• Prehensile_cloaca @lemm.ee
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    6 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.

    • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      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
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        6 hours ago

        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.

        • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
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          5 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
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      5 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.

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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    7 hours ago

    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.

      • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.uk
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        3 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

    • PeteZa@lemm.ee
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      9 hours ago

      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
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        8 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
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        8 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.

  • MurrayL@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    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
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      11 hours ago
      1. Unplug your amazon echo devices
      1. Hit it with a hammer
      1. Send it to an electronics recycler
    • MurrayL@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      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
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        7 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.

    • Flic@mstdn.social
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      10 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.

      • slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org
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        11 hours ago

        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

      • pogmommy@lemmy.ml
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        11 hours ago

        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

          • pogmommy@lemmy.ml
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            10 hours ago

            I mean yeah, but for a lot of people if they ditch their phone they’ll also lose their job and possibly relationships they value.

            Cell phones spying on people isn’t good, but most people are simply not informed about how invasive they are and couldn’t make an informed decision if they tried. Pair that with the fact that cell phones are essential for a lot of modern life, and it’s not difficult to see why the average person is generally more wary of smart speakers than cell phones.

          • pogmommy@lemmy.ml
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            10 hours ago

            I meant they’re easier to justify in the sense that I see why people don’t put much thought into putting a spying device in their pocket, not that I agree with the disregard. Most peoples’ friends, family, employers, etc. all expect them to have a cell phone and be available by it. Additionally, the way most people interact with their phones, the spying is much less obvious. They joke about them “always listening”, but a lot of people don’t understand the privacy concerns of pretty typical internet use, so the fact that the device has more than just a microphone, it appears to be worth it to a more typical consumer than us.

            Contrast that with an Alexa, google home, or apple home thing, devices which nobody cares if someone else doesn’t own, which most people only see as a microphone and speaker, and whose primary functionality is to always be listening to you. The skepticism is much easier to arise.

            I’m not saying the level at which cell phones spy on their users is acceptable or even worth it, just that I see why the average user who isn’t conscious of their privacy doesn’t regard them with the same concern they do smart speakers.

      • jim3692@discuss.online
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        11 hours ago

        At least, on mobile devices, it’s typically easier to install a privacy-focused firmware (like LineageOS or GrapheneOS). Those AI assistants are completely locked down.

    • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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      10 hours ago

      I have a bunch in my house. It’s a glorified radio all I use it for is:

      • Set timer for x minute
      • What time is it
      • Ask CBC to play radio one Toronto
      • What is the weather today

      For the convenience I accept the mining they may do.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    14 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

  • Billybob22@feddit.uk
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    12 hours ago

    Just sold my 3 devices and shut down Amazon account. It’s very liberating and I don’t miss it one bit. Have Home Assistant and a couple of really good 2nd hand Sonos speakers.

  • Ronno@feddit.nl
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    16 hours ago

    Want to setup a more privacy friendly solution?

    Have a look at Home Assistant! It’s a great open source smart home platform that recently released a local (so not processing requests in the cloud) voice assistant. It’s pretty neat!

    • iarigby@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      home assistant is amazing but it is not yet an alternative to Alexa, the assistant/voice is still in development and far from being usable. it’s impossible for me to remember the specific wording assist demands and voice to text is incorrect like nine out of ten times. And this includes giving up on terrible locally hosted models trying out their cloud which obviously is a huge privacy hole, but even then it was slow and inaccurate. It’s a mystery to me how the foss community is so behind on voice, Siri and Google Assistant started working offline years ago, and they work straight on a mobile device.

    • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
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      15 hours ago

      I have one big frustration with that: Your voice input has to be understood PERFECTLY by TTS.

      If you have a “To Do” list, and speak “Add cooking to my To Do list”, it will do it! But if the TTS system understood:

      • Todo
      • To-do
      • to do
      • ToDo
      • To-Do

      The system will say it couldn’t find that list. Same for the names of your lights, asking for the time,… and you have very little control over this.

      HA Voice Assistant either needs to find a PERFECT match, or you need to be running a full-blown LLM as the backend, which honestly works even worse in many ways.

      They recently added the option to use LLM as fallback only, but for most people’s hardware, that means that a big chunk of requests take a suuuuuuuper long time to get a response.

      I do not understand why there’s no option to just use the most similar command upon an imperfect matching, through something like the Levenshtein Distance.

    • thanks AV@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      I’ve seen something about this pop up occasionally on my feed, but it’s usually a conversation I’m nowhere close to understanding lol

      Could you recommend any resources for a complete noob?