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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

#471

Post by AlexandrB »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #316
pc86 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be generally understood to you, but not to me, and the link you provided says absolutely nothing about GDP.

Not a problem, let's educate you a little. When graphed together GDP growth and real wages in the US show a disparity that clearly indicates that increases in GDP go somewhere other than working Americans. This being the case GDP metrics don't communicate meaningful information about quality of life. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

While increases in GDP don't all go to working class Americans, the two are not completely decoupled either. If you look at the small-scale variations in both they match each other pretty closely. I also suspect that it's the working class that would eat any dramatic GDP decrease.

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

#472

Post by ethbr1 »

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…

As always, there's a hilariously apropos "imagine if technology were this bad" that turns out to just be reality.

Amazon: We're listening.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JCQhygMdFr4&t=57s

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

#473

Post by wrs »

fardo wrote: post #459
bgirard wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 no…

They have the third thing -- you can see the recordings in your history. [0]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

On the first two, if you already think they're blatantly lying about functionality, why would you think the software in the device is the same as the source you got, or that it can't record with the light off?

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

#474

Post by AlexandrB »

analog31 wrote: post #237
eadmund wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It means that GDP doesn't buy prosperity. We've been told for decades that letting our economy turn out like Europe's was something to fear, while they outpaced us in virtually all quality of life measures. We can no longer claim being the richest country in the world as a source of uniqueness or justification -- handed to us by the gods. I think this is part of the reason for the present descent into authoritarianis…

> I think this is part of the reason for the present descent into authoritarianism.

Which? The American descent into authoritarianism or the European descent into authoritarianism?

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

#475

Post by elif »

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.

" Why did you pick these default wake words and not something like “computer” or “okay assist”? A wake word should be uncommon in everyday conversations at home or in media, such as music or TV, to minimize the risk of the device activating unintentionally. “Nabu”, “Jarvis”, and “Mycroft” ... "

They hardcoded the wake words in hardware...

Why not just use LLM common sense to say "does this really sound like a purposeful activation?"

Or put a GPU in there, or export the call to your PC like they require for text to speech?

For being a DIY thing, they made it inexplicably hard to D

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

#476

Post by AlexandrB »

myrmidon wrote: post #396
eadmund wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Purchasing power adjustments would also probably favor Europe I guess.

I doubt it. Germany and especially Switzerland have a quite hight cost of living. Coming from Canada, I get sticker shock every time I go to the US because of how cheap everything is. I had the opposite reaction going to Europe (except for Italy).

It would also be interesting to compare take-home (after tax) pay.

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

#477

Post by djeastm »

Zamaamiro wrote: post #432
ranger_danger wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, so Amazon needs to prove a negative, now. I get the lack of trust, but at some point logic has to prevail.

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

#478

Post by bentt »

BurningFrog wrote: post #450
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…

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?

That's always been my perspective. The incentive for busting Amazon on this is so high, if it were provable then someone would have done it and the press would love to share that.

My point is it no longer matters. We're out.

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

#479

Post by janalsncm »

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…

And if that’s really all you’re using it for there’s no reason it needs Internet at all. All of the intelligence can be run on-device.

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

#480

Post by bentt »

_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…

I love that you did this and I think it's some reassurance. Agree that the "main" payload has always been what I suspected they were cheating on. They are highly, highly incentivized to listen for other words and at the very least tick an int somewhere to sell that data.
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