look at usercounts for the top-100 most popular apps, by geo.
UPDATE: I found the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat from [0] citing [1]
[0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/
[1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/
As to smart-assistant usage, what we would really want to see is comparative numbers of current and new Alexa users, broken out by privacy region (US, EU, other Europe, Australia, Asia, ME, CALA, Africa). (PS noone other than Amazon knows how many "active Alexa users" there are in a geo, since no third-party can audit Amazon's numbers, and "installed units" might simply mean "user bought an Alexa device at any pointsince 2014, it might be unused/disconnected/broken/sitting in a pile of junk/given away years ago. This is just like the games Linux vendors, Java and MSFT notoriously played with "licenses installed" even if that machine was wiped to install another OS, without ever activating the shipped OS).
"Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices" absolutely does not mean "there were at any point 500 million active Alexa users", and anyway most Alexa users have multiple devices in one house, so the theoretical peak devicecount was only ever 500m/n at most. I suspect the real peak was closer to 77m than 500m. But noone outside Amazon knows; there are only estimates. There is no Nielsen Research or Quantcast of Alexa devices, AFAIK. There are only the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat for number of users [0][1]. Not devicecount.
And as to whether privacy laws, warrant requests are being disregarded, blanket geofenced warrants, Ring syndication, yRoombas snooping on you, data fusion of that data with Kindle devices/phones and smart TV etc., it's a semantic debate whether that's "widespread privacy violations which US Congress is lobbied to turn a blind eye to" rather than "users aren't sophisticated enough to detect when laws are being violated". Imagine if we applied that thought process to bank robberies and whether they were adequately protecting your money: the onus being on the customer to constantly monitor your bank. (We don't need to because there are consumer and criminal laws governing banking).
Anyone with more time might care to look for estimates of number of households with active Alexas by geo/privacy region, and compare to privacy watchdog reports.
[0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/
[1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/
Your second sentences proves that the first is a lie. People very clearly care about their privacy. These surveillance systems are designed so that users never see the line between the collection of their private data and the consequences. People are upset when they know that their privacy has been violated, but Amazon tells them that they are safe and they never see the contractor working for Amazon listening to them having sex so they don't have the sense of outrage that they should.
Amazon is exploiting well known and researched limitations of human's brain/perception and they've crafted their marketing to be as manipulative and reassuring as possible to keep people bugging their own homes with their devices. It's a little unfair to blame the public being fleeced and not the multi-billion dollar corporation who has devoted unimaginable resources into manipulating the customers they are screwing over. You and I know better than to fall for their bullshit, but it's easy to see how most will struggle.
Then why are they willing to pay a premium for Apple Products, which do as much locally as possible? (Without going into detail, I know this because a very skilled engineer I worked with was hired by them.)
Also, even if "people" don't care (I'd love to see a peer reviewed study on the # of folks who meet this criteria you claim), why should the preference of those people override those of us who DO want privacy? Why can't the few who don't care opt in to the panopticon?
We obsess over "AI" when things like "take an audio file and produce a written transcription" have been being done for quite some time. Where does the algorithm end and "AI" begin, and what is it about "AI" that necessitates throwing away years of existing work on privacy preserving queries?
Privacy is also one of those things that is much easier to care about if the lack of privacy is highly visible (e.g. someone standing in your window), but tech companies are pretty good about keeping their snooping in the background.
Majority user care about privacy the same way they care about the environment with apples greenwashing. One marketing line is sufficient.
I had a friend who used to joke "Linux is free if your time has no value" -- when I went off to college I settled on a Macbook because it had a CLI paired with actual hardware/software support.
I keep my phone as long as it gets security updates -- despite talk about price, I've found I can hold onto an Apple laptop for at least four years as long as I make sure to go heavy on the ram when I buy initially buy it.
Also I'm confused how you can jump from legit crits of Apple's closed source to indicating a preference for Android, an OS that will beam a great deal of telemetry to GOOG.
I tend to treat my phone as an inherent privacy risk and lock down my laptop -- it's my understanding that at the end of the day the LTE stack is gonna be closed even on a pine phone.
They don't prioritize privacy over other concerns, largely convenience, because (to date) they haven't been burned by that choice or at least haven't been burned badly enough or aren't aware. I think that, in the coming months and years, this is going to change.
My family has started paying attention to this sort of thing and opting out of things that they see as risks to privacy. A few years ago they were like "yeah, you're right, but..." -- not so much anymore.
Regular folks are even less aware and are scared by technology - when a scary popup comes up, they will press anything and agree to anything just to make it go away.
A big reason for this is that no one really explains what happens and why people should care.
Typically, it's either a hand-wave to "this should be important, you should care", or steeped in so much technical detail that the non-technical listener has a hard time wrapping their head around it. (The third way it's explained is via a bunch of conspiracy theory/NSA stuff, which probably just turns most people off entirely).
Worse, people have been in a dozen breaches in the last few years, but the majority haven't suffered a personal impact (yet). Further reinforcing "why should I care?".
And this is why I no longer use any Meta products.
What I can do is help my family and friends understand the choices they are making (e.g. use Signal to talk to me). That rush they feel posting something has effects on people in their graph and now they at least understand that and pause.
Another example is ancestor "research" type sites, or DNA tests to find "your true ancestry". I had no choice a cousin of mine chose that as a hobby.
All of those services you list are examples of an online medium that exists for the purpose of socializing. So yes, they're all forms of social media, even if they're considerably less structurally harmful than something like Facebook.
How do you square that with people not caring about privacy? The feature as it existed was there specifically to address privacy concerns.
Our greatest power is literally not buying things. But people don’t do it in practice. Why is complicated. We are constantly bombarded by propaganda to push us to consumerist behavior. We just don’t call it that, it’s “advertisement”.
Alexa and Google Assistant created the market, now it will be interesting to see how it evolves. Home Assistant is working well in testing and has a great feature set for home automation, the LLM support is fun, and most of the smart devices I've bought over the years are compatible including Apple Homekit. At least for people that do care, there are options.
Stuff like this is why I've cut amazon out of my life entirely. No more new devices, no more new purchases, cancelled prime, all of it gone.
If you bought something under the pretense that you could disable cloud stuff and then it silently starts uploading to the cloud, that's a violation of your agreement.
If they start dropping all requests until you assent to their shrinkwrap agreement, that still feels like a violation of the promises they made when you bought it, but unfortunately has precedent. See also: all the video games that no longer work because the publishers stopped supporting the servers they relied on.
They should be forced to offer a refund.
I reduced Amazon by 90% when I realized how much money I was wasting over 70-120 packages a year.
But "waiting a week or two" seems directly at odds with delivered in less than 2 days. End users don't really care about shipping speed per service (unless it's a perishable or temperature-sensitive item). They care about how long it will take to arrive from the time the order is placed.
There are options that offer fast shipping at slightly reduced prices, and options that offer slow shipping at significantly reduced prices.
Walmart.com, eBay, temu, and aliexpress are the most common sources I use, but I also do a lot of business with smaller retailers and brand websites.
That was an interesting feature to discover.
If I'm preparing to leave and wonder whether I should bring a jacket, yelling "what's the weather like?" is much more convenient than taking out my phone (or go pick it up from the other room), unlock it, go to the home screen, open the weather app, wait 2-3 seconds and then scroll to the full forecast.
I'm not saying that checking my phone is an annoyance - it's still much better than checking the newspaper. But being able to keep my uninterrupted focus in what I'm doing is the type of luxury one only notices once it's gone.
How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?
The median per-capita U.S. state GDP is $78,649; the median per-capita European state GDP is $28,713.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
The EU ruled that the app store has to allow side-loading in the EU, but y'all still won't get a good browser because both Chrome and Mozilla have said making a side-loadable browser for iOS is only worth it if it can target the American market too, and the side-loading is region-locked.
So sure, y'all can side-load apps in the EU now, but you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america. Fuck yeah.
EU focuses more on quality of life of all individuals, free access to healthcare and education, one just doesn't have these potentially very risky or destroying aspects of life which can easily break them for good in US and send them into homeless spiral. And somebody has to pay for that. Also those protections data are mostly anti-business and pro-citizens hence its aligned as it is. Also we lack agility and are pretty ossified.
Everybody has their own preferences, which also change over time. When single I always took more risky work due to higher rewards (and other benefits). With small kids I am happy to have some safety nets and lower my net income, and I'd bet many US (not only) young parents would appreciate that rather than raw higher paycheck. Also I have 50 paid vacation days per year as a regular employed person (90% contract), something I believe unthinkable in US unless you have your own company.
The regulations are being broken to enhance fortune 1000 profit margins.
I'm amazed there haven't been major class-action lawsuits raised against Tesla yet, both from consumers for not delivering what is promised (full self-driving), and from shareholders for not delivering what was announced years ago (semi, new roadster). And from shareholders for artificially inflating the stock value of Tesla to use as leverage to buy Tesla and / or fund SpaceX.
This is about removing a privacy feature.
Who needs anti-coruption laws with a society like that? And who expects not to get fucked by coorporations when they have lost every incentive not to?
And the free market isn't the incentive you think it is when your're the monipolists that can crush or buy out the competition.
Like a car park can say they're not liable for your car's safety, it doesn't mean they can steal your car. A roller coaster can say they're not liable for injuries but if they didn't inform you it's dangerous for pregnant people or if they violate some safety law, they're probably liable.
The bit about changing terms of service probably gives them some leeway to deal with law changes and stuff. If they're purposely being misleading to play bait and switch, that sounds like it's breaking a law somewhere.
Sometimes winning move is not to play. If there are no competitors to this, just do not use anything.
I don't see why we would need the FTC to fix this. If someone bought Alexa from Amazon and honestly expected it to be privacy focused, they just made a mistake and can learn from it. Problems don't always have to be solved by running to the biggest authority that can be found and demanding they solve it for you.
If the FTC doesn't fix this kind of spontaneous downgrade, I'm not sure what they're for at all.
If somebody falls for a criminal's fraud, I suppose "they just made a mistake and can learn from it"? No need for anybody else, or any authority, to do anything?
Android Auto does not even understand the word "no".
I find it maddening that my google home, hasn't got a single bit better in the 8 years since it's release, and it's now missing some of my favourite features it had at launch. The whole market has been stagnate ever since they convinced me to put a microphone in my house, it's almost as if that was their end game.
1. Set $thing timer for $time
2. Add $thing to my grocery list.
3. Weather
4. Convert $amount to $unit.
And it is pretty great when these work, being able to do it in the kitchen without stopping whatever I am doing (example setting the dishwasher timer while putting in the soap, adding milk to the grocery list as I am pulling the last bag out of the fridge) is amazing. No wasted time and no risk of forgetting to pick up my phone and do it after I finish the current task.
But even then it is pretty unreliable. I feel like it has been getting worse over time to be honest.
It was. You’re one of the few in the thread to realize that, while others are frothing at the mouth over Democrats vs Republicans or EU vs US. The Echo and like devices were never about you but about putting surveillance gear in your house and getting you to pay for it. At least on old rotary phones the cradle switch or plungers physically broke the circuit that powered the microphones. The modern cell phone and home assistant and security cameras smart televisions and smart vehicles are surveilling you at all times.
Driving, working (mute, tell it to do something, unmute -> you've done something without getting up on camera), dirty hands, too comfy to get up and switch the lights off, etc.
It's also probably great for old people. I keep checking for language support since I can definitely imagine an older person being able to learn voice prompts where they're often absolutely lost on a phone. It'd also let them call someone if they've fallen somewhere around the house and can't get up.
When I'm driving and want to switch ANC mode, it's convenient as well.
If I'm coding and realize I didn't turn on the heating in the living room I have three choices: I can break my flow and walk there and back, I can be cold during dinner, or I can yell "turn on the heating in the living room" and have it out of my mind.
If it sounds like a luxury that's because it is. But like all luxuries it crept up on me and I only noticed once it was gone.
Of course, getting your sweet voice for future training also helps!
There is a setting to disable having your voice saved along with options to automatically delete it after a number of months.
But people will put up with anything. You could literally send a note that any Alexa will be equipped with 2kg of Semtex, to be triggered in case of wrongthink in your own home. People would still use Alexa and rationalize the feature.
I have an Echo Dot 2nd Gen which I used for around two months, until it once failed at a command of playing back a radio station but instead started to continuously stream my audio to Amazon, for hours until I noticed it (bandwidth monitoring with InfluxDB and Grafana).
Now none of my devices (phones and tablets) listen for hotwords, but at this point there's no guarantee that my Pixel phone isn't listening in all the time. That feature where your phone listens to water or an alarm is what I found too sketchy, as if they have been playing around with on-device constant sound recognition for too long and then come up with some silly reason to make you enable it.
I think the answer would be no to both, but IANAL.
https://www.apple.com/jo/newsroom/2025/01/our-longstanding-p...
Never give any data to anyone based on their current policy, because as demonstrated here, it may change. And then you're fucked.
> "When a user talks or types to Siri, their request is processed on device whenever possible."
Tesla remotely disable cars when they decide to, as they claim that they sell you the car, but only license the software. You get to keep the car, but loose the license to operate the software needed to actually make it useable.
I watched a breakdown of that model of Echo where it looked like the mute was indeed at the hardware level. My EE knowledge is limited but good enough I could follow along. Amazon probably could hide some hidden way to get around the hardware switch if they wanted but the risk for them seems higher than the risk to me, which never really was more than they'd hear me belch while cooking.
The USA is a destroyed, hollowed out shell that manufacturers morons, on purpose, because they make desperate employees. The fact that almost no Americans can explain themselves without thinking that act is a lead up to a punishment is very telling, and then their explanation cannot be understood by anyone but a career peer because they only speak in non-communicating jargon, a parrot echoes of talking points from media. No self generated thinking, only echoes of media. It's seriously a giant problem. This nation is kaput intellectually.
"Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation."
If true, one could argue it is a real issue, because it is not clear that the country's 'management' is intellectually on the high end either.
What's changed in the last couple months is that the political discussions used to be both more isolated to specific submissions and more intellectually curious. They got intense, but enough people were interested in actually engaging with their opposition that I've had some of the most enlightening political discussions I've ever seen on here. Now the politics is everywhere, and it's straight flame bait with very little curiosity. A comment like the above would have been instantly flagged to death a few months back as both off topic and flame bait. Now it's what users want to see.
Edit: looks like either a mod or an algorithm did finally downweight this subthread!
You forgot that it’s the usually that very same abusing company that will write these regulations for “ethics” and “protecting the customers”.
There are exactly two companies which make a device capable of actually integrating with every home automation and voice control, so given the options, I assumed Amazon would have fewer evil ideas than Google, seeing as the mechanism for Amazon profiting off the data directly is clear and the mechanism for Google has 100 teams building different products to consume that data in 1000 ways I can't begin to consider.
So yeah, given the dichotomy, it seemed like a clear privacy decision to me.
But that is of no problem, users seem to enjoy being abused, repeatedly, so they continue giving their money to the organization to come up with further marketing startegy (smaless bullshit lies) to introduce the next one never asked for abuse in the next company output that solves very marginal or no problem of their life.
Some time ago, we got free alexa echo dots from contractor. They sold on ebay in record time. My hand is clearly not on the pulse of America.
In the US, because I'm at least reasonably confident that such a setup comes nowhere near any exceptions to free speech protections here.
I like the sound quality of my Echo Dots, so I'd be fine to keep them in "dumb mode" (or even disconnecting their microphones physically), but setting a timer etc. is a useful feature too, when you are running around the house.
How good is the sound of the Home Assistant Speakers and can they be used like bluetooth speakers, too? How about multi room sound?
Any recommendations on a good solution that focusses on that music part and is not likely to be a victim of getting bricked by a software update?
I never had Alexa and imagine I go now and buy one device, the first thing I can expect from it is to record me? Because I never opted out?
I suppose yes for my use case. I would say 80% is to play music and 19% turn on lights and that last 1% for weather and timers.
The time it takes to pull a phone, ten taps, and do one of those things is going to be more mental and physical effort along with time than speaking out the command.
Of course I hold views and express them in my house and, provided I am recorded, taken to court or executed for such positions, I suppose I am either living my truth and willing to die for it or subject to being silenced by unknown parties at an unknown time for an unknown reason. I refuse the latter.
I have weighed these topics heavily. I also have cameras, walk around wearing a smile, and carry on with activities that I would rather not be made public yet at the same time - if they were, I believe all those who use devices are subject to the same exposure.
I choose not to be famous or become well known. If I had 2x net worth or personal exposure I live in a faraday cage.
For a lot of people, voice commands are easier than figuring out a device.
Now trying to figure out if I can physically disable the mics or if I have to buy something else.
Is that really the hill to fight over, or even care about? If you have that thing in your house, you already lost the war.
A class action here would be a massive hit.
We can still say "I told you so" and have sympathy. But we shouldn't throw the sympathy away in contempt. Another reason is that over our life at least once we will be the suckers, and will look on those who said "i told you so" and see contempt in their eyes. Is that what we want?
As opposed to a dismissive "I don't care", "I have nothing to hide", or "You're being paranoid" of the other 99%. Those people either don't need sympathy because they don't feel wronged, or don't deserve it because they shot the messenger.
There's only so much sympathy and support and standing up for others that I can fit into any given day and I'd rather give it to people who weren't warned about the dangers beforehand.
There is no popular controversy - almost nobody notices or cares when these things happen.
What about just not using voice assistants period? Do we really need third party cameras and microphones in every part of our homes?
So yeah we're just going to get a cardboard box, put it in the kitchen, and pile all the Alexa stuff into it and Ebay it. We'll use the $21 we get for all the devices to buy ice cream or something.
It's a spying device people willingly put in their homes for the convenience of a timer you can active with your voice.
Edit: It could be that it activated mishearing "Alexa". I don't have hard evidence of mass spying. I think this wouldn't be hard to prove intercepting the data using something like Wireshark. Even if it's encrypted, you could tell by the data size. The recommending products while chatting with my wife anecdote happened multiple times tho, which convinced me to relocate the Alexa device in the garbage. It seems unlikely to me to not mine the voice data to generate ads, or to do law enforcement.
Though I'll be honest, there's really no way of knowing if they are sending analytics data with the "main" payload and I suspect they are, so I'm not entirely sure how good my method is.
edit: fixed typo, missing a "to" in "to not have"
The bose speaker is sufficiently nice i might try to salvage it.
The wake word requires very little compute, but still requires sampling the background every second or so.
Makes you wonder what other unofficial wake words are baked in there.
I don't know when else they're listening, but that was enough to make him uncomfortable.
It a business decision to use an LLM.
It's a business decision not to beef up the Alexa hardware to support an LLM.
These decisions are weighted against reputational damage by Amazon with the outcome discussed here.
I doubt they have ever ran machine learning model on those speakers. Mostly just some simple one like "hey alexa"
how convenient.