It's a spying device people willingly put in their homes for the convenience of a timer you can active with your voice.
Edit: It could be that it activated mishearing "Alexa". I don't have hard evidence of mass spying. I think this wouldn't be hard to prove intercepting the data using something like Wireshark. The recommending products while chatting with my wife anecdote happened multiple times tho, which convinced me to relocate the Alexa device in the garbage. It seems unlikely to me to not mine the voice data to generate ads, or to do law enforcement.
Let me float an idea based on this study: it doesn't need to listen for more than the wake word (and some variations of same) in order to activate pretty regularly. The study indicates that just watching TV in a room w an echo device will cause it to wake 1-4 times per hour with half of all wakes resulting in at least 4 seconds of recording and virtually all recordings being sent to the cloud for processing. Even absent any "secret wake words" the device activates regularly enough that it will occasionally react to things you say in conversation as though it's secretly listening.
Also, just thinking like someone who is simultaneously evil and competent, if I were building a device like this that listened for secret keywords I wouldn't have it announce the fact that it heard one.
Alexa has an option to play a sound for "Start of Request", i.e. wake word heard.
There is a ring light on the device, blue when it has heard a wake word, red when the hardware mute button is pressed.
https://moniotrlab.khoury.northeastern.edu/publications/smar...
1) not fix the bug
2) quietly remove the option to opt out of remote processing
and then all of a sudden you've got a situation where of course no one is actively spying because We Would Never(tm)(c)(r) but there's a really reliable pipeline by which recordings of me talking to me family in my home end up on a remote server somewhere where they're used to train AI and maybe even automatically scanned for certain keywords that might indicate that I'm some sort of troublemaker and need flagged for additional "attention". It's a plausibly-deniable panopticon. In fact having it activate by purposefully unremediated mistake rather than by keyword makes it a better spy. You can discover a list of keywords and avoid them but ambient noise causing the device to randomly sample and exfiltrate recordings means you can never know when you're being recorded and thus have no choice but to always act like you're being recorded, just in case.
Amazon: We're listening.
We hear you.
I don't necessarily trust Amazon, but I trust anonymous internet accounts far less.
If Amazon does spy this blatantly, it should be easy to verify and reproduce empirically. Has anyone serious done that?
My point is it no longer matters. We're out.
We are in a thread that is literally about how Amazon plans to disable the option to not send voice recordings. I get playing devil's advocate, but at some point logic has to prevail, eh?
In 2025, it feels like we're 5 to 10 years past the time a consumer should default to assuming their cloud-connected device isn't extracting the maximum possible revenue from them.
Assume all companies are amoral, and you'll never be disappointed.
What's a satisfactory burden of proof for Amazon to meet here? There's only so much you can do to prove that something is NOT happening.
Open sourcing of their watch word and recording features specifically, so people can self-verify it does what it says and that it’s not doing sketchy things?
Hardware lights such that any record functionality past the watch words is visible and verifiable by the end user and it can’t record when not lit?
Local streaming and auditable downloads of the last N hours of input as heard by amazon after watchwords, so you can check for misrecordings and also compare “intended usage” times to observed times, such that you can see that you and Amazon get the same stuff?
If you really wanna go all out, putting in their TOS protections like explicit no-train permissions on passing utterances without intent, or adding an SLA into their subscription to refund subscription and legal costs and to provide explicit legal cause of action, if they were recording when they said they weren’t?
If you explicitly want to promote trust, there are actually a ton of ways to do it, one of them isn’t “remove even more of your existing privacy guardrails”.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
On the first two, if you already think they're blatantly lying about functionality, why would you think the software in the device is the same as the source you got, or that it can't record with the light off?
The fact that they don't take any of those steps (and the fact that we are in a thread about they're disabling this privacy feature in the first place!) goes to show that consumers have every right to be skeptical and indeed to refuse to bring these products into our lives.
I think it's inane to complain that consumers are placing an impossibly high standard on Amazon when Amazon themselves choose not to meet even the lowest of standards.
The anecdotes have added up, and it is now an ordinary claim.
Has this been done?
Cheap and ubiquitous surveillance will be the norm in the future.
But you're correct, Tesla is yet another among the multitudes with a robust surveillance network
A Tesla vehicle could also scoop up visible mac addresses, and is equally as capable of doing so as every other wifi-enabled device with closed source firmware.
Android phones have been scooping wifi mac addresses, pairing them with GPS data, and sending that to google for at least 7 years: https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/how-google-uses-wi-fi-n...
Apple probably has an equivalent system.
Privacy-wise, Tesla is shitty but not extraordinarily shitty. Their surveillance capabilities do not differentiate them from among the multitudes. Let's assume maximum maliciousness. Assuming you don't own one, could Tesla track you particularly better than, say, Square? Or Google? Or Palantir? Or Comcast? Or any cell phone company? Or whomever it is that owns the cameras at each traffic light intersection?
Nothing I have said makes light of those other systems and the grotesque data gathering that they do.
Totally agree on the second part.
They were all on stage together, regardless of how they got there. They are all there.
Surveillance? Shit they could just kill you the moment you were discovered to be some undesirable. We're talking about a humanoid-ish robot, after all. If it can help you with the laundry it can bash your head in, too.
With AIs becoming more powerful and expanding to new areas, it makes even more sense to avoid businesses that are consistently user hostile.
I wonder if anti tesla protests and related bad pr will contribute to increased consumer awareness around the topic.
[1]: e.g. it can crash into a will e coyote style wall on autopilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ&t=899s
On HN, people hate on Web3 because of its limited upside. But really look at the downside dynamics of a technology! With Web3, you can only ever lose what you voluntarily put in (at great effort and slippage LOL). So that caps the downside. Millions of people who never got a crypto wallet and never sent their money to some shady exchange never lost a penny.
Now compare that to AI. No matter what you do, no matter how far you try to avoid it millions will lose their jobs, get denied loans, be surveiled, possibly arrested for precrime, micromanaged and controlled, practically enslaved in order to survive and reproduce etc.
It won’t even work to retreat into gated communities or grandfathered human-verified accounts because defectors will run bots in their accounts and their neuralink cyborg hookups and meta glasses, to gain an advantage and approach at least some of the advantages of the bots. Not to mention of course that the economic power and efficiency of botless communities will be laughably uncompetitive.
You won’t even be able to move away anywhere to escape it. You can see an early preview of that with the story of Ted Kazinsky — the unabomber (google it). While the guy was clearly a disturbed maniac who sent explosives to people, as a mathematician following things to its logical conclusion he did sort of predict what will happen to everyone when technology reaches a certain point. AI just makes it so that you can’t escape.
If HN cared about AI unlimited downsides like it cared about Web’s lack of large upsides, the sentiment here would be very different. But the time has not come yet. Set an alarm to check back on this comment in exactly 7 years.
Nitpick: That's not considering how it it has turbocharged and even commodified certain types of crime, such as ransomware.
I thought they were waiting for ubiquitous AI micro drone technology. Maybe not.
Though I'll be honest, there's really no way of knowing if they are sending analytics data with the "main" payload and I suspect they are, so I'm not entirely sure how good my method is.
The risk is that it becomes worthwhile for someone to record everything now and process it later at their own leisure.
It’s trivial to inspect traffic from a device. You can see that your devices aren’t constantly streaming data somewhere. You can see a burst of activity after a command.
Beyond that, it would require a massive conspiracy for everyone who ever worked on these programs to never leak details about always-on surveillance recording. It would be a bombshell revelation and you’d see it everywhere.
What a strange idea. From what I remember about the "privacy nightmare on wheels" disclosure [1], Americans have apparently already consented to being recorded at all times by simply being within range of cameras and microphones in cars they don't own, passengers consent to losing control of their DNA by sitting in the car, etc.
It's better for Europeans for the time being. But short of collaboration with extra-terrestrials to beam up millions of New Yorkers for medical experiments next Tuesday, it's pretty hard to imagine at this point that any example of corporate abuse will qualify for "bombshell revelation" ever again. The overton window has well and truly shifted, and most people will basically argue with you that they enjoy the abuse.
[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...
Your memory is incorrect, or at least misguided. There's nothing special about cars, doing things in public places does not come with a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The flip side of this debate is public photography: Should photographers (including people using their phone) lose their right to take photos in public places because they can't collect consent from everyone around to have their photo taken?
> passengers consent to losing control of their DNA by sitting in the car, etc.
I don't know where you're getting this one. It's definitely not supported by the article you linked.
You're probably talking about pedestrians on the sidewalk (which I also disagree about) but are you going to say the interior of the car is not private? Why would a home be private if a car is not? Spying in the kitchen but not the bedroom? Spying in the bedroom as long as it's audio only? Is my backyard private? Is anything?
> I don't know where you're getting this one. It's definitely not supported by the article you linked.
Dig deeper then. I'd find the reference for you, but when you're confronted with it then you'll just probably just argue it's standard for shrinkwrapped "all rights reserved" kind of legalese and it doesn't matter that we're expected to tolerate this kind of bullshit because we don't have the technology to stick a DNA sequencer under the seat. But that's exactly the point. The abuse is SOP now and for whatever reason, some people will always make excuses for it.
It’s much easier to run an on-device model to match a very specific phrase than to do speech to text of the entire language.
Can't imagine why anyone would want to do that, unless maybe they work for Amazon in a capacity related to this data?
You could even convert to text first to make the packet super tiny.
Especially since Amazon already has advertising profiles on users, so could generate monetizable target word lists per-user.
You really think this would go unnoticed?
> You could even convert to text first to make the packet super tiny.
This entire debate came up in the context of them having to upload audio clips for server side processing.
So which is it? They’re uploading Audi clips? Or they’re converting everything to text?
Exactly. Tens of thousands of people have worked on these products. Many of them ex-employees now. Many disgruntled, even.
And we’re supposed to believe they’re all united in keeping this a secret? Nothing has been leaked, no security researchers have found anything, just a perfectly hidden conspiracy sitting in millions of homes?
I agree with the sentiment, but that seems like a vast overestimation on who would actually know what the device collects. More sophisticated things than this have been made with less. Programmers often have siloed concerns, and PMs only know what their incentives are. It's not hard to imagine less than a hundred people knowing, and what percentage of those people care about us?
Do we have some data that suggests tens of thousands of people have had an integral role in Alexa?
edit: fixed typo, missing a "to" in "to not have"
>We both care about privacy...
How is this controlled? They wouldn't at all be the first devices that deceitfully redefine 'off', or in their documentation say 'off, except ...', or just don't bother to implement it carefully because it's not a priority.
Generally, I would trust something that physically turns it off - a physical switch that didn't just trigger software, but broke the circuit to the mic.
Holy shit, what?!
The bose speaker is sufficiently nice i might try to salvage it.
The wake word requires very little compute, but still requires sampling the background every second or so.
Makes you wonder what other unofficial wake words are baked in there.
I don't know when else they're listening, but that was enough to make him uncomfortable.
If your insurance payments increases 5% because Amazon sold the data to some broker, who then sold it to your insurance company, who figures you're living a slightly more risky life because you go outside 7% more than the average person, how would you even begin to prove this?
I've yet to meet anyone, who's met anyone, who's been harmed in an airplane accident. It still happens.
(No, I'm not saying that Alexa data sharing is equal to physical harm in an airplane accident -- just highlighting that this is a silly argument).
"harm" is a tricky word.
So yeah we're just going to get a cardboard box, put it in the kitchen, and pile all the Alexa stuff into it and Ebay it. We'll use the $21 we get for all the devices to buy ice cream or something.