Technology

Amazon really got people to pay to be spied on. Wild world we live in bois

If anyone remembers the Mycroft Mark II Voice Assistant Kickstarter and was disappointed when development challenges and patent trolls caused the company's untimely demise, know that hope is not lost for a FOSS/OSHW voice assistant insulated from Big Tech..

FAQ: OVOS, Neon, and the Future of the Mycroft Voice Assistant

Disclaimer: I do not represent any of these organizations in any way; I just believe in their mission and wish them all the success in getting there by spreading the word.

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

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 didn't even know this was a feature. My understanding has always been that Echo devices work as follows.

1. Store a constant small buffer of the past few seconds of audio
2. Locally listen for the wake word (typically "Alexa") using onboard hardware. (This is why you cannot use arbitrary wake words.)
3. Upon hearing the wake word, send the buffer from step one along with any fresh audio to the cloud to process what was said.
4. Act on what was said. (Turn lights on or off, play Spotify, etc.)

Unless they made some that were able to do step 3 locally entirely I don't see this as a big deal. They still have to do step 4 remotely.

Also, while they may be "always recording" they don't transmit everything. It's only so if you say "Alexaturnthelightsoff" really fast it has a better chance of getting the full sentence.

I'm not trying to defend Amazon, and I don't necessarily think this is great news or anything, but it doesn't seem like too too big of a deal unless they made a lot of devices that could parse all speech locally and I didn't know.

No way! The microphones you put all over your house are listening to you? What a shocker!
If you bought these this is on you. Trash them now.

If you traveled back in time and told J. Edgar Hoover that in the future, the American public voluntarily wire-tapped themselves, he would cream his frilly pink panties.

Maybe I misread the actual text, but it sounds like the exact opposite, that it's going to auto-delete what you say.

I can’t believe people are still voluntarily wire tapping themselves in 2025

How disheartening. I knew going in that there would be privacy issues but I figured for the service it was fine. I also figure my phone is always listening anyway.

As someone with limited mobility, my echo has been really nice to control my smart devices like lights and TV with just my voice.

Are there good alternatives or should I just accept things as they are?

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

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.

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

So... if you own an inexpensive Alexa device, it just doesn't have the horsepower to process your requests on-device. Your basic $35 device is just a microphone and a wifi streamer (ok, it also handles buttons and fun LED light effects). The Alexa device SDK can run on a $5 ESP-32. That's how little it needs to work on-site.

Everything you say is getting sent to the cloud where it is NLP processed, parsed, then turned into command intents and matched against the devices and services you've installed. It does a match against the phrase 'slots' and returns results which are then turned into voice and played back on the speaker.

With the new LLM-based Alexa+ services, it's all on the cloud. Very little of the processing can happen on-device. If you want to use the service, don't be surprised the voice commands end up on the cloud. In most cases, it already was.

If you don't like it, look into Home Assistant. But last I checked, to keep everything local and not too laggy, you'll need a super beefy (expensive) local home server. Otherwise, it's shipping your audio bits out to the cloud as well. There's no free lunch.

I honestly have no idea why anyone who cares even 1% about their privacy would have ever bought one of these abominations in the first place. If I ever receive one as a gift I will burn it with fire.

Amazon employee with no piss breaks listening in on my echo:

"How many fucking cats does this guy have? Just chose one name and call it that!"

Edit: "I don't know Jeff, sell him a fucking dr seuss book or something the guys mental."

Publicly, that is. They have no doubt been doing it in secret since they launched it.

Easy fix: don't buy this garbage to begin with. It's terrible for the environment, terrible for your privacy, of dubious value to begin with.

If every man is an onion, one of my deeper layers is crumudgeon. So take that into account when I say fuck all portable speakers. I'm so tired of hearing everyone's shitty noise. Just fucking everywhere. It takes one person feeling entitled to blast the shittiest music available to ruin everyone in a 500yd radius's day. If this is you, I hope you stub your toe on every coffee table, hit your head on every door jam, miss every bus.

The part that really gets me is that you have to opt out to not have everything you say saved. Bonkers that that isn't the default! There's no good user-based reason for this. Alexa doesn't remember shit for users, like any AI there's no recall feature. You can't say remember what I told you last night - give the address for that place, I was drunk and don't remember the name.

Today: "...they will be deleted after Alexa processes your requests."

Some point in the not-so-distant future: "We are reaching out to let you know that your voice recordings will no longer be deleted. As we continue to expand Alexa's capabilities, we have decided to no longer support this feature."

What happens if I buy one and start playing porn on my computer ?

I don't think Google home listens in.

Because I'd absolutely be disappeared by now if it did.

Only a fool would put an Amazon listening device in their home.