The amount of amazon > google grift in the comments as if they’re not both spying on you is so cute :)
personally I think its better to be afraid of real things that are happening than things made up by Facebook boomers.
why this particular issue fools even the most technical of people I’ll never know.
LOL :)
At some point ever you’re going to realize is that the real things you need to be afraid of are largely caused by the stuff made up by Facebook boomers.
what specifically? vaccines cause autism/monkeypox, the democrats drink baby blood, trump won the last/next election, Putin is good because he’s only killing Nazis in Ukraine, forest fires are caused by Jewish space lasers, LGBTQ+ folks are grooming children and Bill Gates wants to put microchips in your brain?
Like — what are you saying, some misinformation is good?
I’m saying people believe those things. Roughly half of all voters. And those beliefs cause damage, and it will affect you, whether you think it’s stupid or not. You can ignore it and insult it all you want, but it’s not going away. Perhaps you’ve noticed?
Right, so if “gOoGLe iS reCoRdiNg yOu” is false, it makes sense to call that out, no?
K
🤡
Source: I work at Amazon, and have worked on Alexa
They don’t spy on you without your permission. Comments like these devalue actual instances where companies genuinely steal and manipulate data. Take the tin foil hat off…
Source: I work at Amazon, and have worked on Alexa
If you’re high enough level at Amazon to know for sure, you’re also high enough level at Amazon to almost definitely lie to people about it and other things as part of your job.
So no, we will not be taking your word for it.
They’d also be violating their NDA.
That doesn’t make any sense. If I were “higher up”, do you think I would be actually doing any IC work? I’d be in management, and probably won’t even know where to look at any of the fucking source code.
Feel free not to take my word for it, but also feel free to ask anyone that has any experience with Alexa, or anyone that has monitored traffic leaving the device.
Is Lemmy just full of conspiracy nuts or something?
If I were “higher up”, do you think I would be actually doing any IC work
If you weren’t, why would you have access to enough data to know for sure whatv every part of it does and doesn’t do?
free to ask anyone that has any experience with Alexa, or anyone that has monitored traffic leaving the device.
So basically biased people and people who might lose their jobs if they say anything Amazon doesn’t want people to know? Sure, sounds credible!
There’s conspiracy theories and then there’s expecting that a company that has been proven to spy on people without their knowledge will spy on people without their knowledge.
That’s not how it works, at all, at ANY tech company. I know, because Amazon has a shared GitFarm, with detailed documentation on how things work, and most importantly the better part of a decade where no one inside or outside of the company has found the device “listening”.
I said it elsewhere, but will repeat since you clearly have no idea about the tech industry. Amazon treats it’s corp employees like shit. If ANYONE was going to leak shit about their employer doing something shitty, it would be an Amazon employee, especially since their URA process is so widely known.
IF Amazon get caught spying, they get everything that they deserve. I’ve never worked in the Ring org, so whatever they do is on them, and if they get caught being shitty with customer data they should be punished severely. What I can say, which (again) is backed by a decade of people not calling out the really-fucking-easily-verified fact that Alexa isn’t phoning home outside of the utterances you say to it. Wakewords don’t leave the device, they’re an offline trigger to get the “actual” content.
I’ll repeat it again, this is an insane take that I haven’t experienced after a decade of posting on Reddit and Twitter. Why is the fediverse full of conspiracy theorists that don’t do basic research before making statements?
lol they are such stereotypical conspiracy theorists too, “of course you’d say it’s not true, that’s exactly what someone who was hiding the truth would say!”
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You might want to take your own advice, buddy.
Your general demeanor is atrocious.
Genuinely.
If you think they’re not spying then you’re just still way too low on the totem pole.
You “work at Amazon” so I imagine you’re either deluded or intentionally misleading on purpose.
It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
Any level of technical knowledge in this is enough to know that they aren’t listening through your echo
Tell me you’re not a software developer without telling me you’re not a software developer.
If you’re working on the code the only thing that might change is not having access to the release/staging environments (production databases, cloud server, etc.) but you would need access to the code itself (and development database/services), so it wouldn’t be too difficult to check if the code is keeping voice recordings
(italicized is edited in for clarity)
Additionally, the higher up you are, the less code you usually write. With software development being higher up usually means more meetings, team management, planning, and higher level infrastructure talk.
(Obligatory disclaimer that I’m pretty new in software development, this is the experience in the company I work at and seems to be pretty standard among other companies as well)
So your theory as to why you haven’t seen evidence is that there’s a conspiracy of people withholding the evidence. I gotta ask, do you have evidence of that conspiracy?
Consent could be argued that it was given upon purchase of the Alexa unit…
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Source: Trust me bro
If you had any remote idea about the tech industry, you’d know what kind of reputation Amazon has. If Amazon were stealing data, you can bet your ass that one of its employees (probably one of the ~6% that gets fired every year) would happily rat them out.
Comments like these amaze me. Even cesspools like Reddit and Twitter wouldn’t be so out of touch and stupid.
It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
They’re not completely wrong, though. If the devices are phoning home when the mic is disabled, then someone would have discovered it by now. There are people who do that shit for fun, and Amazon is a big target.
As someone who has Google Home and used to have Alexa:
I have network tools tracking what these devices are doing just to see if they are constantly listening or doing anything weird.
In 4 years I’ve yet to see anything suspicious, which sucks, cuz it’d be worth so much fucking money to the media
Voice assistants are money losing products. If they can do something like processing the wakewords on the device before chosing to send to a server they will. These companies are far too stingy to continuously stream audio to their servers
Back in the day when everything had to be processed server-side sure.
Now we have purpose-built hardware helping work this shit out. The devices are basically capable of handling native language resolution locally. They’re no longer need to farm the data out. I still don’t think they’re doing this we would see it in the open source operating systems, but if they wanted to any late model cell phone would be absolutely fine parsing out your interests from your conversations. Hell, I’m sure the contents of this dictation I’m making now are being reduced and added to my social graph at Google.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong but home assistant is currently struggling with this and is processing everything on your local box because it can’t do wakewords on the device.
Yeah what possible use could this company, whose business model relies on surveillance, have for surveiling you
Exactly. If it is practical and money can be made doing it, then continuous, ambient sound parsing will be the norm. Currently it seems like it’s not a valuable business. When it is valuable to them, they will add a checkbox somewhere in your account to disable it, and most people will not be bothered enough to look for it.
Are they though?
My experiences are much MUCH different. The amount of compute waste is through the roof, and we shrug at +$50k/m provisioning. You don’t even need approvals for that, and you can leave it idle and you MIGHT get a ping from gloudgov after a few months.
only if phones can be like thinkpads which you can easily remove say the audio card from its motherboard.
Then how would you use it as a phone?
I’d love a “phone” that was just a mobile internet-connected device. I very rarely use it as an actual phone, primarily just for text, email, and web browsing.
So…a Palm Pilot?
Yeah but minus the game boy screen and the stylus
I kind of like the stylus idea. More precise than sausage fingers.
Use Universal Android Debloater to remove everything you don’t need.
Connect a headset via 3.5mm jack or Bluetooth Snowden explains how in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucRWyGKBVzo
OK boomer
/s
You text like a normal person
suggesting that phones should be made more like that somehow. though from another comment it seems hard to remove hidden hardwares.
why didn’t i see this in my inbox…
Doesn’t matter if the spyware is hardware installed in your SOCs!
Good ol Lenovo.
ok yeah, can you do better though
Also, why isn’t there a slide cover to physically cover the camera, and why can’t I turn off the mic and camera separately? So I just use one of those black foam stickers to cover the camera.
One Plus 7 Pro had a camera that would physically dissappear when not in use.
Was my favorite phone for a while
My Lenovo smart display has one and I have never opened it because I don’t need to make video calls with a smart display
Are you actually surprised you can’t unplug a microphone from the settings menu?
Do some reading, it’ll do you some good.
You certainly could wire that up and I was aware of that when I made my comment but if you think any of your electronics, especially the big corp home devices like the Google home or Amazon Alexa, are wired like that then you’re out of your mind.
