This has always blown my mind. Watching people willingly allow Big Brother-esque devices into their home for very, very minor conveniences like turning on some gimmicky multi-colored light bulbs. Now they're literally using home "security" cameras that store everything on some random cloud server. I'll truly never understand.

Wait hold on

I wonder if I can get the Google assistant British lady to call me that

Edit: Lmfao it works

People seem upset about this. I’m over here wondering wtf is an echo?

Why has no security researcher published evidence of these devices with microphones uploading random conversations? Nobody working on the inside has ever leaked anything regarding this potentially massive breach of privacy? A perfectly secret conspiracy by everyone involved?

We know more about top secret NSA programs than we do about this proposed Alexa spy mechanism. None of the people working on this at Amazon have wanted to leak anything?

I’m not saying it’s not possible, but it seems extremely improbable to me that everyone’s microphones are listening to their conversations, they’re being uploaded somewhere to serve them better ads, and absolutely nobody has leaked anything or found any evidence.

I have brief mode on, she doesn’t give a shit. I need “say the absolute minimum number of words” mode.

People are saying don't get an echo but this is the tip of an iceberg. My coworkers' cell phones are eavesdropping. My neighbors doorbells record every time I leave the house. Almost every new vehicle mines us for data. We can avoid some of the problem but we cannot avoid it all. We need a bigger, more aggressive solution if we are going to have a solution at all.

https://lemmy.world/c/homeassistant

Nobody working on the inside has ever leaked anything regarding this potentially massive breach of privacy? A perfectly secret conspiracy by everyone involved?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but...

Argument from ignorance

It's better to be safe than sorry is all I'm saying.

Edit: There's also this.

I mean... I 100% agree, and yet you and I and everyone reading this are carrying around a phone that can do the exact same shit

This is why jailbreaking/rooting your phone is so important.

Do you own a smartphone?

Yeah, but it's rooted and running a custom ROM

Wow there are way fewer "so what it's the same as your smartphone" and "everyone does it, google, apple, it's no big deal" comments on Lemmy.

It’s not mine but I frequently tell the one in house our to “fuck off”?

Because if they would publish it, the other security experts would say "well, duh, that's how it works".

It is just the average people that are unaware of it, or don't seem to care.

be aware, everything you say around amazon, apple, alphabet, meta, and any other corporate trash products are being sold, trained on, and sent to your local alphabet agency. it's been this way for a while, but this is a nice reminder to know when to speak and when to listen

be aware, everything you say around amazon, apple, alphabet, meta, and any other corporate trash products are being sold, trained on, and sent to your local alphabet agency. it's been this way for a while, but this is a nice reminder to know when to speak and when to listen

Per that article, it only happens when it thinks it's been activated, and only when you opt in. Not much of a bombshell.

So... if you own an inexpensive Alexa device, it just doesn't have the horsepower to process your requests on-device. Your basic $35 device is just a microphone and a wifi streamer (ok, it also handles buttons and fun LED light effects). The Alexa device SDK can run on a $5 ESP-32. That's how little it needs to work on-site.

Everything you say is getting sent to the cloud where it is NLP processed, parsed, then turned into command intents and matched against the devices and services you've installed. It does a match against the phrase 'slots' and returns results which are then turned into voice and played back on the speaker.

With the new LLM-based Alexa+ services, it's all on the cloud. Very little of the processing can happen on-device. If you want to use the service, don't be surprised the voice commands end up on the cloud. In most cases, it already was.

If you don't like it, look into Home Assistant. But last I checked, to keep everything local and not too laggy, you'll need a super beefy (expensive) local home server. Otherwise, it's shipping your audio bits out to the cloud as well. There's no free lunch.