81–90 of 128 posts
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That sounds like a recipe for causing _more_ accidents as a lot of people are forced to take their eyes off the road to fix their phone; all at the same time.
And losing their GPS to boot
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The article mentions that the Echo does something similar locally, so the cloud-side part is an additional layer.
No, it's different in a major way. Apple: - Only ever uploads anything to the cloud after a *successful* wake word is detected on-device (and, critically, lets you know with a voice confirmation). Amazon: - "On most Echo devices" checks on-device against known commercials (the point of this article). Then: - "In the cloud: Every audio request to Alexa that starts with a wake word is checked..." — successful or not. M…
I'd bet that it totally omits sending any audio for exclusions processed on device, and that the article is not ideally worded. It would be true that some devices may not be able to perform on device exclusion processing (perhaps some of the oldest ones). Further cloud processing would use any information not available to local processing (like sound signatures from commercials no longer running, or the unknown media processing described).
The real Alexa product is the wealth of data that the device can provide with 24 hr surveillance. The shaky voice recognition/command model is merely just the Trojan horse. Amazon now knows who is watching the Super Bowl and will treat you as a consumer they can advertise to. Alexa skill developers were sold a promise of platform promotion, quality, and customer interaction. The whole consumer experience for adding c…
I agree with this point. It's basically impossible to monetize as a third party on Alexa. The closest thing happening is Spotify, Audible, and other audio content, but it would be hard to pinpoint how much of their sales/ads are attributable to Alexa and how much would have happened on another platform if Alexa was unavailable. It's rare to have someone trigger even a $3 transaction via Alexa.
I thought that these voice assistants were keyed to people’s individual voices, and their characteristics. Like what VALL-E clones
Alexa/Echo devices at least can recognise voice. If you ask "Alexa, who am I?" it will try to tell you who it heard. To learn a new person you can go "Alexa, learn my voice" (I have no idea to what extent it uses this - e.g. I'd love for it to know that when it recognises my girlfriend, it should apply her music preferences from her profile on my account, but if it does it's by no means obvious). It specifically seem…
Beyond that, I'm not at all sure what scenarios it uses that data for.
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How would you know when they do this? Buried inside a "We've made some updates to our Terms of Service" email?
There are a lot of people who run proxies like pi-hole while using these devices. It only takes one of those people to notice a sudden increase in traffic and post that finding somewhere. If you discover that Alexa is uploading information that it shouldn't be and blog about it you can be almost guaranteed to hit the front page of HN, these kinds of posts appear from time to time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
The real Alexa product is the wealth of data that the device can provide with 24 hr surveillance. The shaky voice recognition/command model is merely just the Trojan horse. Amazon now knows who is watching the Super Bowl and will treat you as a consumer they can advertise to. Alexa skill developers were sold a promise of platform promotion, quality, and customer interaction. The whole consumer experience for adding c…
Far more people have smart phones using one of 2 OSes, and unlike smart home devices, people generally take these with them wherever they go - to the store, to the bathroom, to sleep, to the doctors office, etc. Do you think cell phones are trojan horses too?
* How many apps ask for location data and background location data, when the use case for such permissions are questionable.
* Look at how much FB's revenue decreased when it's consumer tracking efforts were given the smallest roadblock on iOS.
* Law enforcement has access to a variety of tools that track individuals based on their cellphones. [0]
* Google Maps requires an incredible amount of connectivity in order to do simple navigation. [1]
* We still don't have end-to-end encryption for basic communication protocols such as SMS.
* The entire Tik-tok controversy highlights the risks associated with tracking user behavior.
* How much personal data was compromised by cloud based backups? How many nudes leaked, or criminal activity proven?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
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Alexa/Echo devices at least can recognise voice. If you ask "Alexa, who am I?" it will try to tell you who it heard. To learn a new person you can go "Alexa, learn my voice" (I have no idea to what extent it uses this - e.g. I'd love for it to know that when it recognises my girlfriend, it should apply her music preferences from her profile on my account, but if it does it's by no means obvious). It specifically seem…
One use I've seen of it knowing who is talking is that it can attribute items added to a shopping or todo (or other) list with the name of the person who added it. Beyond that, I'm not at all sure what scenarios it uses that data for.
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There are a lot of people who run proxies like pi-hole while using these devices. It only takes one of those people to notice a sudden increase in traffic and post that finding somewhere. If you discover that Alexa is uploading information that it shouldn't be and blog about it you can be almost guaranteed to hit the front page of HN, these kinds of posts appear from time to time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
Pihole is a dns solution. It wouldn’t notice any uptick in actual data transferred.
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This keeps getting repeated all over the internet but is simply not true. There may be a day when Amazon turns Alexa into advertising spyware, but that definitely wasn't its original intention and nothing of the sort is happening today.
Why sell advertising of you can lease out a backdoor to the NSA and other (international) agencies?