Live data from Hacker News

The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

discuss.systems

191–200 of 696 posts

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughs in European Consumer Protection How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?

Amazon also sold the Echo in Europe, so it’s going to be interesting to see how European Consumer Protection helps out in this case.

GDPR says "hi".

If users don't consent, Amazon can't collect. If users exercise their rights to be forgotten, Amazon has to delete. If Amazon breaks the thing because users have not consented, then Amazon will be on the hook for breaching the contract.

"It was working until yesterday, how come?" EU will ask.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#192
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If, as a culture, we don’t stand up for consumer rights when a seller mistreats others, no one will stand up for us either.

I agree with the principle but frankly it doesn't apply here. Privacy conscious people have been sounding the alarm about these devices since their invention and the overwhelming majority of consumers typically respond to those warnings with dismissal or ridicule. 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…

It’s still much more productive to fight the abuser than it is to fight the victims.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#193
Hm!

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?

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America's lack of customer protection will hurt continue hurting its people. Ladies and gentlemen, please do something about it.

Laughs in European Consumer Protection How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?

Well, the per-capita GDP of the poorest U.S. state — Mississippi — is greater than that of the U.K., France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Poland and many others, and within 10% of Finland, Germany, Belgium and Austria. 34 of the 47 European states have lower per-capita GDPs than Mississippi.

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...

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America's lack of customer protection will hurt continue hurting its people. Ladies and gentlemen, please do something about it.

Laughs in European Consumer Protection How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?

America will continue to cripple EU consumer protection too.

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.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#196
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually working very well for the US, just not the US consumers

Can we not do this? I think it would be more correct to say that a nation is made up of its people (consumers) than its corporations. Correcting to the latter is at best pedantic and at worst just incorrect.

You're right, we shall not do this, however when corporations have privileged rights over their consumers and their abuse of "the people of the nation" is not only ignored, but applauded for value generation, not doing this almost impossible.

I'm not from the US, but everything I see from a distance smells like power trip on one level below. HOAs abuse home owners, service providers abuse their users, corporations abuse their employees, etc.

That doesn't happen in the European side. When Bending Spoons bought Evernote, I was so sure that it'll be liquidated into the other tools they have and shuttered. Instead, every month, they're adding so much things and polishing it so much that I feel kinda bad for migrating away.

There's another way to do things.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#197
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Tesla floating on a cushion of private Saudi wealth?

that's rivian ...

I thought that was Lucid Motors.

Source e.g. https://eletric-vehicles.com/lucid/saudi-pif-now-controls-64...

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home Assistant is getting far easier to set up than you might expect, especially because they now do in fact have out of the box devices. It's not quite as ridiculously simple, not quite yet, but they're rapidly improving and it won't be long until they're better than Amazon Alexa/Google Home/other commercial solutions.

What are these "out of the box devices"? I looked into things a couple of years ago, and back then it was all too much effort to set things up and keep things running and integrated, so I just went with Smart Life stuff from AliExpress. But would love to have Home Assistant if it means I don't need to spend weekends just reading docs, pairing, setting things up, connecting stuff...

For the wifi smartlife stuff, you can use the official cloud based integration or if you want local control, the unofficial tuyalocal. The official integration is really easy to use but if your internet connection drops, you can't control your devices so I prefer to use tuyalocal it still requires to add the devices to the smartlife app once and then you add a device from the addon by scanning a qr code with the app. Once this is done you have local control over the device.

Zigbee devices require more initial setup, you have to buy a dongle, install the Zigbee2mqtt addon and the mqtt integration, but once this is done adding a devices is a really simple process : you put the devices into pair mode and allow pairing for 90s in the Zigbee2mqtt page and rename your device to something useful.

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon also sold the Echo in Europe, so it’s going to be interesting to see how European Consumer Protection helps out in this case.

GDPR says "hi". If users don't consent, Amazon can't collect. If users exercise their rights to be forgotten, Amazon has to delete. If Amazon breaks the thing because users have not consented, then Amazon will be on the hook for breaching the contract. "It was working until yesterday, how come?" EU will ask.

Isn't Alexa already quite a bit limited in EU?

Re: The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no longer available

#200
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the principle but frankly it doesn't apply here. Privacy conscious people have been sounding the alarm about these devices since their invention and the overwhelming majority of consumers typically respond to those warnings with dismissal or ridicule. 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…

It’s still much more productive to fight the abuser than it is to fight the victims.

Nobody is fighting the victims here.
Post reply on HN