this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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The data isn't there. At least not in the way some of the biggest fearmongers talk about it. Everything you say to the device, you can assume is there. But it listens for the wake word locally and doesn't send information to the server until after it receives the wake word.
It's can hallucinate the wake word and streams everything after. And that's assuming you trust the manufacturer which, why would you?
Alexa is wildly popular. What has Amazon done to gain everyone's trust? They just offer the cheapest version.
Care to clarify your meaning? Or are you just disagreeing because it feels good to go along with the conspiracy theory?
I just don’t trust corporations 🤷🏻
I'm specifically talking about Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices, not anything else your phone or apps are doing. So the only one of those articles even remotely relevant is the third.
And the third talks about "false wakes" being the cause. Which goes along with what I said before that until it hears the wake word (even if it's mistaken in doing so), it's not sending back recordings.
The world seems full of people who work as unpaid corporate lawyers. I’ve run into several of these types in person. I imagine that the Venn Diagram of these people and those who snitch on their colleagues is a circle.
Wtf is this crap? Just because I'm taking the approach of siding with reality I must be a bit or corporate stooge?
Google and Amazon do enough real things wrong without needing to make up bullshit conspiracy theories. Like Amazon's abusive labour practices, and…everything about the Audible & Kindle platforms. And Google's support of the American military industrial complex and shoving AI down everyone's throats while making their products actively worse.
Just because something is bad, doesn't mean every single accusation against it is accurate.
And they cannot change this without anyone noticing?
No, they can't. Precisely because of all the people who quite rightly don't trust Google and Amazon, who would notice their devices' network traffic increasing.
Depends on the company. Apple uses a very specific type of chip for the wake word that cannot change the wake word. Alexa is able to change the sound wake word to almost anything, iirc.
That might be true, I honestly don't know. But it doesn't matter to the point I'm making, which is that however the device does it, it's the device, locally, that determines whether a wake word has been said, before it starts transmitting what comes next.