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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

#441

Post by whateveracct »

bgirard wrote: post #437
ethbr1 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay..but then why should I trust that Alexa isn't listening? That's clearly a pretty valuable thing for Amazon to provide to their customers. Is it impossible? If it is..then yeah people should just light these things on fire or have a hard switch on them at least.

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

#442

Post by Aurornis »

odo1242 wrote: post #392
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…

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

> Still would be a massive conspiracy lol

Exactly. Tens of thousands of people have worked on these products. Many of them ex-employees now. Many disgruntled, even.

And we’re supposed to believe they’re all united in keeping this a secret? Nothing has been leaked, no security researchers have found anything, just a perfectly hidden conspiracy sitting in millions of homes?

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

#443

Post by mixermachine »

joshstrange wrote: post #173
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?

It has some of those features. I think I’d attach speakers to the HA Voice you can use them that way but the built-in speaker will not cut it (think gen1 Echo). They are cool little devices, but they have a while to go before they can replace the Alexa’s.

Ah ok, thanks for the info. Had hoped I could jump on HA Voice right away because I have already a small HA server in my home.

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

#444

Post by nix0n »

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.

This claim is not extraordinary.

The anecdotes have added up, and it is now an ordinary claim.

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

#445

Post by balamatom »

rapind wrote: post #402
balamatom wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You demonstrate my point exactly. Did you even notice that you only spoke of the significance of having kids in terms of what it means for "you" , i.e. in terms of the parent's experience? You did not move even minimally towards figuring their perspective, i.e. the first-person conscious experience of the kids themselves , into your moral reasoning. At all. You speak as if they are extensions of your being, and not a…

> Did you even notice that you only spoke of the significance of having kids in terms of what it means for "you" It was a direct response to your "point", which was even quoted. > You speak as if they are extensions of your being, and not actual completely new individuals. In my book, such lack of theory of mind towards even those who are closest to you, is exactly "total psycho" behavior. Wow. One of us is definitel…

>wow

>definitely psycho

>word salad

>reference from the movie

>owned me

>need a break

I'm terribly sorry that your culture has imposed such low thresholds of permissible cognitive density! I definitely believe that it would be morally horrendous to pass that down to one's offspring.

>I will say only that I have kids, they are lovely, they definitely changed me and I wouldn't trade them for the world. Luckily we weren't deterred by sanctimonious parenting slop.

And again you did not acknowledge their perspectives as sentient beings separate from you. You could've said, they are happy. You could've said, they are doing well. You could've even said, they will never entertain convincing doubts as to whether their particular lives are worth living - which is not the case for you can't imagine how many people who were also the kids of some parents at some point.

But what you said is, they are lovely (external appraisal) and that you wouldn't trade them for the world - a fixed expression with zero meaning and misleading premise. There's no weird either/or situation where "trading one's kids for the world" would be on the table (though I've seen parents sell out their kids for less, or sometimes for nothing at all, with the same air of moral stuperiority that you are here attempting to exude); the purpose of repeating this formulaic phrase is to distract from the understanding that kids are given to the world, and, in return, the world is given to them. If anyone even remembers to tell them that, anyway.

I do admit my biases: I only speak from observation and experience, not from a set of phraseologisms drilled into me during freshman year to make me unable to critically examine how my life choices affect other people.

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

#446

Post by mmaunder »

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…

I have Alexa and a few Siri devices next to me and I just said a bunch of phrases indicating fire, choking, that we should call 911 etc and nothing triggered. So yeah - this is just internet bullshit until proven otherwise.

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

#447

Post by psunavy03 »

simpaticoder wrote: post #403
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…

>People don't really care about privacy People don't care about anything by default. They have to learn about threat-models and how to mitigate those threats. Usually this only happens after getting burned personally. (To learn from others is still learning, which people also don't care about.) This topic comes up in politics all the time. There is this hurt and offended reaction to people embracing authoritarianism,…

A columnist I read brought this up recently mocking a bunch of Silicon Valley execs supporting monarchism, presumably thinking they would be the educated elite monarchs. His point was that they hadn't invented anything new . . . monarchy is literally one of the oldest ideas in human history.

Of course there's also the bit that historically, when unrest or a revolution comes, the people who think they can manipulate it to end up in charge are usually the people who end up getting stood up against a wall and shot, too.

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

#448

Post by idatum »

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.

The test for me in defining social medial is whether its core is based a graph of connections. This is where you lose control in, for example, FB: Meta can infer many details about me without me ever posting anything, such as figuring out my home town based on relatives and school friends -- many other examples.

And this is why I no longer use any Meta products.

What I can do is help my family and friends understand the choices they are making (e.g. use Signal to talk to me). That rush they feel posting something has effects on people in their graph and now they at least understand that and pause.

Another example is ancestor "research" type sites, or DNA tests to find "your true ancestry". I had no choice a cousin of mine chose that as a hobby.

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

#449

Post by sprayk »

It would be interesting to put an Alexa (or another voice assistant device) in a space with only an audio playback device around to keep it company, with that audio playback device playing sounds associated with various crimes (but never saying the trigger word obviously). I wonder if there are any crimes it thinks it would hear that would result in a police visit. If police were called as a result of this setup, would this constitute a false police report on Amazon's behalf?

In the US, because I'm at least reasonably confident that such a setup comes nowhere near any exceptions to free speech protections here.

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

#450

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

This is just an anecdote from an anonymous internet account.

I don't necessarily trust Amazon, but I trust anonymous internet accounts far less.

If Amazon does spy this blatantly, it should be easy to verify and reproduce empirically. Has anyone serious done that?

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