I have always told people to avoid Amazon.
They have doorbells to watch who comes to your house and when.
Indoor and outdoor security cameras to monitor when you go outside, for how long, and why.
They acquired roomba, which not only maps out your house, but they have little cameras in them as well, another angle to monitor you through your house in more personal areas that indoor cameras might not see.
They have the Alexa products meant to record you at all times for their own use and intent.
Why do you think along with Amazon Prime subscriptions you get free cloud storage, free video streaming, free music? They are categorizing you in the most efficient and accurate way possible.
Boycott anything Amazon touches
I agree with your sentiment and despise Amazon but they do not own roomba the deal fell through.
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
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.
Jam the mic? https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08Y5GGP4D
Works on my phone…
I don’t think Google home listens in.
Because I’d absolutely be disappeared by now if it did.
Amazon employee with no piss breaks listening in on my echo:
“How many fucking cats does this guy have? Just chose one name and call it that!”
Edit: “I don’t know Jeff, sell him a fucking dr seuss book or something the guys mental.”
What happens if I buy one and start playing porn on my computer ?
Why not fuck around and find out?
I honestly have no idea why anyone who cares even 1% about their privacy would have ever bought one of these abominations in the first place. If I ever receive one as a gift I will burn it with fire.
The part that really gets me is that you have to opt out to not have everything you say saved. Bonkers that that isn’t the default! There’s no good user-based reason for this. Alexa doesn’t remember shit for users, like any AI there’s no recall feature. You can’t say remember what I told you last night - give the address for that place, I was drunk and don’t remember the name.
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.
Easy fix: don’t buy this garbage to begin with. It’s terrible for the environment, terrible for your privacy, of dubious value to begin with.
If every man is an onion, one of my deeper layers is crumudgeon. So take that into account when I say fuck all portable speakers. I’m so tired of hearing everyone’s shitty noise. Just fucking everywhere. It takes one person feeling entitled to blast the shittiest music available to ruin everyone in a 500yd radius’s day. If this is you, I hope you stub your toe on every coffee table, hit your head on every door jam, miss every bus.
I have a Google home. The only reason I have it is because Spotify gave them away for free back in 2019. It sits unplugged somewhere.
spoiler
It still captures your voice
jk (I hope)
That’s covered by my phone.
Publicly, that is. They have no doubt been doing it in secret since they launched it.
Off-device processing has been the default from day one. The only thing changing is the removal for local processing on certain devices, likely because the new backing AI model will no longer be able to run on that hardware.
With on-device processing, they don’t need to send audio. They can just send the text, which is infinitely smaller and easier to encrypt as “telemetry”. They’ve probably got logs of conversations in every Alexa household.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody working on the inside has ever leaked anything regarding this potentially massive breach of privacy? A perfectly secret conspiracy by everyone involved?
Per that article, it only happens when it thinks it’s been activated, and only when you opt in. Not much of a bombshell.
Emphasis on “when it thinks”. Not much point to a privacy control that the device can just ignore for unspecified reasons, and they had 150+ instances of that occurring in this data set.
It’s better to be safe than sorry is all I’m saying.
Edit: There’s also this.
Do you own a smartphone?
Yeah, but it’s rooted and running a custom ROM ;)
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.
If you look at the article, it was only ever possible to do local processing with certain devices and only in English. I assume that those are the ones with enough compute capacity to do local processing, which probably made them cost more, and that the hardware probably isn’t capable of running whatever models Amazon’s running remotely.
I think that there’s a broader problem than Amazon and voice recognition for people who want self-hosted stuff. That is, throwing loads of parallel hardware at something isn’t cheap. It’s worse if you stick it on every device. Companies — even aside from not wanting someone to pirate their model running on the device — are going to have a hard time selling devices with big, costly, power-hungry parallel compute processors.
What they can take advantage of is that for a lot of tasks, the compute demand is only intermittent. So if you buy a parallel compute card, the cost can be spread over many users.
I have a fancy GPU that I got to run LLM stuff that ran about $1000. Say I’m doing AI image generation with it 3% of the time. It’d be possible to do that compute on a shared system off in the Internet, and my actual hardware costs would be about $33. That’s a heckofa big improvement.
And the situation that they’re dealing with is even larger, since there might be multiple devices in a household that want to do parallel-compute-requiring tasks. So now you’re talking about maybe $1k in hardware for each of them, not to mention the supporting hardware like a beefy power supply.
This isn’t specific to Amazon. Like, this is true of all devices that want to take advantage of heavyweight parallel compute.
I think that one thing that it might be worth considering for the self-hosted world is the creation of a hardened network parallel compute node that exposes its services over the network. So, in a scenario like that, you would have one (well, or more, but could just have one) device that provides generic parallel compute services. Then your smaller, weaker, lower-power devices — phones, Alexa-type speakers, whatever — make use of it over your network, using a generic API. There are some issues that come with this. It needs to be hardened, can’t leak information from one device to another. Some tasks require storing a lot of state — like, AI image generation requires uploading a large model, and you want to cache that. If you have, say, two parallel compute cards/servers, you want to use them intelligently, keep the model loaded on one of them insofar as is reasonable, to avoid needing to reload it. Some devices are very latency-sensitive — like voice recognition — and some, like image generation, are amenable to batch use, so some kind of priority system is probably warranted. So there are some technical problems to solve.
But otherwise, the only real option for heavy parallel compute is going to be sending your data out to the cloud.
Having per-household self-hosted parallel compute on one node is still probably more-costly than sharing parallel compute among users. But it’s cheaper than putting parallel compute on every device.
Linux has some highly-isolated computing environments like seccomp that might be appropriate for implementing the compute portion of such a server, though I don’t know whether it’s too-restrictive to permit running parallel compute tasks.
In such a scenario, you’d have a “household parallel compute server”, in much the way that one might have a “household music player” hooked up to a house-wide speaker system running something like mpd or a “household media server” providing storage of media, or suchlike.
Always listening AI. I always thought the future would be awesome but capitalism has figured out a way for it to not be that.
Only a fool would put an Amazon listening device in their home.
Today: “…they will be deleted after Alexa processes your requests.”
Some point in the not-so-distant future: “We are reaching out to let you know that your voice recordings will no longer be deleted. As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities, we have decided to no longer support this feature.”
“We lied and paid a $3M fine.”
Or simply “…they will be deleted after Alexa processes your request and generates a token for AI training”.
And finally “We are reaching out to let you know Alexa key phrase based activation will no longer be supported. For better personalization, Alexa will always process audio in background. Don’t worry, your audio is safe with us, we highly care about your privacy.”
They could also transcribe the recording and only save that. I mean they absolutely will and surely already did do that.
