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nizbit

And all defaults set? Yeah you’re gonna have a bad time.

Disable voice recording storage Disable "Help Improve Alexa" Manage skill permissions Turn off Amazon Sidewalk

But in the end you have a 3rd party passive listening device. Depends if you trust that 3rd party I guess.

And after that post on x, I’m sure that person disconnected all the Alexa’s in their home right?

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Most people already have a phone, laptop, maybe a watch, maybe the TV remote.. And lots of apps on each one. Any one of which could be listening in. It's a crazy situation.

I remember years ago, when viruses were common, watching kids use computers...

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and they never want to clear their cookies and lose their logins.

Android has a button in the quick settings bar to enable/disable the microphone, which helps with this (as long as you trust the OS itself). I keep it disabled most of the time.

I wish my phone was just listening. It’s actually much worse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799802

That thread's too old for me to reply, but for me this "eerie ad for what we just talked about" went away when I disabled "Ok Google" detection.

At least the phones, at least theoretically, will ask first and/or show an indicator when they're recording.

I don't want to life in a world where i have to setup DMZs, filters and special magic incantations to use my devices without them turning into literal spying device listening to every word i say. What the fuck.

Meh, your smartphone is already the ultimate spying device that comes with microphones and triangulates your location from 3 cell towers. The government doesn’t need more spyware than that.

My GrapheneOS Phone is pretty safe and I only use my cellphone connection when I have to, thank you for your concern. Event than, it's still a difference between a battery powered device on a metered connection with tiny microphones vs a literal microphone array connected to a hardline.

It's all make believe, they allow you to pretend that they have no power over you and that makes you happy. All good.

I'm less worried about the government than multinational corporations.

You should be, because multinational corporations can't put you in a cage, the Government can.

That would start with not buying a literal spy device from Amazon.

People who don't see the utility in an Alexa just see the listening device they have paid to place in their home and might be tempted to smugly imagine that they would never be so stupid. But consider, do you have own an Android or iPhone device? You know, the ones with geolocation services, camera, and microphone? Do you also keep it near you almost all the time? You can probably see where I am going with this.

We are already here. As the volume of code/technology increases, it should be clear that systems need strong permission boundaries. It is impossible to meaningfully audit all dependencies and services.

If my desktop music player has an exploit, it should not be possible that it can read my SSH keys. Node supply chain hacks keep occurring where your development environment can leak your private data. Mobile OS have this isolation already, but desktop is sure to slowly follow. I think we might eventually get to a point where even code libraries get assigned capabilities (eg libxml does not have network access).

The thing I found most surprising here was how many devices that person has on their network. In my house, it's a phone and computer per person, plus a chromecast. That's it.

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