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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

#691
post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. We have a Nest Mini at home that someone gave us, that we use as a smart speaker. Before setting it up, I popped it open and physically scraped out the MEMS microphones. Now that' s a hardware mute.

> physically scraped out the MEMS microphones. I am curious. Are you sure you got them all?

Pretty certain! I inspected the board closely, and tested after reassembly to make sure it couldn't hear me anymore. That Nest Mini lives with its mute-switch permanently engaged anyway, just as a fallback.

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

#692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working class solidarity is the only solution. I recently realized that people should understand they have more in common with (and must have solidarity with) the next people down on the socio-economic rung instead of trying to climb the ladder in hopes of joining those on the next rung up.

It will never happen, especially with the racialized nature of that socioeconomic ladder. The country that generates downvotes on a post recognizing the similarities between BLM/Floyd Protests and the Euromaidan ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43389979 ) could never.

I think awareness is growing

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

#693

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…

I'd enjoy hanging with you.

That's dearly appreciated! Not the most common sentiment these days, for some reason. Stay safe out there! :)

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

#694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What alternatives have you found? Do you mostly go to smaller vendors?

always buy local if you can. if you can't, buy directly from vendor or partner.

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

#695

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…

Right. People do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where users tend not to. It's better for everyone in this thread to simply stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region or privacy regime. (Whether the laws are flouted is entirey another topic.)

As to smart-assistant usage, what we would really want to see is comparative numbers of current and new Alexa users, broken out by privacy region (US, EU, other Europe, Australia, Asia, ME, CALA, Africa). (PS noone other than Amazon knows how many "active Alexa users" there are in a geo, since no third-party can audit Amazon's numbers, and "installed units" might simply mean "user bought an Alexa device at any pointsince 2014, it might be unused/disconnected/broken/sitting in a pile of junk/given away years ago. This is just like the games Linux vendors, Java and MSFT notoriously played with "licenses installed" even if that machine was wiped to install another OS, without ever activating the shipped OS).

"Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices" absolutely does not mean "there were at any point 500 million active Alexa users", and anyway most Alexa users have multiple devices in one house, so the theoretical peak devicecount was only ever 500m/n at most. I suspect the real peak was closer to 77m than 500m. But noone outside Amazon knows; there are only estimates. There is no Nielsen Research or Quantcast of Alexa devices, AFAIK. There are only the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat for number of users [0][1]. Not devicecount.

And as to whether privacy laws, warrant requests are being disregarded, blanket geofenced warrants, Ring syndication, yRoombas snooping on you, data fusion of that data with Kindle devices/phones and smart TV etc., it's a semantic debate whether that's "widespread privacy violations which US Congress is lobbied to turn a blind eye to" rather than "users aren't sophisticated enough to detect when laws are being violated". Imagine if we applied that thought process to bank robberies and whether they were adequately protecting your money: the onus being on the customer to constantly monitor your bank. (We don't need to because there are consumer and criminal laws governing banking).

Anyone with more time might care to look for estimates of number of households with active Alexas by geo/privacy region, and compare to privacy watchdog reports.

[0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/

[1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/

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

#696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up? Continued human behavior online. The actual behavior of users does not suggest they consider, on average, that their privacy is being violated every time they put more data into Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. If you want to use this as a case study, come back to this topic in a year and see if Alexa sales and / or usage has gone down…

Per my longer post above, people do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where they tend not to. Stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region. Americans do one thing, Europeans another.

And as I pointed out there are not 600 million active installed Alexas, noone (outside Amazon and LE) knows the number of active current Alexas or current households with 1+ active Alexa. A better way to estimate usage is look at usercounts for the top-100 most popular apps, by geo.

UPDATE: I found the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat from [0] citing [1]

[0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/

[1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/

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