• A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    5 hours ago

    everything you say to your echo/alexa has always been sent to amazon.

    theres literally been leaks proving it.

    • Sovereign@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      I thought so… I was like wait what dont they already have to process all that data?! And no doubt its in a db somewhere… thats just how things are done. Even if they werent a malicious company, they would still need to save the data to improve the product and for analytics…

  • tabular@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    Who the hell is the manufacture to decide if a remote feature no longer functions? (I’m guessing people don’t rent these devices from Amazon - it’s your property).

    I don’t need your concent, it’s in your best interests - Amazon

  • adhdplantdev@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    Duh. This why no one should have this tech as the arbiters can never be trusted with public saftey/good.

  • Prehensile_cloaca @lemm.eeEnglish
    39·
    16 hours ago

    If Corporations were people, they’d be disappeared in the night for stuff like this.

    Which is why they’re not people.

    Why anyone would want some Tech company spybot sifting through their private experiences is beyond me, but that’s definitely what they are doing.

    • JayleneSlide@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Which is why they’re not people.

      But the C-suite and board are almost like humans. And that’s even better for… things.

    • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      171·
      16 hours ago

      I mean if they were doing this already there would be no point in sending this email out. They would have just happily continued letting people think it wasn’t happening while doing it anyway, while not having to deal with the backlash this will generate.

      • Teknikal@eviltoast.orgEnglish
        103·
        15 hours ago

        My suspicion is they probably need to announce it now for some legal reason but there’s no Amazon device with the power to do this locally so it’s definitely always been sent to them.

        Now would they delete that right away or analyse it first, I kinda think they would have always done the latter.

        • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
          10·
          15 hours ago

          I mean there’s no legal reason that would exist now that didn’t before.

          My guess is that they did honor the setting, but that was because the amount of people that used it was so low vs the total number of people that used the devices. Now with smart speaker adoption rates declining, and their desire to train AI, they have to dip into the pool of people that opted not to share.

    • bitjunkie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      15 hours ago

      The setting mentioned in the email was on by default. So they definitely were, they’re just removing the ability to turn it off.

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
    12·
    16 hours ago

    For anyone with existing Home Assistant setup, the Home Assistant Voice Preview is pretty good alternative, when it comes to voice control of HA. The setup is very easy. If you want conversational functionality, you could even hook it up to an LLM, cloud or local. It can also be used for media playback and it’s got an aux out port.

    I used to use Google Home Mini for voice control of Home Assistant. The Voice Preview replaced that rather nicely.

      • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        13 hours ago

        I’m using a Pi Zero as a voice satellite with an additional mic hat and a speaker hanging off the audio output and it’s … ok

        There’s definitely much lower WAF with this option

        The voice assistant has built-in audio which appears to be high (enough) quality and considering it’s case, power, etc, not to mention funding the advancement of open source voice control, it’s just overall “better”

        If you’ve got a Pi lying around with a mic & speaker, definitely give it a go

    • PeteZa@lemm.eeEnglish
      111·
      18 hours ago

      I agree. Although it’s nearly impossible at this point. Especially with Amazon running a significant portion of the internet with AWS. Each one of us most likely touches an Amazon server multiple times a day, even if we don’t have any Amazon subscriptions.

      • gamer@lemm.eeEnglish
        15·
        18 hours ago

        That doesn’t matter. You only need to worry about boycotting things within your control, like Amazon shopping and their consumer products. AWS is profitable, but so is Amazon.com.

        Buying something at a different store is always a dub even if that store is using AWS on the backend.

      • Soup@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        18 hours ago

        Like the other person said, you can at least control what you interact with directly. So you cancel your Prime subscription and turn your lights with your hand instead of an Echo but you don’t worry so much about trying to figure out if any of the several companies involved in making [product] have some form of attachment to AWS.

        And there will be some level of consumption in this horrible system that’s not gunna be good in order for you to not be horribly depressed but people can shed more than they think and alternatives do exist for many of the ones you might put at lower priority.

  • MurrayL@lemmy.worldEnglish
    34·
    22 hours ago

    If you do not want to set your voice recordings setting to ‘Don’t save recordings,’ please follow these steps before March 28th:

    Am I the only one curious to know what these steps are? The image cuts off the rest of the email.

    • pogmommy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      451·
      21 hours ago
      1. Unplug your amazon echo devices
      1. Hit it with a hammer
      1. Send it to an electronics recycler
    • MurrayL@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      19 hours ago

      If anyone else is wondering, I’ve not found a verbatim quote of the steps but I did see an article that mentioned the consequences. It seems like you will be able to turn this off but it will disable Voice ID:

      anyone with their Echo device set to “Don’t save recordings” will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked. Voice ID enables Alexa to do things like share user-specified calendar events, reminders, music, and more. Previously, Amazon has said that “if you choose not to save any voice recordings, Voice ID may not work.” As of March 28, broken Voice ID is a guarantee for people who don’t let Amazon store their voice recordings.

      • IMALlama@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        17 hours ago

        The old “privacy focused” setting made speech processing local. The new “privacy focused setting” means that processing will happen on a remote server, but Amazon won’t store the audio after it’s been processed. Amazon could still fingerprint voices with the new setting, to know if it was you or your parents/parter/kid/roommate/whomever and give a person specific response, but for now at least they appear to not be doing so.

        This all seems like it’s missing the point to me. If you own one of these devices you’re giving up privacy for convenience. With the old privacy setting you were still sending your processed speech to a server nearly every time you interacted with one of those devices because they can’t always react/provide a response on their own. Other than trying to avoid voice fingerprinting, it doesn’t seem like the old setting would gain you much privacy. They still know the device associated to the interaction, know where the device is located, which accounts it’s associated with, what the interaction was, etc. They can then fuse this information with tons of other data collected from different devices, like a phone or computer. They don’t need your unprocessed speech to know way too much about you.