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

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

#391

Post by m3rc »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #372
bentt wrote: post #351

I know this single bit of news isn't the biggest deal. However we were talking at the dinner table, my wife and two kids and I. We just decided we're done with Amazon and Alexa. My wife has always been skeeved out by the devices, and I've reassured her that the wake word is the only time it's recording. Whether this is true or not, it's obvious that the company can no longer be trusted. So yeah we're just going to ge…

My partner and I have both an Alexa and a Google Home Assistant and we leave the mic off on both devices. The Alexa we got because we have a Blink doorbell and it connects to the Alexa in order to make a sound when someone rings the doorbell. The Google Home Assistant came with the Google Nest Wifi Mesh extender. We both care about privacy so that's why we turned them off (but not enough to not have the physical devi…

I don't think it's a good idea to have that doorbell, or any doorbell that is surveilling at all times and you don't own the recordings. Who knows who is watching them.

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

#392

Post by odo1242 »

Aurornis wrote: post #369
venusenvy47 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally assume that they wouldn't be processing all sound at all time from a device because it would be massively expensive for them. Obviously, it's technically possible that they could be, but I don't see how it would be financially possible. If we talk about targeted surveillance, then that is certainly financially possible. But I find it unlikely I would be targeting among the millions of people using these.

I don’t know why anyone in tech believes the myth that their devices are streaming everything. It’s trivial to inspect traffic from a device. You can see that your devices aren’t constantly streaming data somewhere. You can see a burst of activity after a command. Beyond that, it would require a massive conspiracy for everyone who ever worked on these programs to never leak details about always-on surveillance record…

Yeah, a more likely exploit would be it starting to listen for other wake words (different from the original one) and then recording whenever those words are said. Still would be a massive conspiracy lol

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

#393

Post by TriangleEdge »

bentt wrote: post #351

I know this single bit of news isn't the biggest deal. However we were talking at the dinner table, my wife and two kids and I. We just decided we're done with Amazon and Alexa. My wife has always been skeeved out by the devices, and I've reassured her that the wake word is the only time it's recording. Whether this is true or not, it's obvious that the company can no longer be trusted. So yeah we're just going to ge…

Alexa listens to more then the wake word. I've had this recommend products on Amazon while my wife and I were having a conversation at the dinner table. It also recommended calling 911 while I was talking about fire.

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.

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

#394

Post by fads_go »

tiahura wrote: post #358
bentt wrote: post #351

I know this single bit of news isn't the biggest deal. However we were talking at the dinner table, my wife and two kids and I. We just decided we're done with Amazon and Alexa. My wife has always been skeeved out by the devices, and I've reassured her that the wake word is the only time it's recording. Whether this is true or not, it's obvious that the company can no longer be trusted. So yeah we're just going to ge…

Seems kinda paranoid. I've yet to meet anyone, who's met anyone, who's been harmed by not turning that setting off, or been harmed by any assistant listening.

Poster said that unplugging the device made their home more peaceful. This implies that having the device on was creating a constant, albeit low-level, harm.

"harm" is a tricky word.

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

#395

Post by EGreg »

TriangleEdge wrote: post #393
bentt wrote: post #351

I know this single bit of news isn't the biggest deal. However we were talking at the dinner table, my wife and two kids and I. We just decided we're done with Amazon and Alexa. My wife has always been skeeved out by the devices, and I've reassured her that the wake word is the only time it's recording. Whether this is true or not, it's obvious that the company can no longer be trusted. So yeah we're just going to ge…

Alexa listens to more then the wake word. I've had this recommend products on Amazon while my wife and I were having a conversation at the dinner table. It also recommended calling 911 while I was talking about fire. 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…

Just wait until people start buying Tesla’s optimus robots!

Cheap and ubiquitous surveillance will be the norm in the future.

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

#396

Post by myrmidon »

eadmund wrote: post #194
tanepiper wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.or…

A significantly better metric to compare would be median hourly wage (ideally, purchasing power adjusted, but that's hard).

The US average is actually behind wealthier European nations there (Ireland, Scandinavia, Benelux, Switzerland, Germany): 20$/h compared to ~20€/h. Purchasing power adjustments would also probably favor Europe I guess.

So the much stronger US GDP/capita output apparently does very little for the average citizen...

This was honestly surprising to me, I actually expected the US to be comfortably ahead in this (specifically significantly ahead of Germany). France is also much weaker than I expected in this (~17€/h) not including it was cherry-picking on my part, Eastern Europe is super poor (Bulgaria under 5€/hour!), and the top contenders were unsurprising, except maybe how well Denmark did (~30€/h).

Sources: eurostat + statista (because couldn't find what I wanted on bls.gov)

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

#397

Post by DaSHacka »

tetris11 wrote: post #382
bentt wrote: post #351

I know this single bit of news isn't the biggest deal. However we were talking at the dinner table, my wife and two kids and I. We just decided we're done with Amazon and Alexa. My wife has always been skeeved out by the devices, and I've reassured her that the wake word is the only time it's recording. Whether this is true or not, it's obvious that the company can no longer be trusted. So yeah we're just going to ge…

> I've reassured her that the wake word is the only time it's recording. 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 wonder if anyone's poked around the firmware before to discover the others

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

#398

Post by dylan604 »

timwis wrote: post #84
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home Assistant is a great example of the amazing things the open source community is capable of doing. Hopefully they get the color version stuff worked out. It's too bad it appears that most of Amazon's hardware devices can't be turned to the good side and made to work with Home Assistant.

What do you mean color version? 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!

Can you create a private network on your router for your spy devices that blocks any traffic to the mothership while allowing something like Spotify? Do they require access to the mothership to work at all?

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

#399

Post by bsenftner »

pmarreck wrote: post #340
crims0n wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and I homeschool because we feel we can provide a better education to our kids than the local public schools can - making this decision after giving them a trial run. If you do decide to homeschool, it is important that you never grow complacent in how much responsibility you are taking on. So many families around us homeschool for religious/dogmatic reasons and the quality of their kids education is a second…

> tend to do worse That's a subjective evaluation, no? ;) I'm sure their parents would say they did way better on the religion/dogmatism ruler! > So many families around us homeschool This seems like the "gateway drug" to cult indoctrination and worries me. I'm going in completely the other way- My son (who will be 4 in June) is going to a good public school system here for socialization reasons , and I will suppleme…

I've met and worked with some of the most startlingly brilliant home schooled people, that are utterly crippled socially. They ended up being unable to work with others, despite on paper they ought to be leaders. People underestimate the critical value of childhood socialization. When a child finds they do not know the giant host of media nonsense other kids know intimately, they cannot participate in a huge amount of their imaginary fun which uses these media products as the foundation for their social set's humor and identity. That creates a very difficult to unseat insecurity.

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

#400

Post by meindnoch »

AmVess wrote: post #303
ropejumper wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This requires a justification for why home size is a good indicator of quality of life, or for why it's more important than other indicators.

Small homes just plain suck. No room to do anything, stuffy, cramped. GF and I moved, rented a house for a month. 1400 square feet. 700 up, 700 down. Tiny and cramped, and it only had one very small bathroom. We had to sleep on different floors. Master bedroom was barely larger than the queen bed, and no way 2 people could sleep in there because it would get blazing hot in minutes. Garage was similarly minuscule. GF…

Lol. 1400sqft is cramped in the US? I have a 120m2 house, which would be about 1300sqft, and we have two kids rooms, one master bedroom with its own wardrobe and a bathroom, one shared bathroom, and na american kitchen and living room.

What are you guys even doing? Or maybe the 1400sqft included the garage?

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