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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

#451

Post by acuozzo »

_ink_ wrote: post #41
gleenn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the reason you suggest might be a good one, the repercussions of this change are clearly large. Unknowing customers now have their voice recordings sent to the cloud whoch could be leaked, have law enforcement get a warrant to take it from Amazon, or for it to be abused directly by Amazon. Those are huge. They might just have a good scapegoat.

Yeah, but why do people still trust corporations? It's not like this has happened for the first time. Quite the opposite actually. For profit corporations seem to have no moral compass whatsoever and will do anything do increase the margin. People should finally start to act accordingly.

> Yeah, but why do people still trust corporations?

When most of your time is spent ensuring your material needs are met, then whatever time remains is precious. Telling someone hustling two different "gig economy" jobs sixteen hours per day to give a shit about the long term privacy implications of the stupid smart speaker he got his kid for Christmas is asking… a lot.

This is why change through popular political action peaked in the US in the late 1960s/early 1970s. People, on average, had more leisure time on their hands than ever before. More leisure time ⇒ more time to think, organize, unify, and give a shit beyond the immediate here & now.

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

#453

Post by benjaminoakes »

mixermachine wrote: post #439
zyberzero wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Given the lawsuits against Google from Sonos in the last 5 years, it doesn't seem to be low hanging fruit. Might not exist yet.

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

#454

Post by stogot »

draugadrotten wrote: post #80
timwis wrote: post #23

I switched to Home Assistant a couple months ago (because I didn't like the idea of my voice being sent to amazon constantly) and haven't looked back! Soo much more you can do (including immediately using an LLM, if you like, whether in the cloud or local), and so much more control.

I am switching out the Alexas in the house to the home assistant voice devices, which can leverage a local LLM without any cloud whatsoever https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ The process is still complicated enough to be "enthusiast" (aka nerd) territory but it is getting better with every release. It will still be here in 10 years, nobody can take it away from us.

How many hours did you spend on this? I want to do it, but I don’t have much time.

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

#455

Post by yeahsure »

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.

Well, for starters, I guess keeping the "do not send voice recordings" toggle would be a good idea.

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

#456

Post by guntars »

nix0n wrote: post #444
ranger_danger wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

This claim is not extraordinary. The anecdotes have added up, and it is now an ordinary claim.

Only in circles that don’t understand technology and frankly logic. To prove that it’s happening _one_ hacker needs to show that there’s constant flash drive / network traffic while the mic is enabled that also correlates with the entropy in the audio.

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

#457

Post by photonthug »

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…

> It would be a bombshell revelation and you’d see it everywhere.

What a strange idea. From what I remember about the "privacy nightmare on wheels" disclosure [1], Americans have apparently already consented to being recorded at all times by simply being within range of cameras and microphones in cars they don't own, passengers consent to losing control of their DNA by sitting in the car, etc.

It's better for Europeans for the time being. But short of collaboration with extraterrestrials to beam up millions of New Yorkers for medical experiments next Tuesday, it's pretty hard to imagine at this point that any example of corporate abuse will qualify for "bombshell revelation" ever again. The overton window has well and truly shifted, and most people will basically argue with you that they enjoy the abuse.

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...

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

#458

Post by ddmma »

tummler wrote: post #91
ddmma wrote: post #56

My first tought was in this direction: Amazon’s Echo hardware can be hacked to run your own local voice assistant that never touches the cloud. This involves replacing or modifying the Echo’s firmware to break free of Amazon’s servers, then installing offline voice recognition and AI tools on your local network.

Do you have any details on this? With a quick search I could only find some older attempts at rooting but no custom firmware.

Here is GPT "deep research" on this topic on Repurposing Amazon Echo for a Local AI Assistant https://airadiohost.com/alexa.html

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

#459

Post by fardo »

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.

They have a lot of ways they could’ve built trust without a full negative burden: which of them, if any, are they doing?

Open sourcing of their watch word and recording features specifically, so people can self-verify it does what it says and that it’s not doing sketchy things?

Hardware lights such that any record functionality past the watch words is visible and verifiable by the end user and it can’t record when not lit?

Local streaming and auditable downloads of the last N hours of input as heard by amazon after watchwords, so you can check for misrecordings and also compare “intended usage” times to observed times, such that you can see that you and Amazon get the same stuff?

If you really wanna go all out, putting in their TOS protections like explicit no-train permissions on passing utterances without intent, or adding an SLA into their subscription to refund subscription and legal costs and to provide explicit legal cause of action, if they were recording when they said they weren’t?

If you explicitly want to promote trust, there are actually a ton of ways to do it, one of them isn’t “remove even more of your existing privacy guardrails”.

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

#460

Post by grafmax »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #289
grafmax wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mississippi has much higher rates of infant mortality, poverty, preventable deaths, and lower overall education levels than most of the EU. Economic output fails to capture the degree to which the economy serves its people. While average GDP sounds like it’s something that everyone participates in, in reality, under capitalism wealth and income follow a Pareto distribution. As a result, GDP per capita tells us more a…

> under capitalism wealth and income follow a Pareto distribution. And under the other forms of government thus far tried? Anyway, Capitalism doesn't explain wealth inequality. The ability to accumulate capital and apply it to industry with limited liability doesn't inherently cause wealth inequality. That's the fault of Greedism, Over-inflated-sense-of-selfism, and Giving Money to Politicians is like giving Whiskey…

Wealth inequality isn’t simply a side effect of capitalism—it’s structurally necessary thanks to the division of society into two classes, capitalists and workers.

I do agree that a capitalist economic system isn’t alone in manifesting inequality. I would further acknowledge that under capitalism the amount of wealth inequality differs from one capitalist society to the other. Yet the present levels of inequality we see around us are nearly unprecedented.

You blame greed. But capitalism enshrines the profit motive. It incentivizes capitalists to maximize profit regardless of the effect on the working class even if that means bribing politicians or whatever. Greed is a central feature of capitalism, not some personal failing to be explained at the individual level.

Meanwhile, neoliberal deregulation has been enacted for the last 45 years. What are the effects of this? Real working-class wages have remained stagnant while the wealth gap has drastically increased. Should we believe the answer is more deregulation?

Under a deregulation ideology, the wealthy push for deregulation when it suits them on the one hand while benefiting from and expanding government influence on the other (subsidies, bailouts, regulatory capture, etc.). That’s why after 45 years of a deregulatory ideology operating at the highest levels of our governments, subsidies and regulatory capture still exist.

Consider the present moment. Elon Musk slashes government spending while receiving millions from the federal government. This is not a bug. It’s a central feature of this ideology.

We may have different members of the upper class at the wheel now, but they are still using the same siren’s call of deregulation to justify their policies, ostentatiously reducing government influence in some areas while tactically expanding it in others - not just handouts to Trump’s cronies but also expansion of executive powers and erosion of civil liberties.

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