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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

#641

Post by taneq »

EGreg wrote: post #395
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…

Just wait until people start buying Tesla’s optimus robots! Cheap and ubiquitous surveillance will be the norm in the future.

That’s how Skynet wins!

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

#642

Post by simpaticoder »

sapphicsnail wrote: post #594
simpaticoder wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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,…

> Human society's default is authoritarianism. I'd say it's quite the opposite. It takes a lot of force and coercion to maintain authoritarian institutions precisely because it's not natural. Most of us have had a lifetime of schools, churches, and jobs drilling conformity and blind obedience into us.

Human society's default organizing principle is authoritarianism. This is born out by the fact that most humans who've ever lived lived under such a system. A large fraction of us today live under such a system. Even in liberal societies our entertainment overflows with depictions of monarchy and feudalism. Even at a smaller scale, families, clans, businesses, militaries and teams are run this way: there is one boss, and all authority flows from them.

For some (for me) there is a psychological allure to the idea that left to our own devices we'd self-organize in an enlightened way. But the experiment has been done over and over and over again, and that's not what happens. I realize it's painful to accept something you don't want to be true, but that's no reason not to face up to it. Better to face the challenge open-eyed than to have false assumptions undermine you.

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

#643

Post by immibis »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #307
delecti wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you aren't currently holding your phone, with it unlocked and the (probably slow to load) app open? What if you don't have switched outlets, and want to turn off lights either a) when the room is still dark, or b) when you're leaving the room? Voice assistants are not a revolution in home living, but lets not go too far in the other direction and ignore that they do still have useful features.

Almost every instance of "useful features" described, yours included, seem much more like novelties than true utility to me. I get that this is the old man in me.

Same as AI. It's almost like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel for useful products, since capitalism demands people churn out endless useful products, regardless of whether they actually exist or not, so we're trying to make not-useful products into useful products to appease the machine...

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

#644

Post by smallmancontrov »

DanHulton wrote: post #589
kzrdude wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's weird that they (Alexa, Google etc) haven't tried to do something new with generative AI assistants.

"They" or in this case, Apple, has. This is largely why the latest Siri AI enhancements went over so poorly. Hallucinations when trying to get important personal data or accomplish important tasks are not viewed terribly fondly.

You're giving Apple too much credit in a way that their press releases are carefully crafted to encourage you to. The on-the-ground reality is that Siri will sometimes prompt me for permission to ship her mangled speech-to-text out to a very stale ChatGPT model and read what comes back. That's not failure by hallucination, that's failure by duct taping on an extra limb and wondering why it isn't useful.

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

#646

Post by m463 »

seltzered_ wrote: post #513

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…

Misguided and/or naive.

Just remember that "privacy of customer data" is ambiguous, and can be used to mean different things to different people. Some folks think anonymized data is ok. Some people scrutinize the privacy policy and greenlight a product. customers read it and don't know what to think (by design)

As a customer, I don't know who they share my information with. Many or most products on amazon require your name and address (maybe phone number?) to deliver the product.

And I've had companies who've sold me stuff on amazon email me directly on several occasions. I have one email address I've given only to amazon, and the email did not go through an amazon redirector.

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

#647

Post by everdrive »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #548
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…

This argument, "People don't really care about ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier. It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government. The person who is in a position to protect the interests of the customer, whether or not the customer 'cares', has a moral obligation to take care. When the supplier chooses no…

>This argument, "People don't really care about ...",

That may definitely be the case sometimes, but I certainly don't mean it like that. By normal person standards, I'm pretty extreme about privacy: no social media, (no, HN doesn't count) pihole, ublock+custom lists, noscript, as few services as possible, frozen credit, DNS resolver rather than a single 3rd party service, etc.

I strongly lament the lack of interest in privacy. The point of my statement is that people can't even be bothered to care about privacy when it costs them nothing. Given this, I can't imagine them actually caring about privacy when it actually inconveniences them. There's just no chance of it. I don't want things to be that way, but it's clear there's nothing I can do about it.

Between pornography ID laws, anti-bot mitigations on websites, and the rise of smart phones + apps, it seems pretty clear that the death of privacy on the internet is just around the corner. And people will welcome it. I'm not happy about this, and may be less happy about it than much of HN. But I think it's pretty inevitable.

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

#648

Post by sitkack »

margalabargala wrote: post #635
sitkack wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given who is in charge and how much power they have shown to wield over those systems, yes, definitely. Nothing I have said makes light of those other systems and the grotesque data gathering that they do.

The person in charge is irrelevant. If you think that the other companies I mentioned aren't in the business of selling surveillance on you as well, your head is in the sand. It's the primary business model of several.

Totally disagree on the first part.

Totally agree on the second part.

They were all on stage together, regardless of how they got there. They are all there.

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

#649

Post by micromacrofoot »

elif wrote: post #636
micromacrofoot wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

home assistant's voice control works just as well now, mine runs on a locally hosted llm

I was actually going to look into this but the x86 install instructions are literally: 'dd this disk image you downloaded onto your boot device' Is it really open source? Do you really trust the entire operating system you are forced to use and not build yourself is what they say it is? [0] https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/generic-x86-64

I've participated on their forum for years and a I've seen enough of the code to feel good about it

certainly more confident than the alternatives, and I know with certainty the voice assistant I'm running doesn't leave my home because I configured and verified it myself

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

#650

Post by balamatom »

iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #621
balamatom wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, thanks for asking! You see, all this combining words in ways that people are taught to have a negative reaction to is actually part of my super secret plan to take over the world. (But don't worry, I promise to not be any better then the extant network of disavowed power relations maintained by recursive Pavlovian conditioning!) Less facetiously (though only a smidgen less so), bold of you to assume that I think…

Thank you. That was genuinely entertaining including, but not limited to the ethical considerations. It is sad to me it was not anything more grand, but I suppose it can be all be fun and games.

Point taken!
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