‘Alexa, what do you know about us?’ What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything my family’s smart speaker had heard
‘Alexa, what do you know about us?’ What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything my family’s smart speaker had heard
In 2023, 60% of UK households had a smart speaker, up from 22% before the pandemic.
Jesus Christ. I had no idea so many people were buying these things. That's astounding.
If you'd asked me to guess what percentage of households had one, I'd have guessed single digits.
60% of people in UK are certified morons. Slightly higher than I expected.
What is the absofuckingworstly scariest thing about this is that I've personally read quite a few sci-fi books, like in half of them, like in any universe, such things were usually a Trojan horse by the threat of the week to exterminate the good guys, or at least Palpatine's way of spying, or whatever.
OK, Palpatine's coolest microphone was decorative trees with skin changing colors depending on vibrations, and a very complex system of restoring the sounds from image, if I remember that correctly, in one X-Wing book.
So how the hell does it happen that such things are presented in movies and books and series like a threat, and yet people buy them?
I can believe in people loving touchscreens because touchscreens were unfortunately popularized in Star Trek and even, sigh, Star Wars prequels, and everything sci-fi.
But this is something that was being recommended against in such media for decades.
A Torment Nexus sounds cool
I have three unopened google pucks that I received as gifts over the years.
I had four, but I opened one to take apart to help identify if it was possible to hack it.
at the time it was not. the only part that can be reused it the plastic shell.
The most concerning part about this article is that they put one in their nine-year-old's bedroom.
Based on the article, it lets her ask them things that she doesn't want to ask her parents, though I'm not sure that if I were 9 years old that I'd suddenly want to discover that my parents have a list of everything I've asked it and are reading through it, much less that Amazon has a database.
To add to the other responses, and I suspect the real reason, is that Coco is listening to Audible Audio books regularly and/or music. It's mentioned and then dropped by the article fairly quickly.
Interesting how every comment on the article is doing the "you're a terrible parent, how could you do that" routine when I'll bet it's there because Coco either took the first one in or asked for a second one. Kid wants, kid normally gets one way or another.
Also, surely this device is no different to a phone in that neither is meant to be listening indiscriminately. There's a chance a 9 year old has a phone nowadays I'd imagine
Why?
Edit: No one answers the question yet downvotes me for asking a simple question that wasn’t clearly answered in the article. That article really didn’t say anything outside of Amazon documents every prompt ever.
And also a link to all of your Amazon data:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/preview.html
Its kinda depressing that the takeaway they seem have here is "we don't always have enough time for our family, but luckily Alexa can pick up the slack 😌"
Instead of "society pushes us to spend less time making meaningful connections and more time relying on services that cost you money or privacy"
Somebody's toddler is going to eat rocks after AI tells them it's safe, especially if you're giving your kids unfettered access to the internet, which is what Alexa is. You're just hoping Jeffy moderates good, when you and I both know rules and restrictions for an LLM are very hard to enforce.
I was thinking about their horrifying conclusion as well, and your comment made me pine for the days when you wouldn't know something. Think about it, back before the internet, if you had a random question, you either had to interact with some trusted person, or you went to the library and looked it up. It's like the ever-present access to all information has quelled or killed any notion of curiosity or boredom, and it's within those frames of mind that learning and inspiration come. I remember as a kid when I wouldn't know the answer to something, I'd think on it for days, weeks. I'd get stuck on a video game level, and hit my head against the wall for hours trying to overcome it, only to pick up a random gamer magazine off the rack at the mall, and read the solution. Treating that magazine like it was the lost treasure map of some ancient expedition, passing it around my group of friends... Interactions and experiences that are gone forever.
The idea that we've gradually went from relying on trusted professionals, learned educators, and scientific rigor, replacing them with a corporations data-harvesting LLM, on-line influencers, and click-bait "journals" cosplaying as academic centers with integrity. This article is basically celebrating the fact that we've off-shored all of our thinking, curiosity, and inquisitiveness to machines, all the while we struggle for scraps in a corporation dominated life devoid of genuine human interaction. We're all to busy sipping dopamine hits from a screen instead of actually living our lives.
I grew up while the internet was being slowly rolled out, and being from the last generation to remember what it was like before the internet, I can say that the things I miss most are privacy, the ability to be bored, and not knowing.
It's worse now, and it's harder everyday to imagine that life on this planet will improve.
So it's exactly the same as before the Echo, then. Welcome to the human condition.
I asked my google home the same question and it told me that I told it that my dog is a good girl 3 times. I know it's not great for privacy, but it made me chuckle.
I asked that to chatgpt once and it's answer was something like "You like to translate R code to Python" just because I sometimes ask it's to translate R to Python, but I don't personally like it
You don't like doing it so you ask something else to do it for you.
It's completely irrelevant to the article, but I can't believe nobody mentioned how many fucking headphones this person goes through lol
particulars of every purchase I’ve ever made – from the noir novel I bought on the day that Amazon UK launched to the 28th pair of headphones acquired in as many years
they have hostile lobes
someone need to backbone capitalism, he is a hero
Maybe they have lots of ears.
"In as many years" is doing a lot of work there. I dont think Amazon was selling headphones in 1997.
That said if they are spending 10-40 bucks on headphones a year they are doing alright.
Clearly written by a Ferengi.
I absolutely tear through headphones. When they're wired, the wire breaks where it meets the earpiece. When they're wireless, the battery last like two hours. The USB port on my phone is long dead, and they don't sell phones with the old headphone jack that didn't break.
But I still refuse to be that guy playing music on the bus.
Get a tiny carrying pouch for your wired headphones and they will last a lot longer
I feel like I looked into a bag labeled 'everything Alexa has ever heard' and gone, "I don't know what I expected."
On the other side of the coin, the shock shouldn't be what it knows, but what every single other device you own with a micrphone might also know.
Anyone here that isn't as equally distrusting of a stock, off the shelf cellphone is lying to themselves.
I honestly thought this was !nosleep@lemm.ee for a second
you can go into the app and literally see your request history
I cannot comprehend people who agree to have a spy in their own home and they even pay for the privilege.
Its easy, people simply dont even think that it could be used to spy on them. Its just handy and funny tool. There is HUGE problem in the world with majority still naively trusting corporations to such extent saying anything to contrary seems like you are some conspiracy nut. Or if they don't trust them naively, they are so apathetic that they just think their information leaking doesnt matter, it can't be stopped anyway and that they just dont care about it.
Something really should be done to start having people care about things again, otherwise everyone will lose all rights to privacy eventually.
The worst ones know they are being spied on, but say things like they don't mind being spied on because "I have nothing to hide anyway"
I mean, I have some, because I already know my phone is spying on me even more aggressively. I don't have any illusion that I had privacy in the first place
"Pizza Over Privacy", a Stanford study... https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/pizza-over-privacy-paradox-digital-age Basically, people trade their privacy for convenience and don't consider the long term cost.
While I don't dispute the thesis, this is deeply flawed.
I have HomePods to activate my lights, and listen to the news in the shower. Sure, it doesn’t do all the fancy shit that Alexa does, but at least Apple has a track record of respecting privacy.
...to keep the same amount of data for themselve.
Don't kid yourself. Apple collects the same amount as everyone else does. And if either get hacked, it doesnt matter if they keep it or sell it.
They do, so far. I test these machines for privacy claims as a hobby and have been a bit surprised to find Apple stuff mostly delivering on those claims. I’m used to seeing a lot of dark patterns in testing and it’s made me expect the worst, but so far they’ve followed through on (in particular) their end-to-end encryption and on-device processing guarantees. Security audit failures so far have appeared to be engineering oversights, and the ones I reported have been patched already.
The majority of user data they collect appears to be optional analytics and diagnostics that are properly encrypted and anonymized using the same pooling strategy used for their built-in VPN service. They recently started doing processing off-device for some new features related to the Apple intelligence thing (I haven’t gotten around to testing most of that) but otherwise anything siri-related is indeed processed locally. You can toggle a setting to allow anonymized siri recordings to be sent to Apple for quality control but they ask you permission each time you reset a device and re-confirm when you install updates, which IMO is adequate.
Edit: Yes this is the opposite of what the other guy said. He is, to put it delicately, talking out his ass. There are good reasons to hate Apple, such as the fact that it’s a massive soulless corporation raping the planet to make luxury electronics for affluent consumers, but for most of the rabid apple conspiracy theorists I find online the reasons seem to be far more selfish and petty than that.
I sold my Alexa devices when the Sidewalk crap came out
Still waiting for a replacement for the Echo Show though, having a smart speaker with a display was handy at times
Next up: 2+2=5
I have a theory that they understand this is wrong, but also feel the social pressure (ads work this way, remember), and thus decide to go all way in, in the most absurd ways, fully, to suppress their feeling of doing a stupid thing.
OK, not a theory, rather my experience with starting to use an Android phone
https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/preview.html
Your phone is doing it too. TV too, if you have one. Don't forget about your doorbell!
Not unless they're overriding the controls for that (Which - yeah that's possible) and TV? hell no. Doorbell? Nah man it just goes ding.
Mine don't.
My phone runs open source ROMs. I don't have a TV, but I do have an nVidia streaming box -- I don't assume anything I watch there is private. My doorbell is an electromechanical device hooked to a simple wire.