this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
1354 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
66465 readers
4530 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Am I the only one curious to know what these steps are? The image cuts off the rest of the email.
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:
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.