Many (most?) that buy them don’t understand the value exchange they are signing up for. Look at all the breathless articles about how humans listen to Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Google, etc assistant chats. That’s an standard expectation from anyone that gets close to working with supervised learning but from the reporting and interviews it seems many didn’t know. How could they with the ever growing legal soup of privacy policies and tos.

I’d love to see a counter product but more than that I’d like to see more standardized and short/brief lay person understandable policies. Maybe like a nutrition label but for consumer data.

> But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that.

"is worth it" requires people to be fully aware of what's going on.

I've described what some of these devices are doing based on product announcements, patents, investigative news stories, and that sort of thing. I've had numerous people tell me that I'm wrong. That they don't believe companies are doing this.

This has caused me to come to the conclusion that people aren't aware of the trade-offs or what is going on.

That lack of understanding concerns me.

>This has caused me to come to the conclusion that people aren't aware of the trade-offs or what is going on.

But what exactly is going on? It's not like google going to blackmail you for 10K USD in cash, single payment please, once it will learn that you are going to the same pub and spend 2 hours there daily, "or we will let your boss know".

It will show you more relevant ads, right. But do you really expect an average person to be scared by this?

Google probably will not, but can you say that about every Google employee?

Seems a bit patronizing. People can actually make a conscious decision to prefer convenience over surrender of some privacy. Some people don't put shades or curtains on their windows.

Sure, but people generally understand how window shades work, whereas people generally don't understand how the surveillance economy works. That would be a patronizing assumption inside HN, but outside HN it's a reality that I regularly observe.

Currently working on this with Secure Scuttlebutt, FWIW.