everything you say to your echo/alexa has always been sent to amazon.
theres literally been leaks proving it.
badblock has an amazon list :)
If Corporations were people, they’d be disappeared in the night for stuff like this.
Which is why they’re not people.
Why anyone would want some Tech company spybot sifting through their private experiences is beyond me, but that’s definitely what they are doing.
Which is why they’re not people.
But the C-suite and board are almost like humans. And that’s even better for… things.
There’s no way they weren’t doing this already.
I mean if they were doing this already there would be no point in sending this email out. They would have just happily continued letting people think it wasn’t happening while doing it anyway, while not having to deal with the backlash this will generate.
My suspicion is they probably need to announce it now for some legal reason but there’s no Amazon device with the power to do this locally so it’s definitely always been sent to them.
Now would they delete that right away or analyse it first, I kinda think they would have always done the latter.
For anyone with existing Home Assistant setup, the Home Assistant Voice Preview is pretty good alternative, when it comes to voice control of HA. The setup is very easy. If you want conversational functionality, you could even hook it up to an LLM, cloud or local. It can also be used for media playback and it’s got an aux out port.
I used to use Google Home Mini for voice control of Home Assistant. The Voice Preview replaced that rather nicely.
If you were using one, you were already okay with this.
Which Pinevox or Openvoice may be an alternative one day. I think I recall HomeAssistant had something in the works too.
Publicly, that is. They have no doubt been doing it in secret since they launched it.
Off-device processing has been the default from day one. The only thing changing is the removal for local processing on certain devices, likely because the new backing AI model will no longer be able to run on that hardware.
With on-device processing, they don’t need to send audio. They can just send the text, which is infinitely smaller and easier to encrypt as “telemetry”. They’ve probably got logs of conversations in every Alexa household.
This has always blown my mind. Watching people willingly allow Big Brother-esque devices into their home for very, very minor conveniences like turning on some gimmicky multi-colored light bulbs. Now they’re literally using home “security” cameras that store everything on some random cloud server. I’ll truly never understand.
Why has no security researcher published evidence of these devices with microphones uploading random conversations? Nobody working on the inside has ever leaked anything regarding this potentially massive breach of privacy? A perfectly secret conspiracy by everyone involved?
We know more about top secret NSA programs than we do about this proposed Alexa spy mechanism. None of the people working on this at Amazon have wanted to leak anything?
I’m not saying it’s not possible, but it seems extremely improbable to me that everyone’s microphones are listening to their conversations, they’re being uploaded somewhere to serve them better ads, and absolutely nobody has leaked anything or found any evidence.
It’s better to be safe than sorry is all I’m saying.
Edit: There’s also this.
I’m not saying it’s not possible
There is no argument from ignorance fallacy in what I said. I am not claiming these devices never send audio without you wanting because there’s no evidence to the contrary.
However, the idea that everyone’s microphones are always listening, and that’s why you saw an ad for whatever after talking to your friend, yet not a single person has observed a device uploading this kind of data, nor has anyone ever leaked any kind of information on this supposed system, is extremely unlikely to be true in my opinion.
They don’t need microphones to do this. Regular tracking is plenty to do a good job at suggesting you a highly relevant ad, and frequency illusion does the rest. You’re not noticing the thousand times you see ads that are irrelevant to whatever you were talking about, but the one time you do notice really sticks out.
Frankly there are plenty of more concerning ways of violating our privacy that are out in the open that I believe are a much higher priority than mics always recording, of which there is no evidence for.
If no proof is offered (in either direction), then the proposition can be called unproven, undecided, inconclusive, an open problem or a conjecture.
Stating that you don’t think that it’s possible is irrelevant. It’s either happening or it isn’t. True or false. P or ¬P.
is extremely unlikely to be true in my opinion.
Is an argument from ignorance. Not trying to be rude, but this is basic logic.
How the fuck does anyone even buy one of these
The same people who buy mobile phones; despite those being bugs/spy-devices.
Phones are at least easier to justify since everyone kinda needs one now and there aren’t many great private options, especially for the lay person
If you give up your freedom for convenience, then you will lose both.
I mean yeah, but for a lot of people if they ditch their phone they’ll also lose their job and possibly relationships they value.
Cell phones spying on people isn’t good, but most people are simply not informed about how invasive they are and couldn’t make an informed decision if they tried. Pair that with the fact that cell phones are essential for a lot of modern life, and it’s not difficult to see why the average person is generally more wary of smart speakers than cell phones.
The whole damn situation was a trap.
Amazon really got people to pay to be spied on. Wild world we live in bois
They typed from their device that is also spying on them that they most likely also paid for…
Please, sir I have a pager
Want to setup a more privacy friendly solution?
Have a look at Home Assistant! It’s a great open source smart home platform that recently released a local (so not processing requests in the cloud) voice assistant. It’s pretty neat!
I have one big frustration with that: Your voice input has to be understood PERFECTLY by TTS.
If you have a “To Do” list, and speak “Add cooking to my To Do list”, it will do it! But if the TTS system understood:
- Todo
- To-do
- to do
- ToDo
- To-Do
- …
The system will say it couldn’t find that list. Same for the names of your lights, asking for the time,… and you have very little control over this.
HA Voice Assistant either needs to find a PERFECT match, or you need to be running a full-blown LLM as the backend, which honestly works even worse in many ways.
They recently added the option to use LLM as fallback only, but for most people’s hardware, that means that a big chunk of requests take a suuuuuuuper long time to get a response.
I do not understand why there’s no option to just use the most similar command upon an imperfect matching, through something like the Levenshtein Distance.
Because it takes time to implement. It will come.
I have always told people to avoid Amazon.
They have doorbells to watch who comes to your house and when.
Indoor and outdoor security cameras to monitor when you go outside, for how long, and why.
They acquired roomba, which not only maps out your house, but they have little cameras in them as well, another angle to monitor you through your house in more personal areas that indoor cameras might not see.
They have the Alexa products meant to record you at all times for their own use and intent.
Why do you think along with Amazon Prime subscriptions you get free cloud storage, free video streaming, free music? They are categorizing you in the most efficient and accurate way possible.
Boycott anything Amazon touches
I agree with your sentiment and despise Amazon but they do not own roomba the deal fell through.
Now they can hear me scream “shut the fuck up Alexa!!!” every time she says “…by the way…” when I just want to know what time it is.
Say this: “Alexa, disable by the way”
“Alexa, from now on, call me ‘Big Dick Daddy from Cincinnati’.”
Wait hold on
I wonder if I can get the Google assistant British lady to call me that
Edit: Lmfao it works
