Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

discuss.systems

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 696 posts

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

#431

Post by everdrive »

ryukoposting wrote: post #245
everdrive wrote: post #186

People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that. Yes, they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy. But if they cared, they never would have purchased this product in the first place. There are bits of technology which violate privacy, but are extremely difficult to fully avoid: Social Media, (I know a lot of HN isn't on it, but how about most of your family and friends?) smart ph…

HN is social media. So there.

HN only violates your privacy if you write your personal details into comments. Facebook violates your privacy in ways that only talented engineers can understand.

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

#432

Post by Zamaamiro »

ranger_danger wrote: post #421
TriangleEdge wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence is the idea that Big Tech companies are not spying on you any time they can.

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

#433

Post by Aurornis »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #374
Aurornis wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't it have to listen to everything locally for a command though? I wonder if only commands are keywords.

The devices are trained to trigger on wake words or phrases.

It’s much easier to run an on-device model to match a very specific phrase than to do speech to text of the entire language.

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

#434

Post by [deleted] »

swayvil wrote: post #409
Aurornis wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So record everything and upload it along with the legit uploading. Just hide it in there. Seems trivial. You could even convert to text first to make the packet super tiny.

[deleted]

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

#435

Post by acuozzo »

influx wrote: post #302
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

George Carlin said something similar: "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.

So should I be sending my kids to government schools or home schooling?

Do you live in a wealthy coastal suburb? If so, the public school system there is probably great.

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

#436

Post by bko »

jpalawaga wrote: post #367
bko wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anyone who doesn't want more space. And I couldn't imagine raising a family in 800 square feet. Do we really need a "source" for everything? Would it be meaningful if you saw some survey asking: Would you prefer your primary residence to be smaller, larger or the same size? I guess you can say all things being equal larger homes are more expensive so there must be some kind of preference for larger homes…

Do those same people also care about quality of education, availability and utility of public transit, etc? Or is the size of your home the only factor in what makes somewhere livable?

I don't think anyone really cares about "public transit". I think people care how convenient their life is. Why should I care if I take a bus to work or drive? I prefer whatever is best for me.

I would look at cost + time. For instance, if it costs me an extra $2k per year for a car but it saves me 30 minutes round trip, and my time is worth more than $20 an hour (assume work 200 days per year), then car is better. Add the convenience of not having to manage bus schedules and, you know, owning a car, its a no-brainer. I think there's some weird cultish behavior around "public transit" as though it is a good by itself is disconnected to how most people think about this.

So in this case not being able to afford a car or have anywhere to park it is not the win you think it is.

In terms of education, not sure its quantifiable but if you look at money, Mississippi spends considerably more:

In England, secondary school spending per pupil in 2024-25 is projected to be about £7,400 ($9.4k), while primary school spending per pupil is about £6,700 ($8.5k)

In Mississippi its around $12k

Do you have any other data or are you just going entirely off of vibes?

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/annual-report-education-spen...

https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/per-pupil-spending-by-sta...

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

#437

Post by bgirard »

ethbr1 wrote: post #423
ranger_danger wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Should not the burden of proof be on Amazon to prove it's not always recording? In 2025, it feels like we're 5 to 10 years past the time a consumer should default to assuming their cloud-connected device isn't extracting the maximum possible revenue from them. Assume all companies are amoral, and you'll never be disappointed.

> Should not the burden of proof be on Amazon to prove it's not always recording?

What's a satisfactory burden of proof for Amazon to meet here? There's only so much you can do to prove that something is NOT happening.

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

#438

Post by olyjohn »

_fat_santa wrote: post #412
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 wife loves Alexa devices and we have two at home. Knowing I would loose the privacy argument with her, I did the next best thing and setup a pi-hole. With that pi-hole I discovered that Alexa devices send one request to answer your question and another one to Amazon analytics and it was pretty easy to allow one but block the other. Though I'll be honest, there's really no way of knowing if they are sending analyti…

You're only seeing the requests that are using your DNS server. If the Alexa device has backup IPs or hostnames or even it's own DNS server, you're not gonna see those.

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

#439

Post by mixermachine »

zyberzero wrote: post #177
mixermachine wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We mostly use Alexa for playing music (Radio & Spotify) and setting timers. We also use the multi-room music feature where Alexa plays the same audio source on a certain group (great for parties). Does Home Assistant also have these features?

Timers works fine. 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 th…

Thanks, good info. I read nothing about the multi-room-music-feature. Do you by chance know if it can be done?

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

#440

Post by smallnamespace »

venusenvy47 wrote: post #359
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 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.

Advances in AI are bringing down the cost of processing audio by perhaps 5x a year, and has been doing so for several years now.

The risk is that it becomes worthwhile for someone to record everything now and process it later at their own leisure.

Post reply on HN