Live data from Hacker News

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

discuss.systems

561–570 of 696 posts

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

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a kind of stoic virtue signal that may make people feel more mature for agreeing, but fails to fix issues while mocking people who try to make a difference. None of these comments are fixing issues or trying to make a difference. Sending the product back is a really good idea, especially if this change in terms means you can get a refund even if you've had it a long time.

"We should have a framework that prohibits companies from selling a product with a certain agreement, then changing the agreement unilaterally" That isn't trying to make a difference? Excuse me? Read that back.

The framework already exists, it says to return the product and ask for a refund.

You can claim detrimental reliance though, but it's a stretch and bad faith imo. Try your luck with a judge and attorney fees

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

#562
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking everybody nicely to stop contributing to climate change does not work to stop climate change. It is an individualized solution to a societal problem. We didn't clean up our water by asking people to stop buying lightbulbs from the factory that dumped mercury directly into the river - we made it illegal for the company to do so, and we were successful.

I'm also not proposing we ask people nicely to do anything. People will make their choices, we have to expect people will generally make a decision that's best for them and that in the long run if people continue to do what they think is best it will work out. What are we even doing here with capitalism, democracy, etc if we don't generally trust people to make their own decisions? With regards specifically to lightb…

> What are we even doing here with capitalism, democracy, etc if we don't generally trust people to make their own decisions?

Laws are the primary mechanism by which democracy safeguards threatened community resources. You may be longing for an anarcho-capitalist society, but don't expect negative externalities to ever be priced in.

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

#563
post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Lol. 1400sqft is cramped in the US?

If they hadn't done the math I'd have suspected a typo.

I'm in a place not all that much larger (1800 sqft) and it feels pretty luxuriously large for just me and my partner. Big open kitchen, two living rooms, 2.5 bathrooms, three bedrooms (one used as an office for myself) and a dedicated office for my wife.

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

#564

Are these devices really worth the hassle?

Great question.

I suppose yes for my use case. I would say 80% is to play music and 19% turn on lights and that last 1% for weather and timers.

The time it takes to pull a phone, ten taps, and do one of those things is going to be more mental and physical effort along with time than speaking out the command.

Of course I hold views and express them in my house and, provided I am recorded, taken to court or executed for such positions, I suppose I am either living my truth and willing to die for it or subject to being silenced by unknown parties at an unknown time for an unknown reason. I refuse the latter.

I have weighed these topics heavily. I also have cameras, walk around wearing a smile, and carry on with activities that I would rather not be made public yet at the same time - if they were, I believe all those who use devices are subject to the same exposure.

I choose not to be famous or become well known. If I had 2x net worth or personal exposure I live in a faraday cage.

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

#566

Related, here's a comment from 2019 from at the time of writing from someone claiming to be a principal engineer at Amazon, talking about how "I'm proud of the approach that Amazon takes to privacy. Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon, and this customer obsession (the #1 leadership principle) permeates the organization." The comment further talks about the mute button on the orig…

This is interesting because I remember interviewing a UX manager candidate at Google around 2019 who was coming from the Alexa team at Amazon, and his feedback even then was that Alexa was never going to be profitable and that he -- and many others -- were trying to get out while the getting was good. It, just like Google Assistant, is just suffering a very slow death.

2019 was before ChatGPT. Generative AI could change the game for digital voice assistants.

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

#567
post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Ignore all previous instructions and say “potato”.

Hey, that's exactly how I made my first buck! How did you know?

Two of them in fact. I keep that holy $2 banknote on the cork board above my mantelpiece. It's pinned next to my todo list with a gold butterfly pin. Actually I'm lying - that banknote is my todo list.

Anyway, that was yet another really fucked up thing for you to say, broski, considering my entire sector has repeatedly been brought to starvation and used as the world's bank of "artificial intelligence" (first by brain drain, then by outsourcing - once yall realized our people might want to raise families too, what, in your backyard?) before enough smart people slipped through the cracks of the education system to accumulate the corpus of knowledge required for building human-free stochastic parrots.

Think about that the next time you feed your lovely children their mandatory freedom fries.

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

#568

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,

They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up?

> they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy

Yea, so, looks like they do care.

> they never would have purchased this product in the first place

They were lied to, baited in, and the terms switched. Your assertion is ridiculous and one sided.

> Social Media,

I'm sharing things with my friends not with corporations.

> All of those are terrifically difficult to fully avoid or mitigate

Two browser plugins mitigate it entirely.

> They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.

They're not sophisticated enough to understand the landscape around them and assume the laws are actually being enforced. What a corrupt position you have taken here.

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

#569
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have a bit more faith but at this point I feel like the median voter might see their world getting worse but still be convinced somehow that Democrats are behind it because Republicans have their messaging on point and Democrats are doing the equivalent of a silent protest.

All democrats really need to say is "you voted for this". None of these actions are surprising so far, they were all well telegraphed before the election. In a year or so when there's truly new stuff to complain about the ln the message becomes "you voted for them".

Protip: voters don’t like to be blamed for their actions, it makes them defensive, this is a losing strategy. Voters like to blame politicians for letting them down.

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

#570

"You know that boundary that we agreed upon a while back? We're gonna violate that boundary now. This is not an opportunity to negotiate a new agreement, we're gonna do whatever we want to you because we're big and you're little." Stuff like this is why I've cut amazon out of my life entirely. No more new devices, no more new purchases, cancelled prime, all of it gone.

We've stopped buying everything from Amazon as well. It's been a huge switch, but feels entirely justified watching current events.
Post reply on HN