Re:Ask HN: Is it safe to use Alexa Echo?
by dreamcompiler on Thursday October 12, 2017 @01:19PM
(#15459556)
In a word, no. For two reasons:
1. You cannot audit or enforce that Amazon is not listening all the time and misusing your data. Taking their word for it is simply not good enough. (This is even more true for Google since their business model is based on selling your personal information to advertisers.)
2. In-home devices now have more-than-adequate computational power to recognize speech without shipping the signal off to the cloud for processing. But this wouldn't let them sell your data to advertisers, so you don't see many devices that work this way, and the big companies continue to tell us the devices have to be cloud connected. They are simply lying.
1. You cannot audit or enforce that Amazon is not listening all the time and misusing your data. Taking their word for it is simply not good enough. (This is even more true for Google since their business model is based on selling your personal information to advertisers.)
2. In-home devices now have more-than-adequate computational power to recognize speech without shipping the signal off to the cloud for processing. But this wouldn't let them sell your data to advertisers, so you don't see many devices that work this way, and the big companies continue to tell us the devices have to be cloud connected. They are simply lying.