you can go into the app and literally see your request history
I asked that to chatgpt once and it’s answer was something like “You like to translate R code to Python” just because I sometimes ask it’s to translate R to Python, but I don’t personally like it
You don’t like doing it so you ask something else to do it for you.
It’s completely irrelevant to the article, but I can’t believe nobody mentioned how many fucking headphones this person goes through lol
particulars of every purchase I’ve ever made – from the noir novel I bought on the day that Amazon UK launched to the 28th pair of headphones acquired in as many years
“In as many years” is doing a lot of work there. I dont think Amazon was selling headphones in 1997.
That said if they are spending 10-40 bucks on headphones a year they are doing alright.
Are they?? Am I the weird one for not constantly breaking headphones? I’m in my 30s and I can count on two hands the number of headphones I’ve had in my entire life and several of them I got for free with iPhones
I paid I think 250 for earphones over covid. They went in the wash a few weeks ago. I’ll probably spend between 300 and 400 on a replacement. That will ~700 spent which I would hope would do me for at least an additional five years so 70 a year is more than what I would imagine they are spending annually.
That said I expect mine to be better
That’s fair I suppose. I buy quality to last as well. I’ve only bought two pairs of headphones in the last 10 years. One pair is wired in ear studio monitors that came with a pouch to prevent damage and the other was some wired over the ear open backs for when I need to be quiet at my desk.
We are lucky to be able to to make decisions that take us out of false economy situations. Inwould have bought multiples when I was younger, I might only have 10-30 to spend when I’d need/want them.
This is agood example of how it can be more expensive to be poor, the old example being boots that are half thebpricr lasting a quarter of time of the alternative.
I absolutely tear through headphones. When they’re wired, the wire breaks where it meets the earpiece. When they’re wireless, the battery last like two hours. The USB port on my phone is long dead, and they don’t sell phones with the old headphone jack that didn’t break.
But I still refuse to be that guy playing music on the bus.
Buy some on-ears or (better yet) over-ears, still rocking my Sony WH-CH700N for almost 6 years. Can’t find a successor for them, CH710N and CH720N for unknown reasons got rid of aptX ;_;
You need to buy a pair of good ones. Not hyped, not endorsed by whatever weird rap singer, but good ones.
I bought a pair of good BT headphones 10 years ago, and they still going great. 10 years ago the battery lasted 20 hours, now it’s around 12 or so, which is still more than enough.Ok that sounds pretty good! What’s the model number?
I don’t know the exact model unfortunately, It’s Sennheiser and they’re all weird. The old one can’t connect to their new configuration software so I can’t check.
I also have their newer version, Momentum 3, and can very much recommend that one, all the same great quality, but also Bluetooth 5.0
Get a tiny carrying pouch for your wired headphones and they will last a lot longer
someone need to backbone capitalism, he is a hero
Maybe they have lots of ears.
they have hostile lobes
Clearly written by a Ferengi.
I feel like I looked into a bag labeled ‘everything Alexa has ever heard’ and gone, “I don’t know what I expected.”
On the other side of the coin, the shock shouldn’t be what it knows, but what every single other device you own with a micrphone might also know.
Anyone here that isn’t as equally distrusting of a stock, off the shelf cellphone is lying to themselves.
In 2023, 60% of UK households had a smart speaker, up from 22% before the pandemic.
Jesus Christ. I had no idea so many people were buying these things. That’s astounding.
If you’d asked me to guess what percentage of households had one, I’d have guessed single digits.
60% of people in UK are certified morons. Slightly higher than I expected.
I got several free from both google and amazon. My electric company gave me one too.
My parents’ ISP router has Alexa integrated into it
whatthefuck
Gross.
Why would they do that
remember when Texas power turned off peoples heaters when they were freezing to death as Rafael Edward Cruz went on a tropical vacation?
yeah, they did that because those people registered their smart thermostats with the company and gave them control to set the temperatures in their own damn homes.
“smart” means, “you don’t own it”.
In the UK, the take up of smart meters for electric and gas has been slow due go concerns that this would enable companies to do the same.
It’s not a bad argument (haven’t paid, turn it off) but then if you’re struggling financially is it better not to be allowed to rack up further debt anyway?
That depends on the kind of “smart”.
I have a bunch of IKEA “smart” light bulbs, but they are connected through a Sonoff USB Zigbee dongle. And all of it is controlled through the open-source zigbee2mqtt and home-assistant.
No one, but myself and my family, have any control or ownership of any of those devices.
*until the ZigBee alliance is purchased by a large corporation.
wait that happened when it merged into the Connectivity Standards Alliance in 2011.
my point is that merging home utilities with any technology is like drinking bleach. a small amount won’t kill you, but a large enough dose over time will.
being in the tech sector myself along with watching what the tech oligarchs are doing should warrant at least some caution.
IMO anything that is associated with corporate interests cannot be fully trusted. I understand that IOT cannot exist without corporate buy-in, but at the same time I think it should be acknowledged that anything that cannot exist without corporate interference is damaging to consumers.
Even if ZigBee became the most evil corporation in existence.
They still wouldn’t be able to update their devices when they aren’t connected to the internet.
It doesn’t really matter whether Zigbee was merged into something else, because it simply doesn’t have any technical means of phoning home. It simply can’t access the Internet.
There’s no intermediate corporate owned servers, there’s no proprietary software.
So it doesn’t really matter what the corporation does because it can’t affect my “smart” devices.
other than drop all support when “big ma bell” enters the chat with a corporate competitor and you have aging infrastructure built into your home.
it’ll be like those crappy intercom wall units from the 1970s all over again, except you won’t be able to turn on your lights or plugs.
Because we are the product…
I have three unopened google pucks that I received as gifts over the years.
I had four, but I opened one to take apart to help identify if it was possible to hack it.
at the time it was not. the only part that can be reused it the plastic shell.
What is the absofuckingworstly scariest thing about this is that I’ve personally read quite a few sci-fi books, like in half of them, like in any universe, such things were usually a Trojan horse by the threat of the week to exterminate the good guys, or at least Palpatine’s way of spying, or whatever.
OK, Palpatine’s coolest microphone was decorative trees with skin changing colors depending on vibrations, and a very complex system of restoring the sounds from image, if I remember that correctly, in one X-Wing book.
So how the hell does it happen that such things are presented in movies and books and series like a threat, and yet people buy them?
I can believe in people loving touchscreens because touchscreens were unfortunately popularized in Star Trek and even, sigh, Star Wars prequels, and everything sci-fi.
But this is something that was being recommended against in such media for decades.
A Torment Nexus sounds cool
I cannot comprehend people who agree to have a spy in their own home and they even pay for the privilege.
Its easy, people simply dont even think that it could be used to spy on them. Its just handy and funny tool. There is HUGE problem in the world with majority still naively trusting corporations to such extent saying anything to contrary seems like you are some conspiracy nut. Or if they don’t trust them naively, they are so apathetic that they just think their information leaking doesnt matter, it can’t be stopped anyway and that they just dont care about it.
Something really should be done to start having people care about things again, otherwise everyone will lose all rights to privacy eventually.
The worst ones know they are being spied on, but say things like they don’t mind being spied on because “I have nothing to hide anyway”
I mean, I have some, because I already know my phone is spying on me even more aggressively. I don’t have any illusion that I had privacy in the first place
I dont know about other models but I think I have managed to limit how much my phone (fairphone) spies on me quite decently.
I installed application called ReThink, which is basically a firewall and I can block even google services with it. I know it works because its really pain in the ass when I want to use their services like calendar and i have to temporarily unblock it. It can also block ads by completely blocking internet for programs that dont really need it. I have also removed/disabled anything extra and removed permissions to anything that absolutely doesn’t need it. It also alerted me to that stupid google safetycore spyware being installed (by blocking and informing about newly installed program) so i managed to remove that immediately.
At least according to the logs the phone seems secure, since nothing is being allowed to connect anywhere that shouldn’t be allowed. Can’t do much to occasional breaches due to restarts or temporary allowings, but I dont think such sparse information is much use or it might require more effort to utilise.
I, too, have Rethink: DNS + Firewall + VPN installed. Prior to this I was using NetGuard.
“Pizza Over Privacy”, a Stanford study… https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/pizza-over-privacy-paradox-digital-age Basically, people trade their privacy for convenience and don’t consider the long term cost.
To see whether a small incentive could influence a decision about privacy, researchers offered one group of students a free pizza — as long as they disclosed three friends’ email addresses.An overwhelming majority of the students chose pizza over protecting their friends’ privacy.
While I don’t dispute the thesis, this is deeply flawed.
Why flawed?
These students are giving away someone else’s email addresses. They may deeply care about their own privacy and not care about the privacy of their friends. Plus giving away just email addresses (assuming there was nothing else) for a free pizza is not necessarily any invasion of privacy as these can be simply made up.
So I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from this exercise.
Also says nothing about the validity of those emails.
Sure they can have my friend börg.börginson@notyourbusiness.com
I think they mean morally on the part of the student
I have HomePods to activate my lights, and listen to the news in the shower. Sure, it doesn’t do all the fancy shit that Alexa does, but at least Apple has a track record of respecting privacy.
but at least Apple has a track record of respecting privacy.
…to keep the same amount of data for themselve.
Don’t kid yourself. Apple collects the same amount as everyone else does. And if either get hacked, it doesnt matter if they keep it or sell it.
- There is absolutely no possible comparison between the colossal scale of data collected by Google throughout routine operation of their products and the anonymous diagnostic data users can optionally send to Apple.
- The entire point of E2EE is that it remains encrypted in storage and transit. No one wants to buy encrypted consumer data right now unless it’s a very old protocol and guaranteed sensitive.
Anonymous :o
Like this? https://ads.apple.com/
Yes, in fact. That’s a good example.
The API for the ads allowed on-platform (only in their “App Store” and “News” products to my knowledge) is also used internally, which you can verify yourself by simply inspecting network traffic. The component instrumentation is obviously meager compared to the rich analytics and user behavior tracking data offered by virtually every other platform.
But the foremost restriction is granularity. Neither internal analytics nor advertisers are ever provided a persistent user identifier. The advertising ID is generated on-device and doesn’t persist with device reset. That’s unheard of on platforms like Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.
In-app tracking is allowed but subject to item by item opt-in user permission and is similarly restrictive, audited with package submission (they will reject the submission if you attempt to circumvent the API to extract more/better data from the user). What I’m describing is draconian compared to most platforms, especially carrier-manufacturer Android distributions in many countries.
I mostly use custom roms and distros personally, and I’m not even trying to convince you Apple is in some way more ethical than other big tech cos. I just don’t like seeing misinfo and hearsay spread around for any purpose, especially when that purpose is apparently bullying other users for upvotes.
They say they don’t associate the data they collect with anyone. There’s no way to trace back to my device.
That doesn’t work. Data can and has been deanonymized previously. It’s still very much unsafe if it falls in the wrong hands
“Oh yeah we collect data. Anonymously.”
That has literally the same energy as some other user pointed out here about Valve and Gaben with their brain implant.
Gaben is the harbinger of light for many but us still a billionaire that got the money from somewhere. Thus is also evil. Just not as much as, for example, Bezos.
Apple is evil. At least equal to Google in different aspects.Stop cheering for anti-consumer companies.
They do, so far. I test these machines for privacy claims as a hobby and have been a bit surprised to find Apple stuff mostly delivering on those claims. I’m used to seeing a lot of dark patterns in testing and it’s made me expect the worst, but so far they’ve followed through on (in particular) their end-to-end encryption and on-device processing guarantees. Security audit failures so far have appeared to be engineering oversights, and the ones I reported have been patched already.
The majority of user data they collect appears to be optional analytics and diagnostics that are properly encrypted and anonymized using the same pooling strategy used for their built-in VPN service. They recently started doing processing off-device for some new features related to the Apple intelligence thing (I haven’t gotten around to testing most of that) but otherwise anything siri-related is indeed processed locally. You can toggle a setting to allow anonymized siri recordings to be sent to Apple for quality control but they ask you permission each time you reset a device and re-confirm when you install updates, which IMO is adequate.
Edit: Yes this is the opposite of what the other guy said. He is, to put it delicately, talking out his ass. There are good reasons to hate Apple, such as the fact that it’s a massive soulless corporation raping the planet to make luxury electronics for affluent consumers, but for most of the rabid apple conspiracy theorists I find online the reasons seem to be far more selfish and petty than that.
They do, so far.
They do, so far as anyone is aware.
They do, so far as anyone is aware.
They do, so far as anyone is aware or can know, yes.
I said “so far” because I think continuing to test their claims remains important, as they keep making new equipment and are a large public corporation whose only moral code is increasing shareholder value.
But I’m not interested in conspiracy theories. Sorry.
I sold my Alexa devices when the Sidewalk crap came out
Still waiting for a replacement for the Echo Show though, having a smart speaker with a display was handy at times
I have a theory that they understand this is wrong, but also feel the social pressure (ads work this way, remember), and thus decide to go all way in, in the most absurd ways, fully, to suppress their feeling of doing a stupid thing.
OK, not a theory, rather my experience with starting to use an Android phone
Next up: 2+2=5
Your phone is doing it too. TV too, if you have one. Don’t forget about your doorbell!
Not unless they’re overriding the controls for that (Which - yeah that’s possible) and TV? hell no. Doorbell? Nah man it just goes ding.
My phone runs open source ROMs. I don’t have a TV, but I do have an nVidia streaming box – I don’t assume anything I watch there is private. My doorbell is an electromechanical device hooked to a simple wire.
Mine don’t.
I honestly thought this was !nosleep@lemm.ee for a second
The most concerning part about this article is that they put one in their nine-year-old’s bedroom.
Based on the article, it lets her ask them things that she doesn’t want to ask her parents, though I’m not sure that if I were 9 years old that I’d suddenly want to discover that my parents have a list of everything I’ve asked it and are reading through it, much less that Amazon has a database.
Yeah, that is a terrible violation of trust. A parent should stop listening when they find out that they have a copy of such conversations of their child. They shouldn’t write a newspaper article with citations about it
A parent shouldn’t be letting their single digit aged child have unsupervised access to the Internet. Agreed that they shouldn’t be publicizing it, but this idea that parents should be letting their kids have secrets when they’re so little is one way dangerous adults take advantage of kids.
This seems like a bad idea, to me
Yeah, that’s a terrible idea.
To add to the other responses, and I suspect the real reason, is that Coco is listening to Audible Audio books regularly and/or music. It’s mentioned and then dropped by the article fairly quickly.
Interesting how every comment on the article is doing the “you’re a terrible parent, how could you do that” routine when I’ll bet it’s there because Coco either took the first one in or asked for a second one. Kid wants, kid normally gets one way or another.
Also, surely this device is no different to a phone in that neither is meant to be listening indiscriminately. There’s a chance a 9 year old has a phone nowadays I’d imagine
They work great as an intercom, if you have them in every. Room
Yeah, an intercom between you, your kids, and Amazon.
Alexa, why does daddy yell and hit mommy?
Because you won’t eat your veggies and make your bed.
Why?
Edit: No one answers the question yet downvotes me for asking a simple question that wasn’t clearly answered in the article. That article really didn’t say anything outside of Amazon documents every prompt ever.
Because they have no idea why not to. Despite having written the article explaining that clearly.
Must have missed the part where the article explained anything clearly other than Amazon documents all your prompts.
That’s not enough?
That it’s listening and remembering when I talk to it? That’s not exactly spying on us.
A couple of days later, I received an email containing links to gigabytes of information: particulars of every purchase I’ve ever made – from the noir novel I bought on the day that Amazon UK launched to the 28th pair of headphones acquired in as many years. Records of every page turn of every Kindle ebook I’ve opened, every moment of Prime content I’ve watched, measured by the second. And, of course, the details of every interaction we have ever had with our Echo; every question asked, every song requested, every timer set.
They don’t make it easy to find gold among the fields of data available for download.
That’s exactly what it is.
It gave him back every piece of data he had put into Amazon which was tied to a log in. Where is the spying? He willing did this and the whole piece felt like an observation more than a worry. Just my perception that though.
You’re getting douchevoted for speaking heresy but you’re right, Amazon only records requests and commands - i.e. what you say after “Alexa”. Every article about what Amazon actually does and doesn’t record is quickly forgotten because sinister plots are far more entertaining.
Thank you and god forbid someone has a different opinion. There are a lot of assumptions on the internet about what smart speakers are and aren’t but this article didn’t reveal anything shocking IMO. The writer didn’t even seem bothered by all of it. It just came off as a simple observation piece to me.
Was there any indication that it was listening outside of being prompted? That’s just an assumption and would be no different than the phone we all have in our pockets most of the day.
And also a link to all of your Amazon data:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/preview.html
Its kinda depressing that the takeaway they seem have here is “we don’t always have enough time for our family, but luckily Alexa can pick up the slack 😌”
Instead of “society pushes us to spend less time making meaningful connections and more time relying on services that cost you money or privacy”
Somebody’s toddler is going to eat rocks after AI tells them it’s safe, especially if you’re giving your kids unfettered access to the internet, which is what Alexa is. You’re just hoping Jeffy moderates good, when you and I both know rules and restrictions for an LLM are very hard to enforce.
I was thinking about their horrifying conclusion as well, and your comment made me pine for the days when you wouldn’t know something. Think about it, back before the internet, if you had a random question, you either had to interact with some trusted person, or you went to the library and looked it up. It’s like the ever-present access to all information has quelled or killed any notion of curiosity or boredom, and it’s within those frames of mind that learning and inspiration come. I remember as a kid when I wouldn’t know the answer to something, I’d think on it for days, weeks. I’d get stuck on a video game level, and hit my head against the wall for hours trying to overcome it, only to pick up a random gamer magazine off the rack at the mall, and read the solution. Treating that magazine like it was the lost treasure map of some ancient expedition, passing it around my group of friends… Interactions and experiences that are gone forever.
The idea that we’ve gradually went from relying on trusted professionals, learned educators, and scientific rigor, replacing them with a corporations data-harvesting LLM, on-line influencers, and click-bait “journals” cosplaying as academic centers with integrity. This article is basically celebrating the fact that we’ve off-shored all of our thinking, curiosity, and inquisitiveness to machines, all the while we struggle for scraps in a corporation dominated life devoid of genuine human interaction. We’re all to busy sipping dopamine hits from a screen instead of actually living our lives.
I grew up while the internet was being slowly rolled out, and being from the last generation to remember what it was like before the internet, I can say that the things I miss most are privacy, the ability to be bored, and not knowing.
It’s worse now, and it’s harder everyday to imagine that life on this planet will improve.
So it’s exactly the same as before the Echo, then. Welcome to the human condition.
I asked my google home the same question and it told me that I told it that my dog is a good girl 3 times. I know it’s not great for privacy, but it made me chuckle.
