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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure how you monetize “Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes.”
That’s pretty much all we use it for.
If their store was good I think more people would be ok buying via Alexa. But even searching on the web or app, the top result is hardly ever the correct thing I searched for
I kinda feel like voice search is just an inherently bad platform for shopping.
Supposedly… Home & Kitchen is the most popular category on Amazon, consumer choice comes into that so rapidly that it’s hard for it to make sense with just audio feedback or even a tiny screen like the show.
If they charge as much as a penny annually, it’s binned.
It’s like they shockingly didn’t think people would ever realize they didn’t need it.
Yeah I can live with having to turn on my bedroom lights manually. Certainly not paying 5 a month for that
Mines been unplugged for over 3 years, since I got google hub.
Then that started to need to be reset every month so I unplugged that too and now I’m happier without any of that bullshit.
Gee whizz, who would have thought that building your entire platform on deceptive practices would make people not trust you?
They will be fine. If that asshole can afford to go to space and argue that workers rights are unconstitutional then they can eat it. It’s called capitalism.
Paywalled. But I must say I’m very unsurprised that people are not using Alexa to buy things…
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IF you are in accounting, especially if you are in regulatory compliance accounting, or going into it, you NEED to know about a book named “Financial Shenanigans”.
I’m not intellectually-equal to it ( or to accounting, for that matter: psychology’s much easier to crack, for me ), but it is THE most important book for forensic-accountants to know.
The bullshit that they’ve been pulling, where “Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon had more than $25 billion in losses from its devices business, according to the documents. The losses for the years before and after that period couldn’t be determined.” didn’t produce criminal consequences…
You’ve got to be kidding, right?
Individual human goes to jail or prison for $2k tax fraud, but … big tech gets a free pass on that kind of “accounting”??
couldn’t be determined??
Either run a tight-ship or don’t be surprised when it sinks.
Economies are the “ships” that carry our countries, & have to be properly regulated, exactly as a tightly-regulated ship has to be, to keep it afloat longer.
It isn’t the sloppy mechanic-racers who win NASCAR, it is the ones who control everything correctly, with total right-regulation.
I remember when I’d read that Cisco switched to closing their books out daily, so as to always know the exact position of the company…
what an incredible degree of financial-operations integrity that was…
Anyways, “Financial Shenanigans” is THE book to dig into, if you want to know if the business you’re considering investing in is cooking the books… and you’re capable of understanding that stuff at the level it’s speaking…
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If you’re going to post pay walled content, most people will either use a gift article link, or just paste the text of the article into a comment.
