• LifeOfChance@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I call absolute bullshit on this. They’re losing out on the sale of the device but make up for it 20 fold by selling and manipulating data it collects in your house. This isn’t even conspiracy loads of people report Alexa going off randomly without any sort of prompt. Don’t tell me the device isn’t listening closely to every little conversation you have.

    • yesman@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Don’t be paranoid. An Eco Dot literally can’t tell you the time w/o phoning home. You can watch the network traffic it produces. No way it’s transmitting 24h of audio. And if you think about it, millions of Alexa devices recording 24/7 audio would generate more traffic than porn. And that’s before Amazon has paid a nickel to process any of that audio.

      When it comes to eavesdropping on “every little conversation” They don’t, they can’t, it would be stupid to try.

      • aStonedSanta@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        God. I’m imagining the nightmare this would look like passing through a network. Everyone with more than 1 would probably notice rather quick. The poor router being forced to just spew lol

      • sudo@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        It can only recognize certain hotwords on its own, eg, Alexa. So its not recording 24/7 but it is listening 24/7 for hotwords. They could push additional words and start recording whenever they hear it.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      This isn’t even conspiracy loads of people report Alexa going off randomly without any sort of prompt. Don’t tell me the device isn’t listening closely to every little conversation you have.

      This definitely is conspiracy. You’re claiming that Amazon is secretly conspiring to make Alexa devices behave differently than they advertise them to. That’s like the definition of conspiracy lol. But that aside, I really don’t believe this. What’s the exact claim, that they’re always listening? No, they don’t. People can analyze the traffic and tell that’s false. That they’re intentionally overly sensitive? I have an easier time beginning to buy that but I still think we’d see more quantitative articles about that if it were true. Like we haven’t had whistle blowers or security researchers saying anything like that.

    • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I got a free Echo Dot a number of years ago when I attended an AWS conference. I played briefly with it but never found it all that useful. I certainly never would have trusted using it to order things from Amazon, which is one of the things they hoped people would do. It sat in a pile of junk for a year or so before I finally got rid of it.

    • sfxrlz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      this. It’s the same as with phones, just more obvious because they(Alexa devices) can’t do most of the other stuff you can do on a smartphone.

      And because it might not be that legal or ethical or a good look to customers, they‘d rather not disclose it and hide the revenue partly through their „normal“ ad business or other venues. But that’s just my guess.

    • PanArab@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      The device has to be always on and always listening, that’s how it works. Else it won’t hear your prompt.

      Siri on the iPhone too is always listening. Every time I have a conversation about something with my wife, the next day I see ads for it online.