this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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[–] MurrayL@lemmy.world 33 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

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.ml 43 points 10 hours ago
  1. Unplug your amazon echo devices
  1. Hit it with a hammer
  1. Send it to an electronics recycler
[–] MurrayL@lemmy.world 10 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

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.world 3 points 6 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.