Man, that is pretty reductive. There is a lot of nuance here, and to act like this is somehow a priori "immoral" is not a reasonable conclusion. This behavior is clearly related to trying to provide the service that people bought. We can argue over it being immoral or not, but this isn't as cut and dry as you are making it out to be.

Of course, you already said I am a shill, so I don't know why I am trying to respond.

It's not that nuanced in this case. These things are literally wire-taps. You can have a voice assistant that does just about as well as Alexa/Echo/etc, without having to sacrifice your data privacy.

Are you sure about that? Every offline voice assistant I have tried does a lot worse than Alexa. You have any examples of ones that are as good?

What's your metric? And are these offline assistants smartphone apps? NLP is expensive computing, so it'd make sense for those to do poorly. And this doesn't even have to strictly be offline; You can have your data processed online in a privacy-respecting way, so long as you actually know what's going on under the hood and have control over the data.

My shill is MyCroft[0]. They're partnered with Mozilla to develop an open source NLP engine[1], so I have high hopes for it.

[0] https://mycroft.ai/

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech

It does look promising, but it also seems like it has yet to get to the point of working "just about as well as Alexa/Echo/etc." – which means it's an open question whether it will be able to.

"This behavior is clearly related to trying to provide the service that people bought."

OK I have a device that will let you do all your chores for free and for no work. Oh now I need slavery to be legal. It's ok tho - im trying to provide the service people bought.

See how a tangible example makes tech monoliths flaunting of the law sound ridiculous? Yes. You sound like a shill.

This argument makes no sense. How is this anything like slavery? And what law are they flaunting?

Yeah, I always assume that anyone who disagrees with me is a paid shill too. It makes things so much simpler!

Id refer you to the Wikipedia list of logical fallacies.

Amazon apart, what's inmmoral about labeling data that you got with the consent of the user?

It's hard to appreciate what you are saying when you're basically judging the incentive of economic/technological progress as an inmmoral behavior (in this case the intention of improving a technology)

Labeling data and training a machine learning model sounds far from inmoral. Perhaps for some people the idea of companies developing machine learning models and capturing data to train them is an ethically gray concept.

Does Amazon clearly says that everything you say to Alexa will be recorded and reviewed by its employees? Or they prefer to hide this somewhere in the legal documents using vague wordings? That's what is wrong. They know that if they say about it explicitly, their product will look worse than competitors', so they try to hide it.

Everything you say is not reviewed by employees, that would be impossible given the scale. It clearly says in the article that a very small sample are chosen for human annotation. Every single voice assistant uses supervised machine learning algorithmns, which require labeled data. It won't look better or worse than any of the others in that regard.

Yes, I meant "everything you say is recorded and might be reviewed by employees". But Amazon doesn't have to make every customer a beta-tester. And Alexa could give a warning when setting up for the first time, something like "Look, we are recording everything you tell me so please don't say something too embarassing or something that might get you into a trouble with police". While this is what any honest person should do, no way Amazon or any other major tech company does this.

I don't disagree, it probably should be made more explicit to customers that someone could listen to certain things said to the device. I just wanted to point out that there is a big difference between reviewing everything a customer says and having the possibility of certain phrases reviewed.

> Does Amazon clearly says that everything you say to Alexa will be recorded and reviewed by its employees?

Thing is, they can't possibly review everything. Tagging is hard. The taggers can accomplish 1000 data points per day, as the article says. They can only cover a tiny portion of the Alexa data, and probably they use some algorithm to select which part would benefit the model most.

> Amazon apart, what's inmmoral about labeling data that you got with the consent of the user?

They don't have my consent and I'm increasingly surrounded by the damn things. Take a look at the comments about hotels, new condos, etc. that have Alexa or Google Home installed. And, of course, friends and family.

When did I give anyone consent? Because I used a monopoly's search engine? Because Facebook has data on me when I don't have an account?

And more to the point - what kind of hell is this where getting permission to my data where I have no say on the unethical ways they use it?

You're doing exactly what I'm saying with the shilling tho.

Everyone who disagrees with you is a shill. Got it.

Yeah I heard another shill say that a minute ago. No. Disagree all you want. I love dialectic and I'm always ready to change my mind.

It's just that there's a retarded level of corporate love in the world.

Dismissing someone as a shill, an ad hominem, is not a dialectic argument.

Agreed. And it's pretty obvious too. If you ever have some serious misgivings about any of these IoT privacy invasions and voice it in a comment, a deluge of comments scolding you for being a Luddite start appearing within seconds.