If you were using one, you were already okay with this.
Yeah. Hell, chances are they were already
My parents have an Alexa and I have no choice in whether they install one in our house or not. I doubt they would be convinced by my pleas about privacy. So unfortunately and reduction in whatever privacy that was left is a shame.
Which Pinevox or Openvoice may be an alternative one day. I think I recall HomeAssistant had something in the works too.
Amazon really got people to pay to be spied on. Wild world we live in bois
Who pays for Alexa?
Everyone who didn’t get an echo as a gift, I’d imagine
Plenty of people I know have gotten the little echo dots or the bigger alternative with larger speakers for Christmas or birthdays. Technically they didn’t spend money, but their friends and family did.
I see. The initial purchase price is the “payment”. I thought the intimation was some sort of subscription to use Alexa. My bad.
They are usually on sale for less than $20
They typed from their device that is also spying on them that they most likely also paid for…
Please, sir I have a pager
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
Yet, you probably use an Apple iPhone or an Android device. You should be avoiding all 3 of these, which I have been since inception.
You guessed that I use an apple device or an android. Your guess are the top two options that capture 99% of the market? Wow, super genius thought process
I agree with your sentiment and despise Amazon but they do not own roomba the deal fell through.
Christ, finally a win
That is actually good news to hear. Not completely good on my part for being incorrect about ownership, but once I saw the proposed deal back when it was announced, I immediately added them to the “no I don’t think I will.” list of products I won’t support.
Cheers for the clarification mate
They backed out of the Roomba deal. Now iRobot is going down the shitter.
everything you say to your echo/alexa has always been sent to amazon.
theres literally been leaks proving it.
I thought so… I was like wait what dont they already have to process all that data?! And no doubt its in a db somewhere… thats just how things are done. Even if they werent a malicious company, they would still need to save the data to improve the product and for analytics…
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.
People are saying don’t get an echo but this is the tip of an iceberg. My coworkers’ cell phones are eavesdropping. My neighbors doorbells record every time I leave the house. Almost every new vehicle mines us for data. We can avoid some of the problem but we cannot avoid it all. We need a bigger, more aggressive solution if we are going to have a solution at all.
How about regulation? Let’s start with saying data about me belongs to me, not to whoever collected the data, as is currently the case
Jam the mic? https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08Y5GGP4D
Works on my phone…
the irony of posting an amazon link…
They create a problem, then sell the solution.
My clunky old bike ain’t listening to shit bro. Neither is my android phone using a custom rom.
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.
I mean there’s no legal reason that would exist now that didn’t before.
My guess is that they did honor the setting, but that was because the amount of people that used it was so low vs the total number of people that used the devices. Now with smart speaker adoption rates declining, and their desire to train AI, they have to dip into the pool of people that opted not to share.
The setting mentioned in the email was on by default. So they definitely were, they’re just removing the ability to turn it off.
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’ve seen something about this pop up occasionally on my feed, but it’s usually a conversation I’m nowhere close to understanding lol
Could you recommend any resources for a complete noob?
home assistant is amazing but it is not yet an alternative to Alexa, the assistant/voice is still in development and far from being usable. it’s impossible for me to remember the specific wording assist demands and voice to text is incorrect like nine out of ten times. And this includes giving up on terrible locally hosted models trying out their cloud which obviously is a huge privacy hole, but even then it was slow and inaccurate. It’s a mystery to me how the foss community is so behind on voice, Siri and Google Assistant started working offline years ago, and they work straight on a mobile device.
Yeah, just avoid the oligarchy tech
I agree. Although it’s nearly impossible at this point. Especially with Amazon running a significant portion of the internet with AWS. Each one of us most likely touches an Amazon server multiple times a day, even if we don’t have any Amazon subscriptions.
That doesn’t matter. You only need to worry about boycotting things within your control, like Amazon shopping and their consumer products. AWS is profitable, but so is Amazon.com.
Buying something at a different store is always a dub even if that store is using AWS on the backend.
Like the other person said, you can at least control what you interact with directly. So you cancel your Prime subscription and turn your lights with your hand instead of an Echo but you don’t worry so much about trying to figure out if any of the several companies involved in making [product] have some form of attachment to AWS.
And there will be some level of consumption in this horrible system that’s not gunna be good in order for you to not be horribly depressed but people can shed more than they think and alternatives do exist for many of the ones you might put at lower priority.
true, but there’s a lot you can do on the hardware side with an arduino-or esp32/pi pico if you need networking.
How the fuck does anyone even buy one of these
You can get them on Amazon.
Well played.
You can also buy some on Facebook Marketplace.
The same people who buy mobile phones; despite those being bugs/spy-devices.
True, but a mobile phone is basically a world brain, calculator, camera, flashlight, you can watch movies on it in hi def, hate it all you want, it’s one of the most versatile tools on the planet. An echo dot, it just spy garbage and nothing else
I mean what better spot to syphon of each and every piece of information about you…
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, it’s not convience. It’s outright necessary for most jobs.
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.
Lmao. Why complain about one and try to justify the other…
I meant they’re easier to justify in the sense that I see why people don’t put much thought into putting a spying device in their pocket, not that I agree with the disregard. Most peoples’ friends, family, employers, etc. all expect them to have a cell phone and be available by it. Additionally, the way most people interact with their phones, the spying is much less obvious. They joke about them “always listening”, but a lot of people don’t understand the privacy concerns of pretty typical internet use, so the fact that the device has more than just a microphone, it appears to be worth it to a more typical consumer than us.
Contrast that with an Alexa, google home, or apple home thing, devices which nobody cares if someone else doesn’t own, which most people only see as a microphone and speaker, and whose primary functionality is to always be listening to you. The skepticism is much easier to arise.
I’m not saying the level at which cell phones spy on their users is acceptable or even worth it, just that I see why the average user who isn’t conscious of their privacy doesn’t regard them with the same concern they do smart speakers.
At least, on mobile devices, it’s typically easier to install a privacy-focused firmware (like LineageOS or GrapheneOS). Those AI assistants are completely locked down.
I am sorry but the telephony system itself is fundamentally a privacy threat.
Wait till you find out about the internet and social media (including here).
So is the internet.
More directly comparable, is the Ring cameras inside the house.
@richardisaguy @Tea sometimes they just come free with stuff. We got given two Google ones when my husband bought a Pixel phone. We were going to sell them on but we never got round to it. You can physically turn off the microphone part though (at least it tells you it’s turned off so fingers crossed) so we use the one with a screen as a digital photo frame (and a speaker) and the other one as just a speaker.
I have a bunch in my house. It’s a glorified radio all I use it for is:
- Set timer for x minute
- What time is it
- Ask CBC to play radio one Toronto
- What is the weather today
For the convenience I accept the mining they may do.
Lists are also very handy!
They literally could just leave the feature on the device, but then you can’t force your users to send you all their data, voices, thoughts and first borns
Fuck Amazon, fuck Bezos
If you do not want to set your voice recordings setting to ‘Don’t save recordings,’ please follow these steps before March 28th:
Am I the only one curious to know what these steps are? The image cuts off the rest of the email.
- Unplug your amazon echo devices
- Hit it with a hammer
- Send it to an electronics recycler
If anyone else is wondering, I’ve not found a verbatim quote of the steps but I did see an article that mentioned the consequences. It seems like you will be able to turn this off but it will disable Voice ID:
anyone with their Echo device set to “Don’t save recordings” will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked. Voice ID enables Alexa to do things like share user-specified calendar events, reminders, music, and more. Previously, Amazon has said that “if you choose not to save any voice recordings, Voice ID may not work.” As of March 28, broken Voice ID is a guarantee for people who don’t let Amazon store their voice recordings.
The old “privacy focused” setting made speech processing local. The new “privacy focused setting” means that processing will happen on a remote server, but Amazon won’t store the audio after it’s been processed. Amazon could still fingerprint voices with the new setting, to know if it was you or your parents/parter/kid/roommate/whomever and give a person specific response, but for now at least they appear to not be doing so.
This all seems like it’s missing the point to me. If you own one of these devices you’re giving up privacy for convenience. With the old privacy setting you were still sending your processed speech to a server nearly every time you interacted with one of those devices because they can’t always react/provide a response on their own. Other than trying to avoid voice fingerprinting, it doesn’t seem like the old setting would gain you much privacy. They still know the device associated to the interaction, know where the device is located, which accounts it’s associated with, what the interaction was, etc. They can then fuse this information with tons of other data collected from different devices, like a phone or computer. They don’t need your unprocessed speech to know way too much about you.
I can’t believe people are still voluntarily wire tapping themselves in 2025
Do the device you wrote this on have a microphone?
None of my devices have one that’s lacking a physical switch to disable it.
Yes, but they’ll conveniently ignore that on devices they are addicted to.
be aware, everything you say around amazon, apple, alphabet, meta, and any other corporate trash products are being sold, trained on, and sent to your local alphabet agency. it’s been this way for a while, but this is a nice reminder to know when to speak and when to listen
Everyone literally carries a personal recording device.
not everyone. and some people build their own or have ways of mitigating surveillance capitalism
