this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
1355 points (99.3% liked)

Technology

66465 readers
4481 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. 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.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 4 hours ago
[–] Flocklesscrow@lemm.ee 31 points 8 hours ago

If Corporations were people, they'd be disappeared in the night for stuff like this.

Which is why they're not people.

Why anyone would want some Tech company spybot sifting through their private experiences is beyond me, but that's definitely what they are doing.

[–] Jocker@sh.itjust.works 9 points 6 hours ago

Great, they made it public.

[–] Teknikal@eviltoast.org 26 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

There's no way they weren't doing this already.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 13 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

I mean if they were doing this already there would be no point in sending this email out. They would have just happily continued letting people think it wasn’t happening while doing it anyway, while not having to deal with the backlash this will generate.

[–] Teknikal@eviltoast.org 6 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

My suspicion is they probably need to announce it now for some legal reason but there's no Amazon device with the power to do this locally so it's definitely always been sent to them.

Now would they delete that right away or analyse it first, I kinda think they would have always done the latter.

[–] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 6 points 7 hours ago

I mean there’s no legal reason that would exist now that didn’t before.

My guess is that they did honor the setting, but that was because the amount of people that used it was so low vs the total number of people that used the devices. Now with smart speaker adoption rates declining, and their desire to train AI, they have to dip into the pool of people that opted not to share.

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago

The setting mentioned in the email was on by default. So they definitely were, they're just removing the ability to turn it off.

[–] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 hours ago

Definitely not a complete FOSS setup but I decided to go the Apple route a self-hosted Homebridge for non Apple home-kit enabled devices.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 11 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

For anyone with existing Home Assistant setup, the Home Assistant Voice Preview is pretty good alternative, when it comes to voice control of HA. The setup is very easy. If you want conversational functionality, you could even hook it up to an LLM, cloud or local. It can also be used for media playback and it's got an aux out port.

I used to use Google Home Mini for voice control of Home Assistant. The Voice Preview replaced that rather nicely.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 3 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

The difference between a pi and open voice?

[–] Cyber@feddit.uk 1 points 5 hours ago

I'm using a Pi Zero as a voice satellite with an additional mic hat and a speaker hanging off the audio output and it's ... ok

There's definitely much lower WAF with this option

The voice assistant has built-in audio which appears to be high (enough) quality and considering it's case, power, etc, not to mention funding the advancement of open source voice control, it's just overall “better”

If you've got a Pi lying around with a mic & speaker, definitely give it a go

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 hours ago

No idea, haven't used those. The HA Voice is open source through and through.

[–] cynar@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

That's tempting, and not a hideous price either.

[–] Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 77 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

If you were using one, you were already okay with this.

[–] Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah. Hell, chances are they were already

[–] faberyayo@lemm.ee 32 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah, just avoid the oligarchy tech

[–] PeteZa@lemm.ee 10 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

I agree. Although it’s nearly impossible at this point. Especially with Amazon running a significant portion of the internet with AWS. Each one of us most likely touches an Amazon server multiple times a day, even if we don’t have any Amazon subscriptions.

[–] gamer@lemm.ee 14 points 10 hours ago

That doesn't matter. You only need to worry about boycotting things within your control, like Amazon shopping and their consumer products. AWS is profitable, but so is Amazon.com.

Buying something at a different store is always a dub even if that store is using AWS on the backend.

[–] Soup@lemmy.world 7 points 10 hours ago

Like the other person said, you can at least control what you interact with directly. So you cancel your Prime subscription and turn your lights with your hand instead of an Echo but you don’t worry so much about trying to figure out if any of the several companies involved in making [product] have some form of attachment to AWS.

And there will be some level of consumption in this horrible system that’s not gunna be good in order for you to not be horribly depressed but people can shed more than they think and alternatives do exist for many of the ones you might put at lower priority.

true, but there's a lot you can do on the hardware side with an arduino-or esp32/pi pico if you need networking.

[–] kaerypheur@lemmy.world 13 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 10 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

🔴 I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 hours ago

alexa! install an oligarchy!

[–] MurrayL@lemmy.world 33 points 14 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 13 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 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 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 8 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.

[–] richardisaguy@lemmy.world 32 points 14 hours ago (5 children)

How the fuck does anyone even buy one of these

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 25 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

You can get them on Amazon.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 3 points 8 hours ago

You can also buy some on Facebook Marketplace.

[–] edgesmash@lemmy.world 4 points 10 hours ago

Well played.

[–] Flisty@mstdn.social 8 points 12 hours ago

@richardisaguy @Tea sometimes they just come free with stuff. We got given two Google ones when my husband bought a Pixel phone. We were going to sell them on but we never got round to it. You can physically turn off the microphone part though (at least it tells you it's turned off so fingers crossed) so we use the one with a screen as a digital photo frame (and a speaker) and the other one as just a speaker.

[–] AynRandLibertarian@lemmy.world 14 points 14 hours ago (7 children)

The same people who buy mobile phones; despite those being bugs/spy-devices.

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 5 points 8 hours ago

More directly comparable, is the Ring cameras inside the house.

[–] slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 15 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

True, but a mobile phone is basically a world brain, calculator, camera, flashlight, you can watch movies on it in hi def, hate it all you want, it's one of the most versatile tools on the planet. An echo dot, it just spy garbage and nothing else

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] pogmommy@lemmy.ml 11 points 12 hours ago (6 children)

Phones are at least easier to justify since everyone kinda needs one now and there aren't many great private options, especially for the lay person

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] DaChrissy@reddthat.com 86 points 17 hours ago (8 children)

Amazon really got people to pay to be spied on. Wild world we live in bois

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 37 points 16 hours ago

They literally could just leave the feature on the device, but then you can't force your users to send you all their data, voices, thoughts and first borns

Fuck Amazon, fuck Bezos

load more comments
view more: next ›