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Now would be a good time to have a functional FTC commissioner. Doing a bait and switch like on a product that was sold with a set of features should be illegal. If I buy a car and the sales guy stops by my house the next day to take back the wheels, it would rightfully be seen as ridiculous.

America's lack of customer protection will hurt continue hurting its people. Ladies and gentlemen, please do something about it.

Laughs in European Consumer Protection

How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?

Well, the per-capita GDP of the poorest U.S. state — Mississippi — is greater than that of the U.K., France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Poland and many others, and within 10% of Finland, Germany, Belgium and Austria. 34 of the 47 European states have lower per-capita GDPs than Mississippi.

The median per-capita U.S. state GDP is $78,649; the median per-capita European state GDP is $28,713.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...

We have to ask ourselves what we want. Because it's not GDP, you can't eat GDP or sleep under it, you can't even withdraw it from the bank. So more directly, how does it influence our life? (Of course GDP influences our life to some extent.)

And is the average Mississippian better off than the average citizen of UK, France, Italy, etc..?

How is GDP per-capita related to the customers having any rights?

> Poland

I don't know much about others, but perhaps you should be comparing ratio of GDP in the last 20 years, not absolute values. With Poland coming very poor out of communism and all.

Well, it's working out really well for corporations to extract maximal value from their users, for sure.

America will continue to cripple EU consumer protection too.

The EU ruled that the app store has to allow side-loading in the EU, but y'all still won't get a good browser because both Chrome and Mozilla have said making a side-loadable browser for iOS is only worth it if it can target the American market too, and the side-loading is region-locked.

So sure, y'all can side-load apps in the EU now, but you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america. Fuck yeah.

You know uBO installs just fine in Orion by Kagi⁽¹⁾ (which is in the regular App Store) and that it has a much better privacy policy,⁽²⁾ right? Fuck yeah.

⁽¹⁾ https://kagi.com/orion/

⁽²⁾ https://help.kagi.com/orion/privacy-and-security/respecting-...

> you still can't install uBlock origin on firefox on your iphone thanks to america

I'm not American, but this stance seems extremely biased. We only have Chrome and Mozilla due to America. Nothing's stopping an EU-originated browser from appearing, and with the America-funded open source Chromium, they would have 99.999% of the work already done.

Amazon also sold the Echo in Europe, so it’s going to be interesting to see how European Consumer Protection helps out in this case.

GDPR says "hi".

If users don't consent, Amazon can't collect. If users exercise their rights to be forgotten, Amazon has to delete. If Amazon breaks the thing because users have not consented, then Amazon will be on the hook for breaching the contract.

"It was working until yesterday, how come?" EU will ask.

Isn't Alexa already quite a bit limited in EU?

It's actually working very well for the US, just not the US consumers

"It's actually really good for me, it's just bad for almost every cell in my body"

Well, I think the proper analogy would be that it's good for me but bad for my kidneys and colon.

Edit: LOL at the downvotes. It's true. The US is basically mistreating its "undesirables". In the US if you're poor, f** you. Payday loans, food deserts, car dependency, etc, everything is meant to hit you while you're down.

Something bad for your kidneys is bad for you as well, even if you don't notice at the time/don't mind that level of damage.

If the US harms its population, it is harming itself, because -- like every state -- it's at least partially made of its people.

Which seems to be exactly the point of the person you replied to.

Not sure why you're downvoted? I can't think of almost anything that isn't designed to cripple poor or vulnerable people? Health insurance, medicine costs, student loans, etc etc. I never thought about it like this...

My initial version didn't have the edit and I guess people assumed I was being callous.

Can we not do this?

I think it would be more correct to say that a nation is made up of its people (consumers) than its corporations. Correcting to the latter is at best pedantic and at worst just incorrect.

You're right, we shall not do this, however when corporations have privileged rights over their consumers and their abuse of "the people of the nation" is not only ignored, but applauded for value generation, not doing this almost impossible.

I'm not from the US, but everything I see from a distance smells like power trip on one level below. HOAs abuse home owners, service providers abuse their users, corporations abuse their employees, etc.

That doesn't happen in the European side. When Bending Spoons bought Evernote, I was so sure that it'll be liquidated into the other tools they have and shuttered. Instead, every month, they're adding so much things and polishing it so much that I feel kinda bad for migrating away.

There's another way to do things.

> HOAs abuse home owners

There are plenty of local authorities who exercise strange levels of power over small changes to people's houses. The difference is that when that happens to you vs a HOA, you're also paying their salary to avoid jail time.

I think Americans do similar for the EU- think of the government and other things we see in the news or identify with it first before its people.

Has anyone checked whether this is also happening in the EU? Whether they've bothered about GDPR compliance or not.

Well, depends what your goals are. Agile economy focused on health of companies, high revenue, and ability to quickly adapt to changing environment? US is great for that. It sucks to be the bottom 70% maybe, OK till maybe 95% and great above.

EU focuses more on quality of life of all individuals, free access to healthcare and education, one just doesn't have these potentially very risky or destroying aspects of life which can easily break them for good in US and send them into homeless spiral. And somebody has to pay for that. Also those protections data are mostly anti-business and pro-citizens hence its aligned as it is. Also we lack agility and are pretty ossified.

Everybody has their own preferences, which also change over time. When single I always took more risky work due to higher rewards (and other benefits). With small kids I am happy to have some safety nets and lower my net income, and I'd bet many US (not only) young parents would appreciate that rather than raw higher paycheck. Also I have 50 paid vacation days per year as a regular employed person (90% contract), something I believe unthinkable in US unless you have your own company.

Trust me, if you own your own company anywhere, 50 days paid vacation is unlikely. Owners tend to work more, not less.

Or let me be more flippant- sure I get 50 paid days off a year. I call it Sunday.

I feel the issue is deeper than that. We no longer buy products, we rent them, it's hard for consumer protection laws to catch up with that (even European).

How so? The rental vs buy setup is orthogonal to respecting people's privacy.

I 100% agree but unfortunately this is pretty far down the list of our biggest problems at the moment.

I’m afraid the only thing we can do at this point is gun for an economic depression, ride out three years of that just like with Hoover (1929–33), and upgrade to New Deal 2.0 beta. There’s no amount of protests that can convince the median Trump voter that anything is wrong in America unless it affects him personally. And no amount of protest will convince Trump that he has made a single mistake in his entire life.

I should have a bit more faith but at this point I feel like the median voter might see their world getting worse but still be convinced somehow that Democrats are behind it because Republicans have their messaging on point and Democrats are doing the equivalent of a silent protest.

All democrats really need to say is "you voted for this". None of these actions are surprising so far, they were all well telegraphed before the election.

In a year or so when there's truly new stuff to complain about the ln the message becomes "you voted for them".

Turns out, propoganda really does work. Just takes a few billionaires, a few hostile nations states, and some exploitable algorithms

And a multi-decade effort to shift courts toward a certain flavor of right wing perspective, so you can get a ruling like Citizens United, among others.

I suspect Democrats remain silent because they believe nothing new can be said about Trump's policies. His supporters will counter any argument, so it's better to step back and let them experience Trump 2.0 without distractions. Over time, they may realize the harm he causes.

It's very likely that they're going to Liz Truss the budget, but without any comparable way of dealing with the consequences by swiftly removing the bad actors.

(when exactly is that anyway? I'm dimly aware of some drama with continuing resolutions)

It's over. The Republicans larded up the CR with poison pills and dared the Democrats to block it. Chuck Shumer, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, didn't have the stomach to do so, fearing the populace would be convinced all the resulting harms of a government shutdown would be pinned on the Democrats. He's probably right. They did vote for Trump twice in sufficient numbers to give him power. Anyway, that was the only point of leverage the Democrats had and now it's gone. In Shumer's calculation they never had it anyway.

Maybe Britain should conduct a special military operation to protect English speaking people in the US. Surely orange man would surrender to make peace otherwise he would be called a warmonger.

The car is no longer usable without the wheels, I believe the argument for Alexa would be that the core functionality is still usable without the privacy setting.

I don't see why we would need the FTC to fix this. If someone bought Alexa from Amazon and honestly expected it to be privacy focused, they just made a mistake and can learn from it. Problems don't always have to be solved by running to the biggest authority that can be found and demanding they solve it for you.

And yet this is what Tesla did. They sold a car and added a surcharge for full self-driving as a future option, or they added it as an upgrade option. But they never delivered. That's like buying a car with the promise of wheels but the wheels are never delivered (except you actually need the wheels etc).

I'm amazed there haven't been major class-action lawsuits raised against Tesla yet, both from consumers for not delivering what is promised (full self-driving), and from shareholders for not delivering what was announced years ago (semi, new roadster). And from shareholders for artificially inflating the stock value of Tesla to use as leverage to buy Tesla and / or fund SpaceX.

Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Tesla floating on a cushion of private Saudi wealth?

that's rivian ...

I thought that was Lucid Motors.

Source e.g. https://eletric-vehicles.com/lucid/saudi-pif-now-controls-64...

That’s different, delivering later (for example probably never) is not the same.

This is about removing a privacy feature.

IANAL but I thought bait and switch is illegal? It definitely is in the EU. Is it not in the US?

The law has lost most of its force in the US since January 20th.

It was not yours to begin with. Think of it as a service. Just give it back and go to a competitor. Ohh wait, there are no competitors! Monopolies suck! Especially if they are world-wide.

There are competitors, even open source ones

These are not viable options for the vast majority of users. Most peppe don't have a clue how to set up open source options, let alone set them up with usable hardware.

The average consumer wants out of the box solutions that don't require a degree in Computer Science to use.

Home Assistant is getting far easier to set up than you might expect, especially because they now do in fact have out of the box devices. It's not quite as ridiculously simple, not quite yet, but they're rapidly improving and it won't be long until they're better than Amazon Alexa/Google Home/other commercial solutions.

Just to chip in with a plug for HomeAssistant. I am really not very techy at all, but so far I have used the out-of-box HA Green version and:

-installed waterproof exterior socket, remotely controllable -installed various interior sockets -installed smart thermometer to control our little plant propagator

So far it seems to be a case of checking that the thing you are going to buy has a working HA integration program (which seem to be added on a fairly frequent basis) and then just adding it to the network. The only vaguely difficult thing I had to do was log in to my router homepage and change the wifi mode to allow the exterior socket to connect.

I'd much rather just not use Amazon/Google/etc where possible, as I don't like the feeling of being used.

What are these "out of the box devices"? I looked into things a couple of years ago, and back then it was all too much effort to set things up and keep things running and integrated, so I just went with Smart Life stuff from AliExpress. But would love to have Home Assistant if it means I don't need to spend weekends just reading docs, pairing, setting things up, connecting stuff...

For the wifi smartlife stuff, you can use the official cloud based integration or if you want local control, the unofficial tuyalocal. The official integration is really easy to use but if your internet connection drops, you can't control your devices so I prefer to use tuyalocal it still requires to add the devices to the smartlife app once and then you add a device from the addon by scanning a qr code with the app. Once this is done you have local control over the device.

Zigbee devices require more initial setup, you have to buy a dongle, install the Zigbee2mqtt addon and the mqtt integration, but once this is done adding a devices is a really simple process : you put the devices into pair mode and allow pairing for 90s in the Zigbee2mqtt page and rename your device to something useful.

Look at Home Assistant Green [0]. They've also got a smart speakers as of just recently [1], although they're still a "preview edition". The prices seem comparable to other similar smart home devices, IMO.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/green [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

I've got HA set up (nearly 2 years now with a whole host of things connected: Bluetooth, WIFI, iOS devices, Zigbee, etc.) and I think I'm only just getting to the point now of two weekends worth of reading docs (primarily because their documentation seems to be written by developers rather than technical writers). Most time I've spent tinkering with HA was modifying their embedded `mastodon.py` to make it work with GotoSocial (but I think someone upstreamed a fix for that and it's no longer required.)

Home assistant is a nightmare to set up. Even with their hardware, you need to learn a whole new vocabulary and God help you if you stay off the happy path.

If HA (which is a wonderful project) is your example of usable OSS software, then your bar is set lightyears away from what actual consumers need.

At no point did I say it's usable by the average, non-tech-inclined user. I said it's getting much better, quickly. It absolutely still needs work to replace something like Amazon or Google have.

I like your confidence in the competitors. Which ones do you recommend?

I need a timer, integration with smart home (turn things on and off), play songs and radio, I need to announce to my other devices. And the set up should not be a month long side project.

How much will it cost me to replace Alexa in at least 5 rooms...

Home Assistant. Sure, non-tech people might have an issue setting it up today (it's easy and getting easier, but it's not turn-key easy yet), but for you personally, this shouldn't be an issue.

Assuming you have a spare Raspberry Pi or some other compute you can dedicate to it, replacing Alexa in every aspect except the microphones is at most a couple hours of installing, configuring and testing stuff. I don't personally know how things are on the market with replacing the always-on microphones in every room, but ignoring that (let's assume for a moment you're fine with using either a phone or a smartwatch as voice I/O), you get:

- A better and more capable integration with smart home than anything on the market;

- A chance to pick whatever LLM you want to power your logic (just bring your own API key, ofc.), which instantly makes it much better than Google's Assistant, Siri and Alexa; this has been the case for around a year now, and the Big Companies are still playing catch-up with the simple "just feed it to GPT-4 / Claude along with some context and tools, and let it do what you want" approach.

- You can configure the activities whichever way you like, expose whichever smart devices you like, and you don't have to speak brands anymore. No more "Hey ${brand 1}, use ${brand 2} to play ${brand 3} on ${brand 4}" - you can just say "Please play whatever in the living room" and it just works.

(In my case, some of the most frequent commands are off-hand lines like "warm up the kids' room a bit, please", and "kill the ACs", or any variation that rolls off the tongue best. Claude knows what to do with zero config. Home Assistant alone cut the time to operate ACs from 2 minutes to 5 seconds (cold-start) relative to the vendor app; running things by voice from a watch is just a cherry on the cake.)

- If you're on Android, you can (and, again, could for around a year now) expose your phone to Home Assistant; setting the HA app as your assistant + coupling it with Tasker lets you also replicate the on-phone feature of commercial assistants, but better, because LLMs. It's smarter and sends less sensitive data to iffy cloud services (you control where STT and TTS happen).

- Timers and announcements and weather and such, you can obviously also handle through Home Assistant. The defaults should be enough for this (you might need to "add weather integration", "add timer integration", etc. - couple UI clicks in the UI, each). HA is simple by default, but you can also do more advanced stuff, at any complexity level between this and arbitrary code execution, through no-code, low-code (e.g. NodeRED) or yes-code means.

Going back to the topic of microphone arrays - I didn't look into it much; there are DIY solutions (with DIY quality of listening - which may be OK, depending on environment; almost 2 decades ago, I got a lot of mileage out of cheap microphone soldered to a 2M cable and glued to the side of the wardrobe, + Microsoft Speech API on the PC), I think I recall some people selling packaged microphone arrays, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could reuse Alexa hardware for the I/O part. But I honestly don't know. I'm fine with my phone and watch for I/O at the moment.

The microphones and speakers are what I care about. Alexa is the perfect hands-off universal remote + podcast speaker.

Is there a way to flash the Echo hardware to make it work with Home Assistant without pinging Amazon HQ?

I mean this in a non snarky serious way: these things are a totally unnecessary luxury electronics item. Don’t buy one at all is also an option.

> Ohh wait, there are no competitors!

Sometimes winning move is not to play. If there are no competitors to this, just do not use anything.

Yes boycott is a solution. I don't need Amazon for anything except maybe to buy cheap off-brand toner, and honestly for the time toner can last I could've stayed with the brand.

Yeah but the ridiculously anti-consumer US has opted to elect politicians with so much billionaire miney, they'd rather get their moneys worth.

Who needs anti-coruption laws with a society like that? And who expects not to get fucked by coorporations when they have lost every incentive not to?

And the free market isn't the incentive you think it is when your're the monipolists that can crush or buy out the competition.

[flagged]

“Reputation” as a free market remedy is such a poor solution, though, as it lags behind the events that change it.

A badly tuned PID loop is better than nothing, I guess.

Pardon my French, but fuck "free market" remedies. The actual "free market remedy" here should theoretically be a lawsuit. But, you and I both know that Amazon's TOS are locked down pretty hard to pre-empt this sort of thing. Even if they weren't, it would take either an individual with deep pockets to pursue such a suit, or it would have to be a class action. Except that neither of those would be likely to succeed, because there's no law that says once a company offers a feature or feature toggle that they have to continue to offer it for the life of the product. And, if there were, that, by definition, wouldn't be a "free market" solution.

The solution here is regulation.

Edit: I forgot to mention that a lawsuit would take years to resolve. Meanwhile, Amazon would continue to benefit from their unfair tactics.

This is actually part of our (Australia's) Australian consumer protection laws, which are considered pretty beastly.

Its simply a test of reasonableness. If you had another source of information about a likely fault and you purchased anyway, it can reduce your protection.

If you have a reasonable expectation that a brand is really good and often lasts 7 plus years it can also go the other way. Netting you government guaranteed replacements by manufacturers far longer than their competitors.

To continue the metaphor, shouldn't someone close down or regulate "wheel stealing jimmies wheel theft funded auto retailer" so that they don't keep stealing people's wheels?

Some people will say just about anything to blame the consumer. You know, like “it’s your own fault for buying a thing from a company.”

Yes! You knew this was coming, why didn't you buy something from any other huge monopolistic tech-cloud-everything-store?! Oh wait...

Why didnt you just buy an ESP32 or Arduino option.

Or like, not purchase the in house recording device.

YMMV.

They aren't wheel stealing jimmies, but they're definitely data railing bit bangers itching for their next fix. I think choosing to do business with Amazon comes with the same sort of reasonable assumptions. Lie down with dogs, and all that.

Y'all got some more of that data...?

It doesn't sound like a good idea to blame the victim more if the offender is a repeat offender. If anything repeat offenders should be treated harsher.

>Yes but reputation is a factor. If you bought that car from wheel stealing jimmies wheel theft funded auto retailer you might need to shoulder some of the blame.

You think the same for food and medicine? remove the "evil" regulations and let the reputation be a factor and every individual should do their research ?

This is actually part of our (Australia's) Australian consumer protection laws, which are considered pretty beastly.

Its simply a test of reasonableness. If you had another source of information about a likely fault and you purchased anyway, it can reduce your protection.

If you have a reasonable expectation that a brand is really good and often lasts 7 plus years it can also go the other way. Netting you government guaranteed replacements by manufacturers far longer than their competitors.

I wasn't applying any free market assumptions here, but the (very popular) regulatory framework I already live under.

Chill man. Just send back the product and ask for a refund.

This is a kind of stoic virtue signal that may make people feel more mature for agreeing, but fails to fix issues while mocking people who try to make a difference. It's ok for people to feel things, and it's ok for people to want laws addressing anti-consumer behavior.

> This is a kind of stoic virtue signal that may make people feel more mature for agreeing, but fails to fix issues while mocking people who try to make a difference.

None of these comments are fixing issues or trying to make a difference. Sending the product back is a really good idea, especially if this change in terms means you can get a refund even if you've had it a long time.

Don't these usually come with ToS or something that has you agreeing that they can change the service any time?

ToS have limits, people in a practical sense aren't really able to read and understand the ToS of every product they buy, which means a ToS can only go so far in the ways it allows companies to be predatory against consumers.

Has that been tested in court? I would have thought a user wilfully or negligently misreading a ToS would not be a good legal defence (not that I agree with how I think the law would play out)

Yes [0].

> Unless the website operator can show that a consumer has actual knowledge of the agreement, an enforceable contract will be found based on an inquiry notice theory only if: (1) the website provides reasonably conspicuous notice of the terms to which the consumer will be bound; and (2) the consumer takes some action, such as clicking a button or checking a box, that unambiguously manifests his or her assent to those terms.

Its part of why changes of terms generally require you to accept them, before you can continue using a service.

Unambiguous consent, and understanding of consent, are required, as ToS fall under contract law. Which does make most ToS... Unenforceable.

[0] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-cand-4_20-cv-07...

The claim there is that they never saw the terms of service updates, and thus weren't aware of an arbitration clause, rather than terms of service generally not being valid.

There's more than one claim pointed out - specifically that ToS falls under contract law, which does require you agree to changes.

Nobody knows what they are consenting to. The law has failed us deeply in this regard.

I always wonder how valid these actually are. There's probably a reasonable range.

Like a car park can say they're not liable for your car's safety, it doesn't mean they can steal your car. A roller coaster can say they're not liable for injuries but if they didn't inform you it's dangerous for pregnant people or if they violate some safety law, they're probably liable.

The bit about changing terms of service probably gives them some leeway to deal with law changes and stuff. If they're purposely being misleading to play bait and switch, that sounds like it's breaking a law somewhere.

What you’re describing is that ToS cannot exonerate them from breaking other laws. Which is correct.

However the question is whether other laws have been broken in the first place.

When you buy a car there is a lot of required paperwork that they don't really give you time to read, so maybe.

They're not gonna refuse to sell you the car if you take the time to read the paperwork. And it's probably a large enough amount of money that you should take the time to at least skim it.

You shouldn't sign things you don't read. Cue the centipad.

That’s generally loan paperwork. And you can take all the time you want to read.

Perhaps there should be license allowing the procurement and operation of consumer devices having overly complex (including language) ToC, making sure that the user knows what it takes to have and to operate a device like that. With categories for the various device categories, just like for vechicles (although cars and trafic rules are much simpler than ToCs, still that is a simple analogy to build up the complexity of ToCs).

I switched to Home Assistant a couple months ago (because I didn't like the idea of my voice being sent to amazon constantly) and haven't looked back! Soo much more you can do (including immediately using an LLM, if you like, whether in the cloud or local), and so much more control.

I am switching out the Alexas in the house to the home assistant voice devices, which can leverage a local LLM without any cloud whatsoever

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

The process is still complicated enough to be "enthusiast" (aka nerd) territory but it is getting better with every release. It will still be here in 10 years, nobody can take it away from us.

I think the audience here might be ok with '"enthusiast" (aka nerd) territory' hardware.

We mostly use Alexa for playing music (Radio & Spotify) and setting timers. We also use the multi-room music feature where Alexa plays the same audio source on a certain group (great for parties).

Does Home Assistant also have these features?

Timers works fine.

Music - yes, albeit a bit finicky to set up.

There's an addon called Music Assistant that controls the music, you can connect it to your provider of choice (local files, Spotify, etc), and you can let it connect to several types of sinks.

OOB the HA only knows a few commands (pause, next, etc) but there are some community driven effort to improve the support, such as "Play the album Dark side of the moon". [0].

[0] https://github.com/music-assistant/voice-support

It has some of those features. I think I’d attach speakers to the HA Voice you can use them that way but the built-in speaker will not cut it (think gen1 Echo).

They are cool little devices, but they have a while to go before they can replace the Alexa’s.

Are those features worth having a wiretap in your entire home?

No that is why I'm asking. I want a replacement.

Without those features I can just replace Alexa with nothing because we do not use any other features.

Home Assistant is a great example of the amazing things the open source community is capable of doing. Hopefully they get the color version stuff worked out. It's too bad it appears that most of Amazon's hardware devices can't be turned to the good side and made to work with Home Assistant.

What do you mean color version?

As an aside, I get what you mean in the context of my earlier comment, but just to clarify for anyone reading, you can use alexa and Google home devices with home assistant (eg to send commands and as media players, I believe), but you can't "deamazon"/"degoogle" them and just use the hardware with home assistant, which would be great if we could!

Home Assistant has physical hardware labeled "green" and "yellow".

Beyond that, I assume there's some confusion about what each can and can't do? I certainly can't remember which is which... But I don't actually own one.

I'd love to de-amazon (neuter) my Alexa's, and somehow flash custom firmware on it. We have some devices around the house, and switching to the linked Home Assistant Voice would be a significant expense now.

People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that. Yes, they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy. But if they cared, they never would have purchased this product in the first place. There are bits of technology which violate privacy, but are extremely difficult to fully avoid: Social Media, (I know a lot of HN isn't on it, but how about most of your family and friends?) smart phones, the surveillance of modern stores, etc. All of those are terrifically difficult to fully avoid or mitigate. But not buying an echo is effortless and free. There's no cost associated with not buying one, and not spending the time to set it up.

But, despite the fact that it literally costs nothing, these have sold quite well, and if folks haven't got an echo they've got a Google Home, or a Siri, or something else. They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.

This kind of apathic statement is not very useful.

By your logic, we should not care about climate change either.

"People don't care about privacy" doesn't mean that regulators and the tech community should not lead a charge.

Thinking about that picture from a (UK?) hospital breakroom with the sign that said "Please turn off the Echo before discussing sensitive patient information."

Why does a break room have an Echo there in the first place?

I will never have anything voice controlled in my house if I can help it. I mean I have them but they're all turned off. Except for the teenager's iphone, but we troll him by saying stuff like "Hey Siri, how do I stop being annoying?" or something like that.

I am fully in favor of team "I'm never sending my voice anywhere", but assuming a locally-hosted voice control I'll say: voice is a great interface around the house.

If I'm preparing to leave and wonder whether I should bring a jacket, yelling "what's the weather like?" is much more convenient than taking out my phone (or go pick it up from the other room), unlock it, go to the home screen, open the weather app, wait 2-3 seconds and then scroll to the full forecast.

I'm not saying that checking my phone is an annoyance - it's still much better than checking the newspaper. But being able to keep my uninterrupted focus in what I'm doing is the type of luxury one only notices once it's gone.

I will never understand why anyone would ever want to use voice assistants (other than for accessibility reasons). It is so gimmicky and awkward to use.

Android Auto does not even understand the word "no".

This reads more like, 'they're not very good' rather than 'people don't want them'. They could be hugely useful, and even in their current capacity I find are very much so.

I find it maddening that my google home, hasn't got a single bit better in the 8 years since it's release, and it's now missing some of my favourite features it had at launch. The whole market has been stagnate ever since they convinced me to put a microphone in my house, it's almost as if that was their end game.

There are a lot of reasons.

Driving, working (mute, tell it to do something, unmute -> you've done something without getting up on camera), dirty hands, too comfy to get up and switch the lights off, etc.

It's also probably great for old people. I keep checking for language support since I can definitely imagine an older person being able to learn voice prompts where they're often absolutely lost on a phone. It'd also let them call someone if they've fallen somewhere around the house and can't get up.

Making an urgent phone call to your spouse while rushing to your kids in the ER without taking your hands off the steering while is a fucking godsend. No matter how broken they are currently, they do have their place, and they work at least a bare minimum.

You should just drive and call later. You are putting yourself, your kids and the people around you at risk by calling someone else while driving, even when keeping your hands no the steering wheel.

When I'm cooking food and hands dirty, setting a timer with my voice is extremely convenient.

When I'm driving and want to switch ANC mode, it's convenient as well.

Timers, and converting those insane units US recipes use.

As I pointed in another comment: because they let you keep uninterrupted focus in what you're doing.

If I'm coding and realize I didn't turn on the heating in the living room I have three choices: I can break my flow and walk there and back, I can be cold during dinner, or I can yell "turn on the heating in the living room" and have it out of my mind.

If it sounds like a luxury that's because it is. But like all luxuries it crept up on me and I only noticed once it was gone.

It's handy for non-tech-savy people, namely the elderly. It can be used for playing music: "Alexa play X", "Alexa shutdown" is all the user needs to know.

Arguably that comes under the 'accessibility' use case that was mentioned.

If they worked and were local, why not?

People don't always have their hands free or are able to look at a screen. Not everyone is good at typing.

The commenter did mention "except for accessibility reasons".

Voice input while driving isn't an accessibility reason, but it's an important safety feature. Unfortunately Google's Assistant has only gotten worse, nearing uselessness in anything but setting driving directions.

If you consider any advantage of voice as an input modality to be an accessibility reason, then by definition there are no non accessibility reasons to use voice.

Hm!

I like the sound quality of my Echo Dots, so I'd be fine to keep them in "dumb mode" (or even disconnecting their microphones physically), but setting a timer etc. is a useful feature too, when you are running around the house.

How good is the sound of the Home Assistant Speakers and can they be used like bluetooth speakers, too? How about multi room sound?

Any recommendations on a good solution that focusses on that music part and is not likely to be a victim of getting bricked by a software update?

How much AI computational power do I need to "set a timer for 8 minutes"? It's all just a sham to take away the little privacy you have left.

It's probably a mix. The computational power to run a dialog system is one thing but it's also just more convenient in terms of maintainance to have the system be completely server side.

Of course, getting your sweet voice for future training also helps!

>Of course, getting your sweet voice for future training also helps!

There is a setting to disable having your voice saved along with options to automatically delete it after a number of months.

Ok, but then unfortunately we have the trust issue.

Do we trust them, to:

a) do it and not just lie about it totally or partially, and we find out later on when somebody does eventually report it/find out/investigate, if ever happens.

b) even if they intend to really do it, that they do it properly.

If it doesn't reach them, you are 100% sure the data is not there and not at risk (from their end of course). Otherwise is just let's hope for the big corporation with optimizing for most profitability for their stackholders as main objective to do "their best at protecting it's consumers data and privacy".

Which sure... hurting consumers and getting fines aint' great, but not always ends up in less profitability than doing the right thing from the beginning.

Of course... this is not a big deal compared with other stuff, there are alternatives and it's not something you really depend on day to day. Compared with other stuff that is for sure.

We have become absolutely spoiled, now talking with a machine feels like something an arm chip should be able to handle

You can preprogram super cheap chips to do voice commands. They come with limitations but they don't wire tap your home to sell data to social media to water board your kids into purchasing thing's on social media

What if you bought the device just because it had this option?

I have an Echo Dot 2nd Gen which I used for around two months, until it once failed at a command of playing back a radio station but instead started to continuously stream my audio to Amazon, for hours until I noticed it (bandwidth monitoring with InfluxDB and Grafana).

Now none of my devices (phones and tablets) listen for hotwords, but at this point there's no guarantee that my Pixel phone isn't listening in all the time. That feature where your phone listens to water or an alarm is what I found too sketchy, as if they have been playing around with on-device constant sound recognition for too long and then come up with some silly reason to make you enable it.

Our longstanding privacy commitment with Siri

https://www.apple.com/jo/newsroom/2025/01/our-longstanding-p...

Times come and go.

Never give any data to anyone based on their current policy, because as demonstrated here, it may change. And then you're fucked.

Seems better but still:

> "When a user talks or types to Siri, their request is processed on device whenever possible."

Yeah right.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...

With all due respect, the link you’ve linked to is reddit, and the underlying story is a 500. Can you provide an available source or alternative, since this one seems broken?

Updated link but it's getting hard to find them.

Eg: I can't find any link about the home button scandal anymore.

People will forget about all the wrong doing and the PR will enventually win.

Your link does not contradict his.

The link is still relevant, because apple's statement is posted in a manner antithetical to the article when, in fact, apple does the same thing.

The main difference is that apple didn't allow its users to have such a setting in the first place, so amazon used to be better. Until now, when they're equally bad in this respect.

As well another one is Siri after 14 years remain not intelligent even with Apple's supposed new Apple Intelligence!

You can't have it both ways

It's terrible and always has been. As featured in Curb Your Enthusiasm (contains swearing so don't play it in the office loud): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTefnhbg0Ig

If I buy a car and, after a while, the guy who sold me the car comes in the middle of the night and takes the wheels, isn't it theft?

If you buy the steering wheel of a car and rent the rest of the car and then the owner comes in the middle of the night and takes the wheels, is it theft?

It's certainly a violation of the rental terms.

Rental terms were 1000 page book.

That's the terms from when you rented the car, we have updated the terms since then.

I will feed the book into an LLM and ask questions.

It's on page 52.

Actually, it's first implied on page 23, but it becomes clear in conjunction with the articles on pages 48 and 49.

The article you're referring to on page 52 has provisions regarding confusion and/or impersonation, following the previously mentioned positive affirmation.

You need the full context of the T&C's, don't cherry pick.

I still remember the time when devices worked for you rather than against you.

But people will put up with anything. You could literally send a note that any Alexa will be equipped with 2kg of Semtex, to be triggered in case of wrongthink in your own home. People would still use Alexa and rationalize the feature.

Discussion (233 points, 2 days ago, 103 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367536

Do people really enjoy talking to their home devices? I've always felt really awkward telling my phone to do something, especially in public, like I don't feel like everyone else needs to hear about what I want things to do, so I just prefer to type something. I know there are some people for whom its an accessibility thing, where they have difficulty typing or reading, but I've never really seen the point for average joe/josephine

Mindblowing that people actually use these things

People still play the lottery, which one of William Gibson's characters in "The Peripheral" calls "the stupidity tax".

Is all audio up to “Alexa” still processed on device?

It should, but as far as I know you have zero guarantees about that. I just hope there's privacy organizations and / or hackers that continuously verify these claims. Of course, Amazon can push an update at any time to change this, at which point it'll be too late to think "hmm, 1984 warned us about this".

Looking forward to the Louis Rossmann video. It may be as long as the fishy one, there is so much to tell about how we're getting effed...

That's called a breach of contract.

A class action here would be a massive hit.

Now is the time to look at Open Home Foundation and their Voice Assistant device which does Speech Processing offline.. Donate! Buy their stuff!

> Now is the time to look at Open Home Foundation and their Voice Assistant device which does Speech Processing offline.. Donate! Buy their stuff!

What about just not using voice assistants period? Do we really need third party cameras and microphones in every part of our homes?

The PM who asked for this deserves to be arrested

User hostility level +1

But that is of no problem, users seem to enjoy being abused, repeatedly, so they continue giving their money to the organization to come up with further marketing startegy (smaless bullshit lies) to introduce the next one never asked for abuse in the next company output that solves very marginal or no problem of their life.

Is this international or USA only?

According to Amazon Germany it's US only

Are these devices really worth the hassle?

I know at least two UK based elderly people who use Alexa on the regular for various reasons. Of course, the device struggles with their accents frequently but that doesn't seem to be enough of a deterrent.

For a lot of people, voice commands are easier than figuring out a device.

Not even close. They're slightly worse than average music speakers that also make funny noises sometimes.

What hassle?

Having to weigh the pros and cons of eroding privacy protections, where the service is placing its own needs ahead of those already specified by the user. For me the answer is no, but I'm wondering what people get from these devices that make this a worthwhile trade off. I feel like a mobile phone gives me most of the utility, just through a different UX

Alexa: we here for you

My first tought was in this direction: Amazon’s Echo hardware can be hacked to run your own local voice assistant that never touches the cloud. This involves replacing or modifying the Echo’s firmware to break free of Amazon’s servers, then installing offline voice recognition and AI tools on your local network.

Do you have any details on this? With a quick search I could only find some older attempts at rooting but no custom firmware.

Do you have a link? Last time I looked a couple of years ago, Amazon's hardware was too locked down to be used for anything other than Amazon's services.

US only

Always assumed Amazon was doing whatever it wanted with Alexa powered devices. I used to have one in the kitchen that I used mainly for timers. The mute button stayed on 99.999% of the time. Needing to unmute to start or stop timers did make it a bit less useful but it was fine.

I watched a breakdown of that model of Echo where it looked like the mute was indeed at the hardware level. My EE knowledge is limited but good enough I could follow along. Amazon probably could hide some hidden way to get around the hardware switch if they wanted but the risk for them seems higher than the risk to me, which never really was more than they'd hear me belch while cooking.

Am I supposed to have sympathy for people who bought a home snooping device now realizing they're going to be snooped on?

Yes. If, as a culture, we don’t stand up for consumer rights when a seller mistreats others, no one will stand up for us either.

I agree with the principle but frankly it doesn't apply here. Privacy conscious people have been sounding the alarm about these devices since their invention and the overwhelming majority of consumers typically respond to those warnings with dismissal or ridicule.

There's only so much sympathy and support and standing up for others that I can fit into any given day and I'd rather give it to people who weren't warned about the dangers beforehand.

You probably overestimate how loud are these "Privacy conscious people". I bet if you ask ordinary Joe about privacy concerns with voice assistant devices, he'd tell he had no clue.

I'm just extrapolating from my own experience of telling people about various privacy concerns. 99% of the time it's either "I don't care", "I have nothing to hide", or "you're being paranoid".

It’s still much more productive to fight the abuser than it is to fight the victims.

Nobody is fighting the victims here.

Yes because it damages one's own morals and can increase the likelihood in the future to be the one to exploit "suckers" for profit.

We can still say "I told you so" and have sympathy. But we shouldn't throw the sympathy away in contempt. Another reason is that over our life at least once we will be the suckers, and will look on those who said "i told you so" and see contempt in their eyes. Is that what we want?

I have sympathy for the 1% of people whose response to "Hey I think having these devices is a really bad idea because you can never be sure where the audio is being sent and who's listening" was "You raise a good point, I won't be buying it" or "Thanks for pointing that out, that sounds scary but I trust them".

As opposed to a dismissive "I don't care", "I have nothing to hide", or "You're being paranoid" of the other 99%. Those people either don't need sympathy because they don't feel wronged, or don't deserve it because they shot the messenger.

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[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43365424

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367536

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at least the people in power can be trusted not to abuse the situation /s

TL;DR Alexa will be cloud-only very soon because it'll be powered by an LLM, which is too big to run on a smart speaker.

While the reason you suggest might be a good one, the repercussions of this change are clearly large. Unknowing customers now have their voice recordings sent to the cloud whoch could be leaked, have law enforcement get a warrant to take it from Amazon, or for it to be abused directly by Amazon. Those are huge. They might just have a good scapegoat.

Yeah, but why do people still trust corporations? It's not like this has happened for the first time. Quite the opposite actually. For profit corporations seem to have no moral compass whatsoever and will do anything do increase the margin. People should finally start to act accordingly.

The law enforcement point is an excellent one. They were already caught giving ring footage without warrants.

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There is nothing inevitable about this.

It a business decision to use an LLM.

It's a business decision not to beef up the Alexa hardware to support an LLM.

These decisions are weighted against reputational damage by Amazon with the outcome discussed here.

Doesn't alexa (or smart speaker) always need network to transfer voice data to server ?

I doubt they have ever ran machine learning model on those speakers. Mostly just some simple one like "hey alexa"

It's depressing that this hadn't happened years ago, neither for legal nor ethical reasons.

That doesn't explain anything. LLMs use text as input. This feature already transcribes locally and sends text to the cloud.

LLM can take audio as input, e.g. Gemini 2.0 Flash can take audio as input and is very fast and cheap (costs 25 audio tokens for a second, and prices $0.1 for 1 million input tokens).

But I get your point that e.g. whisper is also very good and can run fast locally on edge devices. We also have recently phi4-multimodal LLM that is 5.6B params and is good enough to do inference locally on beefy smartphones. Problem is probably those smart speakers have really low CPU/GPU. Also LLM with audio input probably can be better re WER and take your mood/emotion into account when doing inference.

Is the specific component that takes the audio in gemini an LLM? If so, how does audio data become tokens?

But my point is not just about the ease of running whisper, it's that the device is already doing transcription. Even if it's not optimal, it works.

and there is no way to prevent that update from taking effect even though you "own" (wink wink) the device.

> too big to run on a smart speaker.

how convenient.