this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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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.
Audio esp for voices can be super compressed, it's not like music, few hours of low quality audio can be as little as a few MB. There is also hardware transcoding and as the exact modifications of the SOC aren't public, it could be doing that too
Don't be naive about how shitty corporations are, they are not really disincentivized to not break laws as the fines are just a cost of business.
It doesn't even have to be that much. Obviously these devices can do sound to text conversion, that's how they interpret commands. That can convert hours of stored conversation to text, zip it up and send it as a few kilobytes along with the next network request it makes for a legit purpose.
Do you really think one of those cheap little nuggets has the computing power to do that? The only thing it really does locally is listen to the wake word, everything else, including audio, it sends off to the Zon.
No way is it sitting there converting everything it hears to text.
If my cheap ass $250 cad phone can do it locally I'm sure the echo can too
We would easily be able to tell if an Alexa was constantly streaming audio data by monitoring its network traffic. It'd be just a wasteful inefficient implementation to stream everything 24/7. Makes much more sense to only start recording when it hears certain keywords that it can recognize locally beyond "Alexa".
Who says it's constantly streamed? Who says it's not stored or transcribed then sent off in a small package?
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
Porn is generally video and audio with an acceptable quality standard for consumers, which is incomparable in size to compressed audio.
It's weird that people always think the Alexa shit is spying on them, but happily walk around with a smartphone in their pocket which is infinitely more capable of doing do.
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.
Honestly, they can just send the keywords. No need to send audio if they can match 1000 or so words that are most meaningful to advertisers and send counts of those.
AFAIK this is only speculated, not proven.
I can see why people are quick to think this but I don't see any compelling evidence this is the case, and as others have pointed out it would be impractical for them to do so.
More likely they use it for consumer lock-in and to collect data through its api endpoints. Collecting media activity and smart home device information is valuable enough on its own, before even approaching the value of collecting recorded audio.
They can already intuit consumer habits/word of mouth exposure from other associated data with your online activity. After locking down all my other privacy, the ads I get are far less relevant to me, even though I have a number of smart listening devices in my home
There's also the matter of there being literally hundreds of security and privacy researchers who would love nothing more than to catch Amazon doing this, and no one has in any major way.
It's always listening. They don't debate that.
Sure, no one is saying that. The point is that it doesn't send anything other than the stuff after the keywords back to company servers.
Or what it thinks is a keyword. Correct.
Well, obviously it operates on what it believes is a keyword. It does not have magically divine insight. Are you trying to imply they make them overly sensitive? I don't see the problem. Imagine the opposite. If they responded to less things they thought were keywords people would just think they're broken.
Just wanted to highlight they miss trigger.
Some hackers have found that there is builtin protection in the hardware that guarantees the led turns on when the device listens
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.
We have had stories like this one where marketers claim to be able to actively listen:
https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/
Whether you believe them or not is important. But they are secretly claiming to have this capability.
Article doesn't mention Alexa which is specifically what we're talking about, but I get your point.
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.
Even if it is listening, based on the article, it seems the current CEO wants Alexa itself to be profitable. He doesn't want another division of Amazon to be profitable because of Alexa.
From an article I remember reading like 6 months ago, it's not even doing that. They thought people would use their Alexa for shopping, very few people did that.
Conspiracy means there are people conspiring meaning it is a conspiracy fact. I mention this coz the next comment says it IS but goes on to back up it is not a conspiracy because wording
Build box with speakers. Place over Alexa. Play Jerry Falwell sermons on the speakers.
If it is, it's impressively doing all of the data processing locally, otherwise any nerd with Wireshark would have caught it.
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.