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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.

" Why did you pick these default wake words and not something like “computer” or “okay assist”? A wake word should be uncommon in everyday conversations at home or in media, such as music or TV, to minimize the risk of the device activating unintentionally. “Nabu”, “Jarvis”, and “Mycroft” ... "

They hardcoded the wake words in hardware...

Why not just use LLM common sense to say "does this really sound like a purposeful activation?"

Or put a GPU in there, or export the call to your PC like they require for text to speech?

For being a DIY thing, they made it inexplicably hard to D

They actually have thought it out well. The short of it is you can set up a device to constantly stream to home assistant so that you can use any wake word. That comes with the draw back of more power use and more importantly higher cpu use for each microphone you add. It's still possible (https://github.com/dscripka/openWakeWord)

The alternative for a dedicated low power device is to have trained a model to run on smaller micro controllers so that it can run locally on low powered devices (https://github.com/kahrendt/microWakeWord) this is what they have chosen for their dedicated devices.

This choice also comes with much higher default privacy. Which is great as home assistant offers cloud integration and the fact that they put privacy first in this area makes it much easier to trust they do the right thing in other areas.

A brief run down on the subject https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/about_wake_word/

Because then you'd be running a full speech to text model all the time, and an LLM any time any speech is detected.

Uh yea, I want that to happen. Correct. Why would I want things happening without the model knowing and having context?

Have you seen Star Trek? We should have computer by now. An agent which knows when to tell us things we need to know, not just respond to requests.

>> Because then you'd be running a full speech to text model all the time, and an LLM any time any speech is detected.

> Uh yea, I want that to happen.

Be careful what you wish for.

> Have you seen Star Trek? We should have computer by now. An agent which knows when to tell us things we need to know, not just respond to requests.

Have you read 1984[0]?

Star Trek is fiction. A good fiction IMHO, but a fiction none the less. As such, the writers took "creative liberties" in order to present a storyline for viewers of same.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

If you'd read 1984 recently enough you'd know it is based upon the notion of state and social imposed ideology becoming enmeshed, a locally running hub of pure logic is the antithesis of that concept.

A better metaphor would be mephi from yamyatin's We (the original inspiration for 1984) which represents the kernel of u modulated truth which exists outside the calculus of the imposed social matrix

Hilarious that you thought I'd wouldn't be familiar with the work, when you yourself appear to be that person

> If you'd read 1984 recently enough you'd know it is based upon the notion of state and social imposed ideology becoming enmeshed ...

My reference to 1984 was a juxtaposition used to illuminate the fallacy of:

>> Have you seen Star Trek? We should have computer by now. An agent which knows when to tell us things we need to know, not just respond to requests.

Be that as it may, the probability of a dystopian result is far greater than the utopian one quoted.

> A better metaphor would be ...

Since it was not a metaphor, the remaining critique is moot.

How many hours did you spend on this? I want to do it, but I don’t have much time.

For what it's worth, I was worried about that as well, but I found it to be _fun_, and I actually look forward to playing with it, even before bed. Weird, I know, but I'm enjoying it and didn't think I would.

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.

Ah, yeah, it was confusing to me when I was trying to get started as well! fortunately, the folks in the hardware channel of their Discord are super helpful.

Here's what I learnt: Green is the new plug and play server. Easiest to setup and will cover the vast majority of what you'll want to do. Yellow is basically green with a couple extra things built in (namely zigbee and thread), plus expansion bays, if you anticipate building on to it, but it requires you to flash it so less user friendly setup but easy if you're a dev.

But most people start out by using an old laptop or PC sitting around. That's what I did, the got a yellow.

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.

You can get an atom echo for $13, if that helps: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/thirteen-usd-voi...

Can you create a private network on your router for your spy devices that blocks any traffic to the mothership while allowing something like Spotify? Do they require access to the mothership to work at all?

Data sovereignty in general is always a good decision. I love my HA device, my local inference for LLMs on my 3090, my homelab of services, and the FTP access to my PikaPods workloads.

If you don't have full control over your data, someone else does - and will do as they please with it, eventually.

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

Thanks, good info. I read nothing about the multi-room-music-feature. Do you by chance know if it can be done?

Yes, there is functionality to create groups in music assistant. You can even create groups between different types of sinks (so you can combine say Chromecasts together with home assistants media player together with airplay). However, I have not played around with that too much so I don’t know how well the players will sync with each other.

Given the lawsuits against Google from Sonos in the last 5 years, it doesn't seem to be low hanging fruit. Might not exist yet.

I can’t see any reason why you couldn’t do that. I’ve only been using Home Assistant for a few months, but off the top of my head I reckon I could do that with an automation. The catch is that you may have to set that automation up yourself (either in the UI Or with YAML), and it's less user friendly than an alexa is out of the box. But if you're happy to tinker, as most folks on here are, then the world is your oyster..

This blog post is a great illustration of what I mean: https://blog.jlpouffier.fr/chatgpt-powered-music-search-engi...

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.

Ah ok, thanks for the info. Had hoped I could jump on HA Voice right away because I have already a small HA server in my home.

Same here, I was ready to replace 8-10 echo with them in a heartbeat if it was even close to the Echo but it's not quite there yet. I hope v2 is good enough as I'd love to remove the echo's but they are too convenient currently.

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.

Related, here's a comment from 2019 from at the time of writing from someone claiming to be a principal engineer at Amazon, talking about how

"I'm proud of the approach that Amazon takes to privacy. Privacy of customer data is considered the most important thing to Amazon, and this customer obsession (the #1 leadership principle) permeates the organization."

The comment further talks about the mute button on the original Amazon Echo (i.e. Alexa voice assistant) being hardware-based : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19208670

Heh. We have a Nest Mini at home that someone gave us, that we use as a smart speaker. Before setting it up, I popped it open and physically scraped out the MEMS microphones. Now that's a hardware mute.

Hardware mute until they switch the speaker output pins to input mode and use the speaker itself as a microphone.

Speakers much larger than headphone speakers tend to be very poor at such a thing since it gets a lot harder to move the voice coil as weight and pressure from the surround dampen everything. Anything capable of reproducing appreciable bass will almost certainly not work.

Is it really smart if you've removed the ability for it to respond to voice commands ?

Yea - I don't think voice commands are a feature particularly desired for speakers. There are only a few instances I can think of where I want my speaker to respond to voice commands - when I'm in the shower and when I want it to be silent so I can take a call being the primary ones. For the former I think just having a playlist on shuffle is good enough and the for the latter there are better solutions available by integrating my phone into the system.

Using voice commands to control music has always seemed like a sisyphean task to me. You're using a control method that directly conflicts with the state you'll generally use it in and song/artist names are so dense and confused that oftentimes you'll need multiple commands to hone in on what you actually want.

My "smart speaker" (aka desktop computer with massive speakers) is simply controlled by spotify sync which is absolutely not amazing but it's also not not terrible and far easier to control than times I've tried shouting at voice devices in the past.

The mic in these home devices is, imo, 90% for cooking and 7%[1] for other alarms and timers - they're relatively poor music platforms and only moved into the space because of how subsidized they were by Amazon and other companies.

1. (edit) bumped down from 9% to 7% because smart lights and thermostats are also quite prevalent.

So what you wanted was a wireless speaker? I think when most people say "smart speaker" they mean a speaker that they can control using the speaker itself, so not just a speaker tethered via bluetooth/wifi.

I just started mentally replacing "smart" with "spy" in product names a few years ago, and it's been a generally helpful heuristic as to their tradeoffs.

Considering the only apparent difference between the two is method of control and people love complaining about voice analysis miscomprehending I doubt there is much distance between those two terms in most consumers minds. I think in general marketing loves slapping "smart" in front of other nouns and it's usually received a lot worse than they expect to the point where most consumers ignore it as much as other fluff terms like "Next Gen".

The difference for me is a lot broader. A wireless speaker to me mostly means a bluetooth speaker. A smart speaker means internet connected, firmware updates, feature-creep, TOS/EULA crap and a probably-sooner-than-I-expected end-of-life.

> physically scraped out the MEMS microphones.

I am curious. Are you sure you got them all?

Pretty certain! I inspected the board closely, and tested after reassembly to make sure it couldn't hear me anymore. That Nest Mini lives with its mute-switch permanently engaged anyway, just as a fallback.

I like this approach.

But can you safely do this with multi room devices?

Yeah, companies are like that - they'll lie and pretend to be "the good guys" at the start, right up until they're not and change their motto to something besides "don't be evil".

As far as I can tell, it's all part of the plan to attract idealists for cheaper and get better bang-for-buck from their "committed" workers until such time as they can no longer deny their shady practices. By the time the original engineers leave, they have enough of an established framework that they can hire mercenary contractors or whatever to keep things going.

I was very "I will only work for moral companies" and I still feel that way. But when I was laid off for almost a year, well, I did apply at Amazon knowing all about them. Didn't quite apply at Google / Meta (didn't really want to do website / HTML stuff) but it was getting harder to resist..

I feel you on prioritizing moral work! It took me a long time in my career to finally be able to make that choice (versus taking the first job I could find). I had an extremely moral open source robotics job for 5.5 years and then had to leave and take a less moral but still I think positively moral startup job. I think it’s okay to prioritize your personal financial needs sometimes. In the long term you won’t do the immoral stuff that long if this is how you think - so your own will provides a check to make sure you won’t do it too long.

It's not possible to work for a moral company because it's the government that's immoral and is responsible for corrupting them. Tech is basically the whipping boy for all the government's misdeeds. The government forces tech companies to be dirty (it's against the law to say no to them) and then inflames the public to blame the tech companies for doing it, so that people hate tech and love the government. It's like blaming the hand of the person whipping you while kissing their feet. So until the government stops being evil, there's no ethically safe space for tech workers. We'll just continue to be passed around and used as spoils of war by one twisted regime after another.

> right up until they're not

In my experience, this moment is when the company goes public.

This is interesting because I remember interviewing a UX manager candidate at Google around 2019 who was coming from the Alexa team at Amazon, and his feedback even then was that Alexa was never going to be profitable and that he -- and many others -- were trying to get out while the getting was good. It, just like Google Assistant, is just suffering a very slow death.

2019 was before ChatGPT. Generative AI could change the game for digital voice assistants.

I think it's weird that they (Alexa, Google etc) haven't tried to do something new with generative AI assistants.

"They" or in this case, Apple, has. This is largely why the latest Siri AI enhancements went over so poorly. Hallucinations when trying to get important personal data or accomplish important tasks are not viewed terribly fondly.

You're giving Apple too much credit in a way that their press releases are carefully crafted to encourage you to. The on-the-ground reality is that Siri will sometimes prompt me for permission to ship her mangled speech-to-text out to a very stale ChatGPT model and read what comes back. That's not failure by hallucination, that's failure by duct taping on an extra limb and wondering why it isn't useful.

I think they have all been trying [1][2][3] which is why assessments about voice assistants from 2019 might not apply today.

[1]: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...

[2]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-apple-intelligenc...

[3]: https://blog.google/products/assistant/google-assistant-bard...

They have. You can switch your Android phone from the old Google Assistant to Gemini. I don't like it, so I use Gemini separately by going to the Gemini URL, leaving the assistant as is. It may be dumb, but it's useful. Just like you wouldn't replace your Bash with a GUI, at least not for some values of 'you'.

Google Assistant is going away soon so this won't work anymore.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/end-of-life-gemini-wi...

I wonder how that will affect older devices, like Android TV streaming boxes, where you use the assistant through the remote.

I see that the article mentions this, but I'm skeptical. I think that the assistant will just be switched off, and that will be it; no more using the older Android TV box to ask for today's weather or search for videos.

I think older and low power devices would actually be easier to port: they capture the audio request, send it to the server, receive an audio response from the server and play it. No local "intelligence" at all.

So you could probably replace the whole backend while keeping things compatible as long as you maintain that simple API.

Weird that this got downvoted, considering that Amazon is currently rolling out Alexa+.

If the complaint was that the product wasn't profitable, wouldn't adding expensive LLM inference costs potentially make the problem worse at least at the outset?

The last thing I need is another bullshit generator.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Misguided and/or naive.

Just remember that "privacy of customer data" is ambiguous, and can be used to mean different things to different people. Some folks think anonymized data is ok. Some people scrutinize the privacy policy and greenlight a product. customers read it and don't know what to think (by design)

As a customer, I don't know who they share my information with. Many or most products on amazon require your name and address (maybe phone number?) to deliver the product.

And I've had companies who've sold me stuff on amazon email me directly on several occasions. I have one email address I've given only to amazon, and the email did not go through an amazon redirector.

We should make AI generated conversations to overload their surveilance.

It's all fun and games until the import brokerage calls to ask where to deliver the 850,000 rubber dog turds you ordered.

Or the 28,000 tons of coal [1]. Unrelated to LLM (except for the part where I asked Gemini to find the link) but somewhat relevant.

[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Special-Delivery

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 argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier.

It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government. The person who is in a position to protect the interests of the customer, whether or not the customer 'cares', has a moral obligation to take care.

When the supplier chooses not to protect the interests of their customers, regulation steps in to create a consequence for that bad behavior.

I know people who hate this reality because they feel it is up to the customer to "decide" whether the risk is worth it, but those same people are not moving to Somalia to live in a land with zero effective government and regulation either. It generally comes down to a discussion that "some regulation" is good except for the regulation that is interfering with "their" plans. A very self centered point of view but all too common in my experience.

> This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...", is not so much an argument as it is a rationalization for amoral or simply bad behavior on the part of the seller/supplier.

It's worse than that. It's adversarial propaganda.

People actually do care about privacy, but they also care about other things, and they don't always know about privacy.

If Amazon tells you that they're recording what you say at all, it's buried in a hundred page ToS that nobody reads, and then what they do with the information isn't even clearly specified. If people understood that they're using it to determine which products to show you so you're more likely to buy the ones with higher margins, and that's costing you $1200/year, people would care about that, but they don't even realize it's happening.

If the market is consolidated into two companies and they're both invading your privacy, or there is one company that doesn't but their product costs $500 more and the customer doesn't have $500 more, it's not that customers don't care, it's that they have no viable alternatives.

If they start using a product before it starts invading their privacy and then later it does, but that product is something like Microsoft Windows and by then they're so thoroughly locked into that platform that short-term extrication is infeasible, they grit their teeth and whinge about it because they wish there was an alternative, not because they don't.

Casting this as "people don't care" gets it wrong. If there are two otherwise-identical fungible products and one of them invades your privacy and the other one doesn't, not doing that is an advertisable feature. In a competitive market it's a competitive advantage. But if the incumbents can convince would-be competitors that it isn't then they don't have to face that competition, which is the purpose of the propaganda.

And in the markets where competition is lacking independently of this, the "regulation" needed is antitrust, because uncompetitive markets have more than just privacy problems.

>This argument, "People don't really care about <x> ...",

That may definitely be the case sometimes, but I certainly don't mean it like that. By normal person standards, I'm pretty extreme about privacy: no social media, (no, HN doesn't count) pihole, ublock+custom lists, noscript, as few services as possible, frozen credit, DNS resolver rather than a single 3rd party service, etc.

I strongly lament the lack of interest in privacy. The point of my statement is that people can't even be bothered to care about privacy when it costs them nothing. Given this, I can't imagine them actually caring about privacy when it actually inconveniences them. There's just no chance of it. I don't want things to be that way, but it's clear there's nothing I can do about it.

Between pornography ID laws, anti-bot mitigations on websites, and the rise of smart phones + apps, it seems pretty clear that the death of privacy on the internet is just around the corner. And people will welcome it. I'm not happy about this, and may be less happy about it than much of HN. But I think it's pretty inevitable.

"People are naturally ambivalent" is a statement of fact, not an argument. What confuses me is that you imply that you agree it's true. After all, if people did care they wouldn't need advocates to care for them.

What's more, we don't want to care about things. In fact a lot of pain we are experiencing now is precisely that we are being forced to care about things we haven't had to for decades, arguably centuries. It sucks. Life is better when the plumbing "just works" precisely because then we don't have to care about it and can focus on other more interesting parts of life.

There has been a critical breakdown in the trust people have in the experts that advocate for them. The damage started with a flurry of self-inflicted wounds and then those wounds were mercilessly exploited by those seeking tactical advantage. What makes this especially evil is that these mercinaries use people's natural ambivalence to damage the very institutions that made their ambivalence possible! They are tricking people into acting against their self-interest.

The real solution is neither to defend damaged institutions nor to seek their utter destruction. The solution is to heal those wounds and take strong action to avoid future damage. That's the only way people can go on not caring so they can focus on more important things.

> It is the rationale for the existence of regulation by government

... including the War on Drugs. We should be very cautious about asserting our value system over the value system of other people who are customers of these tools, lest the end result is a situation where people are no happier (and not much safer).

>People don't really care about privacy

People don't care about anything by default. They have to learn about threat-models and how to mitigate those threats. Usually this only happens after getting burned personally. (To learn from others is still learning, which people also don't care about.)

This topic comes up in politics all the time. There is this hurt and offended reaction to people embracing authoritarianism, often becoming nihilistic. But the practical truth is that people don't care about philosophy or politics. Human society's default is authoritarianism. Rather than be upset at this impulse, it would be wiser to acknowledge with amazement that we managed to try something different. Civilization will struggle with it's default settings for as long as civilization exists, and our role is fight against them, knowing the fight is never over.

> Human society's default is authoritarianism.

I'd say it's quite the opposite. It takes a lot of force and coercion to maintain authoritarian institutions precisely because it's not natural. Most of us have had a lifetime of schools, churches, and jobs drilling conformity and blind obedience into us.

Human society's default organizing principle is authoritarianism. This is born out by the fact that most humans who've ever lived lived under such a system. A large fraction of us today live under such a system. Even in liberal societies our entertainment overflows with depictions of monarchy and feudalism. Even at a smaller scale, families, clans, businesses, militaries and teams are run this way: there is one boss, and all authority flows from them.

For some (for me) there is a psychological allure to the idea that left to our own devices we'd self-organize in an enlightened way. But the experiment has been done over and over and over again, and that's not what happens. I realize it's painful to accept something you don't want to be true, but that's no reason not to face up to it. Better to face the challenge open-eyed than to have false assumptions undermine you.

> Human society's default is authoritarianism.

This is a very interesting question -- Thomas Hobbes would disagree with you here.

A columnist I read brought this up recently mocking a bunch of Silicon Valley execs supporting monarchism, presumably thinking they would be the educated elite monarchs. His point was that they hadn't invented anything new . . . monarchy is literally one of the oldest ideas in human history.

Of course there's also the bit that historically, when unrest or a revolution comes, the people who think they can manipulate it to end up in charge are usually the people who end up getting stood up against a wall and shot, too.

To paraphrase Gandalf, "Do not bother saying we, Saruman. Only one hand can wield the One Ring."

> Human society's default is authoritarianism.

I do not think so

I think freedom

People don't care about privacy

Some people have enjoyed the benefits of government agencies that promote consumer protections. At some level, maybe we hear about or even directly benefitted from some consumer protection agency, and assume the government has our back. Maybe it is naive, but I still think that assumption is there: we don't have to care because it is someone else's job to care about privacy. How could it be put on sale if it is not safe? They test cars, for safety, they test food for safety, etc. They must test these things, too, right?

This is clearly not the case, though. The government works for big tech. The US government is even shutting down consumer protection agencies at the behest of big tech and leaving us to their whims!

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.

I read OP as in "they just don't care about privacy [enough to change their behavior]", and in that sense I fully agree.

Same can be said about climate change. Sure they worry and complain, but when pointing out concrete measures they can take, basically nobody does.

Complaining is easy.

> This kind of apathic statement is not very useful.

Except for corporations who want to exploit us to no end. I’m sure they love this type of defeatist attitude. There’s no one easier to take advantage of than someone who confirms they have given up and won’t fight back.

People should care about climate change, that's different from whether people do care about it.

More importantly though, those that do care should do as much as they're willing to do to help avoid making it worse.

For some that means choosing to only buy products made with natural materials, growing/raising their own food, drinking rain water, etc. For others that means not using plastic straws.

There's no perfect answer and no one really knows what will happen in the future or how to best change it. Regulators fall into this camp too, they don't know the future and they can't accurately predict precisely what must be don't. Expecting this of them is a fools errand and demanding everyone do what they say is oppressive at best.

Blaming consumers for climate change is a con. Giving regular people a bunch of useless busywork when they are already busy instead of regulating at the manufacturer where the effort would be minimal is a choice.

It will always work. The opportunity to blame your neighbor for climate change for not being as conscientious as you is the archetype of a liberal wedge issue. You can yell at them on social media. But regulate my company? Akshualy you're killing jobs?

I'm not blaming anyone. People make their choices, every choice has a consequence. Its as simple as that.

It sounds like you may take more issue with the busy work we're all given. Is the problem really that the government isn't regulating problems away, or that people are kept so busy and distracted that they can't make their own decisions?

Asking everybody nicely to stop contributing to climate change does not work to stop climate change. It is an individualized solution to a societal problem.

We didn't clean up our water by asking people to stop buying lightbulbs from the factory that dumped mercury directly into the river - we made it illegal for the company to do so, and we were successful.

I'm also not proposing we ask people nicely to do anything. People will make their choices, we have to expect people will generally make a decision that's best for them and that in the long run if people continue to do what they think is best it will work out.

What are we even doing here with capitalism, democracy, etc if we don't generally trust people to make their own decisions?

With regards specifically to lightbulb factories dumping mercury - the problem is often that the people in the area have no power to legally handle it themselves. Companies get to hide behind expensive lawyers, lobbyists, and often regulations themselves to avoid repercussions.

We often can get just as far by removing legal protections for companies rather than further centralizing power and authority to a few people we trust to do the right thing.

> What are we even doing here with capitalism, democracy, etc if we don't generally trust people to make their own decisions?

Laws are the primary mechanism by which democracy safeguards threatened community resources. You may be longing for an anarcho-capitalist society, but don't expect negative externalities to ever be priced in.

I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, or an anarchist in general. I generally agree with laws that protect individual freedoms and generally disagree with laws that limit freedoms. Protecting everyone's right to free speech is important for example, legislating whether my milk must be pasteurized is not for example.

I think you misunderstood the post you are replying to.

I didn't read their comment as apathetic. The mass majority just doesn't choose to make privacy an emphasis in their lives.

[dead]

People might not care, but it also might be that they are not aware. Telemetry and data collection are cleverly hidden by app developers. Imagine if for example a phone would show messages like "Sending your data to Company X" every time it sends a telemetry. That would make people more aware.

What I think is hard for a lot of tech people to understand is that people don't care about privacy in the abstract. "Your data is being read and stored" isn't interesting to most people unless they know what it's being used for. And, often, to the surprise of the kind of person reading this, they are totally fine with how their data is being used. They don't care that the government is listening in for anti-terror activities. They don't care that corporations are aggregating their data to sell ads. They don't think it's a big deal.

There are things they would care about, but they don't care about those things.

And they don't care about privacy in the abstract.

> People don't really care about privacy,

They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up?

> they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy

Yea, so, looks like they do care.

> they never would have purchased this product in the first place

They were lied to, baited in, and the terms switched. Your assertion is ridiculous and one sided.

> Social Media,

I'm sharing things with my friends not with corporations.

> All of those are terrifically difficult to fully avoid or mitigate

Two browser plugins mitigate it entirely.

> They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this.

They're not sophisticated enough to understand the landscape around them and assume the laws are actually being enforced. What a corrupt position you have taken here.

> They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up?

Continued human behavior online. The actual behavior of users does not suggest they consider, on average, that their privacy is being violated every time they put more data into Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.

If you want to use this as a case study, come back to this topic in a year and see if Alexa sales and / or usage has gone down or up. It's at about 600 million installed units and 77 million users right now (and that's after someone's Alexa dataset was used as evidence in their murder trial two years ago... If people cared, wouldn't the line go down, not up?).

Per my longer post above, people do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where they tend not to. Stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region. Americans do one thing, Europeans another.

And as I pointed out there are not 600 million active installed Alexas, noone (outside Amazon and LE) knows the number of active current Alexas or current households with 1+ active Alexa. A better way to estimate usage is look at usercounts for the top-100 most popular apps, by geo.

UPDATE: I found the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat from [0] citing [1]

[0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/

[1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/

Right. People do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where users tend not to. It's better for everyone in this thread to simply stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region or privacy regime. (Whether the laws are flouted is entirey another topic.)

As to smart-assistant usage, what we would really want to see is comparative numbers of current and new Alexa users, broken out by privacy region (US, EU, other Europe, Australia, Asia, ME, CALA, Africa). (PS noone other than Amazon knows how many "active Alexa users" there are in a geo, since no third-party can audit Amazon's numbers, and "installed units" might simply mean "user bought an Alexa device at any pointsince 2014, it might be unused/disconnected/broken/sitting in a pile of junk/given away years ago. This is just like the games Linux vendors, Java and MSFT notoriously played with "licenses installed" even if that machine was wiped to install another OS, without ever activating the shipped OS).

"Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices" absolutely does not mean "there were at any point 500 million active Alexa users", and anyway most Alexa users have multiple devices in one house, so the theoretical peak devicecount was only ever 500m/n at most. I suspect the real peak was closer to 77m than 500m. But noone outside Amazon knows; there are only estimates. There is no Nielsen Research or Quantcast of Alexa devices, AFAIK. There are only the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat for number of users [0][1]. Not devicecount.

And as to whether privacy laws, warrant requests are being disregarded, blanket geofenced warrants, Ring syndication, yRoombas snooping on you, data fusion of that data with Kindle devices/phones and smart TV etc., it's a semantic debate whether that's "widespread privacy violations which US Congress is lobbied to turn a blind eye to" rather than "users aren't sophisticated enough to detect when laws are being violated". Imagine if we applied that thought process to bank robberies and whether they were adequately protecting your money: the onus being on the customer to constantly monitor your bank. (We don't need to because there are consumer and criminal laws governing banking).

Anyone with more time might care to look for estimates of number of households with active Alexas by geo/privacy region, and compare to privacy watchdog reports.

[0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/

[1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/

> People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that. Yes, they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy.

Your second sentences proves that the first is a lie. People very clearly care about their privacy. These surveillance systems are designed so that users never see the line between the collection of their private data and the consequences. People are upset when they know that their privacy has been violated, but Amazon tells them that they are safe and they never see the contractor working for Amazon listening to them having sex so they don't have the sense of outrage that they should.

Amazon is exploiting well known and researched limitations of human's brain/perception and they've crafted their marketing to be as manipulative and reassuring as possible to keep people bugging their own homes with their devices. It's a little unfair to blame the public being fleeced and not the multi-billion dollar corporation who has devoted unimaginable resources into manipulating the customers they are screwing over. You and I know better than to fall for their bullshit, but it's easy to see how most will struggle.

>People don't really care about privacy

Then why are they willing to pay a premium for Apple Products, which do as much locally as possible? (Without going into detail, I know this because a very skilled engineer I worked with was hired by them.)

Also, even if "people" don't care (I'd love to see a peer reviewed study on the # of folks who meet this criteria you claim), why should the preference of those people override those of us who DO want privacy? Why can't the few who don't care opt in to the panopticon?

We obsess over "AI" when things like "take an audio file and produce a written transcription" have been being done for quite some time. Where does the algorithm end and "AI" begin, and what is it about "AI" that necessitates throwing away years of existing work on privacy preserving queries?

Yeah, people care about privacy, and a lot of other things, but generally lack the organization and resources to do much.

Privacy is also one of those things that is much easier to care about if the lack of privacy is highly visible (e.g. someone standing in your window), but tech companies are pretty good about keeping their snooping in the background.

I've made a lot of comments on the internet about folks like Mark Zuckerberg, but to be fair, I've never caught him outside my window ;-)

Nobody buys apple because of privacy they buy it because its a status symbol and stupidly easy to use. All the privacy marketing is there just to feel even more superior to those plebian android user that can have a factually and verifiably private OS with android forks like GrapehenOS for people who actually care.

Majority user care about privacy the same way they care about the environment with apples greenwashing. One marketing line is sufficient.

>Nobody buys apple because of privacy they buy it because its a status symbol and stupidly easy to use.

I had a friend who used to joke "Linux is free if your time has no value" -- when I went off to college I settled on a Macbook because it had a CLI paired with actual hardware/software support.

I keep my phone as long as it gets security updates -- despite talk about price, I've found I can hold onto an Apple laptop for at least four years as long as I make sure to go heavy on the ram when I buy initially buy it.

Also I'm confused how you can jump from legit crits of Apple's closed source to indicating a preference for Android, an OS that will beam a great deal of telemetry to GOOG.

I tend to treat my phone as an inherent privacy risk and lock down my laptop -- it's my understanding that at the end of the day the LTE stack is gonna be closed even on a pine phone.

"They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this."

They don't prioritize privacy over other concerns, largely convenience, because (to date) they haven't been burned by that choice or at least haven't been burned badly enough or aren't aware. I think that, in the coming months and years, this is going to change.

My family has started paying attention to this sort of thing and opting out of things that they see as risks to privacy. A few years ago they were like "yeah, you're right, but..." -- not so much anymore.

People (including me) are simply ignorant of the privacy implications of their actions, even tech savvy people like me can't really understand who is watching and collecting their data and when, and won't go to extreme lengths in preventing others from listening in.

Regular folks are even less aware and are scared by technology - when a scary popup comes up, they will press anything and agree to anything just to make it go away.

I care a lot about privacy, I think others do as well. We don’t actually have that many choices as much of the privacy issues are difficult to avoid.

>People don't really care about privacy, it's as simple as that.

A big reason for this is that no one really explains what happens and why people should care.

Typically, it's either a hand-wave to "this should be important, you should care", or steeped in so much technical detail that the non-technical listener has a hard time wrapping their head around it. (The third way it's explained is via a bunch of conspiracy theory/NSA stuff, which probably just turns most people off entirely).

Worse, people have been in a dozen breaches in the last few years, but the majority haven't suffered a personal impact (yet). Further reinforcing "why should I care?".

HN is social media. So there.

Yes, but "social media" is a broad spectrum. On one end you have "profile-less" social media, like forums, and the other end is "profile-rich" social media, like Facebook. The privacy implications of the latter are far worse than the former.

The test for me in defining social medial is whether its core is based a graph of connections. This is where you lose control in, for example, FB: Meta can infer many details about me without me ever posting anything, such as figuring out my home town based on relatives and school friends -- many other examples.

And this is why I no longer use any Meta products.

What I can do is help my family and friends understand the choices they are making (e.g. use Signal to talk to me). That rush they feel posting something has effects on people in their graph and now they at least understand that and pause.

Another example is ancestor "research" type sites, or DNA tests to find "your true ancestry". I had no choice a cousin of mine chose that as a hobby.

Only if you think forums, 4chan or whatnot from ye olden days are also "social media". HN has no friends feature, no curated algorithm, no way to discover creators...

I do. Primeval social media, sure. Social media that predates the term "social media," even. Nearly all things exist before we agree on a name for them, so that's nothing new.

All of those services you list are examples of an online medium that exists for the purpose of socializing. So yes, they're all forms of social media, even if they're considerably less structurally harmful than something like Facebook.

HN only violates your privacy if you write your personal details into comments. Facebook violates your privacy in ways that only talented engineers can understand.

It says right there in the official messaging that they're going to use this to feed some GenAI model.

How do you square that with people not caring about privacy? The feature as it existed was there specifically to address privacy concerns.

Yeah, we do, that's why we didn't buy into the voice activated ecosystem from anyone. We voted with our wallets.

It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that consumerism is a stronger force than that care. Which makes sense, consumerism is the backbone of every consumer-focused capitalist economy.

Our greatest power is literally not buying things. But people don’t do it in practice. Why is complicated. We are constantly bombarded by propaganda to push us to consumerist behavior. We just don’t call it that, it’s “advertisement”.

Many people refuse to have any of these devices in their home over privacy concerns, one person I know wants them unplugged when visiting. I like the convenience, but there is a line and Amazon is crossing it. The lack of innovation, layoffs, and reports of financial losses were the warning the enshittifcation of Alexa is coming and I expect this is only the start.

Alexa and Google Assistant created the market, now it will be interesting to see how it evolves. Home Assistant is working well in testing and has a great feature set for home automation, the LLM support is fun, and most of the smart devices I've bought over the years are compatible including Apple Homekit. At least for people that do care, there are options.

Cynically, much of the "privacy" industry is just a red herring by big tech / data broker industry to normalize how egregious their privacy violations are.

"You know that boundary that we agreed upon a while back? We're gonna violate that boundary now. This is not an opportunity to negotiate a new agreement, we're gonna do whatever we want to you because we're big and you're little."

Stuff like this is why I've cut amazon out of my life entirely. No more new devices, no more new purchases, cancelled prime, all of it gone.

We've stopped buying everything from Amazon as well. It's been a huge switch, but feels entirely justified watching current events.

What alternatives have you found? Do you mostly go to smaller vendors?

not the person you're replying to but one trick I've found to be very effective is to find a product on amazon and then look for the vendor to buy from directly.

Also just a tip for an easy discount code or coupon:

1. Visit the manufacturer's social media account, if they are promoting an influencer, then visit the influencer's social media account.

2. That influencer usually has a discount code as part of a profit sharing deal with the brand. For many it's right in their bio.

3. Also searching youtube/instagram for "reviews" often finds advertorial style content that includes a discount code

This works particularly well if you're buying things like health supplements, but I've seen it for everything from tech to holidays.

I can often do that, but the biggest lament with the spouse is the easy returns on Amazon. You often have to pay for shipping to return an item and even then, only with an RMA and / or 15% restocking fee, while (if you have Prime), free on Amazon. I realize some of the "free shipping" is baked into the price at times - but I've yet to see it arriving faster or cheaper all costs considered from a 3rd party compared to that same item on Amazon. There's a lot less friction via Amazon.

If your goal is to delete all traces of Amazon, you should know that many vendors who sell on Amazon will use Amazon Logistics for shipping.

[dead]

always buy local if you can. if you can't, buy directly from vendor or partner.

I honestly wonder how legal that is.

If you bought something under the pretense that you could disable cloud stuff and then it silently starts uploading to the cloud, that's a violation of your agreement.

If they start dropping all requests until you assent to their shrinkwrap agreement, that still feels like a violation of the promises they made when you bought it, but unfortunately has precedent. See also: all the video games that no longer work because the publishers stopped supporting the servers they relied on.

The agreement contains provisions by which they can unilaterally change the agreement. They almost all do now, it's pretty standard boilerplate. Not long ago there was a TV, I wanna say it was LG but doublecheck that before you quote me, that shipped an OTA update with a change to the licensing agreement. Either you agreed, or they intentionally disabled all functionality. As we steadily move toward that sort of freedom that means less things you can actually do and more ways you can get screwed over this kind of stuff becomes increasingly common.

It's just "bait and switch" (which is illegal in most countries) with a few more steps.

They should be forced to offer a refund.

"Legal" requires judges that will view the case in a certain way and often needs the force of a government agency to back it. This administration has gutted both those things. Expect it to get worse, not better.

Amazon is rarely the cheapest way to have a package delivered to your home in less than two days. You can often find people much cheaper if you don’t mind waiting a week or two.

I reduced Amazon by 90% when I realized how much money I was wasting over 70-120 packages a year.

> Amazon is rarely the cheapest way to have a package delivered to your home in less than two days. You can often find people much cheaper if you don’t mind waiting a week or two.

But "waiting a week or two" seems directly at odds with delivered in less than 2 days. End users don't really care about shipping speed per service (unless it's a perishable or temperature-sensitive item). They care about how long it will take to arrive from the time the order is placed.

Sorry if my message was confusing.

There are options that offer fast shipping at slightly reduced prices, and options that offer slow shipping at significantly reduced prices.

Walmart.com, eBay, temu, and aliexpress are the most common sources I use, but I also do a lot of business with smaller retailers and brand websites.

What’s the alternative? Everyone else has you pay for shipping, and it’s slower.

To my mind that's just what my privacy costs and I'm willing to pay it. Others might not feel the same way, and they're welcome to pawn their data for free fast shipping.

Everyone has you pay for shipping. Amazon just lies about it, and has contracts that prevent people from selling their wares anywhere else cheaper.

Amazon spreads the cost across everyone (who is prime). The biggest users pay the least for shipping.

One week is longer than two days.

No, it's just disablement of a hardware-based feature that won't be able to run the new software.

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

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.

Hey Siri, delete all music.

That was an interesting feature to discover.

Man. I wonder what the PM/dev was thinking when they designed, planned, tested, and deployed that feature.

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've never liked any answer I've gotten to questions like "what's the weather like."

I look at the forecast in my weather app -- the whole fullscreen thing -- and follow some sort of mental algorithm that I can't fully specify to arrive at the conclusion about what to wear/bring. The spoken data feels like it's missing something, or maybe it's just transmitted in a sequence that my brain can't work with.

It's not that I don't trust it, exactly. It's that I can't use it for the task I'm trying to do. Never could. I have this problem with a lot of voice interfaces, and it suggests to me that either a) they're not very good, or b) my brain is not designed for that kind of UX.

It's certainly gives a very different kind of answer than my roommate would. Often times the most useful answer to receive can be "exactly like yesterday" or "slightly warmer/colder" - a voice assistant wouldn't do that.

My android phone does that by default, I'm assuming it would be very easy to have a voice assistant read the same text

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

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.)

It is generally understood that GDP is a poor measure of what matters to people. The OP should know this.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/quality-of-...

It may be generally understood to you, but not to me, and the link you provided says absolutely nothing about GDP.

Not a problem, let's educate you a little. When graphed together GDP growth and real wages in the US show a disparity that clearly indicates that increases in GDP go somewhere other than working Americans. This being the case GDP metrics don't communicate meaningful information about quality of life.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

While increases in GDP don't all go to working class Americans, the two are not completely decoupled either. If you look at the small-scale variations in both they match each other pretty closely. I also suspect that it's the working class that would eat any dramatic GDP decrease.

We can at least agree that the working class would be on the receiving end of the worst of the consequences for any flavor of economic downsizing, just like they have been during every other recession, market crash, etc. to date. I would however like to suggest not letting yourself get distracted by the fact that the two lines kinda wiggle similarly. That massive and growing pie slice where the two decoupled is absolutely the larger issue.

You also have to ask yourself why so many europeans try to move to the US for a better life (especially talented ones) and why almost no american does it the other way around. (The number is ridiculously low in comparison)

People move east to west across the pond, because they want the life offered by the US economy.

>The number is ridiculously low in comparison

Where are you getting your confidence that that is so?

Numbers of H1B applicants per country are available. The equivalent for the UK and France is also available.

If you believe there's nearly as many people trying to get out than there is trying to get in, you will be surprised.

The difference (per capita) is a factor of at least 10x

> You also have to ask yourself why so many europeans try to move to the US for a better life

I can guarantee you that number is now not growing so much.

I mean you can eat GDP and sleep under it. That's what it measures production.

Estimated GDP in 2024 28.9 T vs 2025 of 13.3 T

That’s a huge gain in 20 years. Where is the commensurate equivalent growth in housing, education, healthcare, cheap food, etc…

There is a huge disconnect between GDP increase and the economic pressure the majority of Americans feel.

The richest man in the world in 2008 was Warren Buffett with a net worth of 62 billion dollars. Now with 62 billion you are not even in the top 20. So the growth went into wealth inequality.

You see the contradiction between this and your previous post?

Here you say we can't eat/shelter better with GDP increases because they aren't distributed; there you said that [spending on] ability to eat/shelter was what they measured.

Looks like that should be 13 T 2005?

Take pretty much any quality of life thing. Just as one example

Mississippi: The average home size 2,065 square feet

United Kingdom: The average home size is 818 square feet

No, you cannot "eat GDP", but its a useful proxy as it correlates very highly to a lot of things we do care about

I wonder how it interacts with life expectancy.

There is a huge difference between Mississippi and the UK: 78.6 years for males and 82.6 years for females in the UK in 2020 to 2022. 68.6 years for males and 75.2 years for females in Mississippi in 2020 and 67.7 years for makes and 74.3 years for females in Mississippi in 2021. Might go up a bit if you have 2022 numbers, but the difference is huge.

Life expectancy differences in Mississippi vs. the UK is largely due to race. Mississippi is about 36% black, and blacks in the US have a 5+ year shorter life expectancy than whites.

How do Black people fare in the UK?

Because if there's no discrepancy, or a smaller one, it seems to suggest that maybe GDP and square-footage-of-your-house is actually not all that important.

And... why does that matter?

Because the comment I was replying to was wondering if there was any relationship between the GDP per capita of each location and the life expectancy?

To me your comment seems to be implying one of two things: 1) Black people are biologically hardwired to have a shorter life expectancy than white people 2) A shorter life expectancy among black people doesn't count -- it's only life expectancy among white people that matters

Could you clarify further if you meant one of these, or if you meant something else that I was not able to pick up on?

Neither, simply that there appears to be little correlation between GDP per capita and life expectancy between Mississippi and the UK, and the lion's share of the difference is due to lower life expectancies amongst blacks (the reasons for their lower life expectancy being something I didn't get into at all).

The black fraction of the population of UK was never mentioned. If you're going to compare the life span of two places, there doesn't seem to be any reason to bring race up. If you're going to bring it up, you need to justify why its relevant. You can probably find lots of demographic lines along which you can split a population to support this argument or that argument. Some fraction of Mississippi is black, as is some fraction of the UK. And each sub-demographic has some life expectancy. Different places have different population mixes, but those mixes are de-facto representative of those places. If the argument is about non-black life spans, your argument would make sense. But if it's about the average lifespan of the region, and the demographic mix is different, it's non-sensical to filter using different cohorts since that mixture difference is a real difference between the regions.

This requires a justification for why home size is a good indicator of quality of life, or for why it's more important than other indicators.

I don't know anyone who doesn't want more space. And I couldn't imagine raising a family in 800 square feet.

Do we really need a "source" for everything? Would it be meaningful if you saw some survey asking: Would you prefer your primary residence to be smaller, larger or the same size?

I guess you can say all things being equal larger homes are more expensive so there must be some kind of preference for larger homes that indicates value

Do those same people also care about quality of education, availability and utility of public transit, etc? Or is the size of your home the only factor in what makes somewhere livable?

I don't think anyone really cares about "public transit". I think people care how convenient their life is. Why should I care if I take a bus to work or drive? I prefer whatever is best for me.

I would look at cost + time. For instance, if it costs me an extra $2k per year for a car but it saves me 30 minutes round trip, and my time is worth more than $20 an hour (assume work 200 days per year), then car is better. Add the convenience of not having to manage bus schedules and, you know, owning a car, its a no-brainer. I think there's some weird cultish behavior around "public transit" as though it is a good by itself is disconnected to how most people think about this.

So in this case not being able to afford a car or have anywhere to park it is not the win you think it is.

In terms of education, not sure its quantifiable but if you look at money, Mississippi spends considerably more:

In England, secondary school spending per pupil in 2024-25 is projected to be about £7,400 ($9.4k), while primary school spending per pupil is about £6,700 ($8.5k)

In Mississippi its around $12k

Do you have any other data or are you just going entirely off of vibes?

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/annual-report-education-spen...

https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/per-pupil-spending-by-sta...

>I don't think anyone really cares about "public transit". I think people care how convenient their life is. Why should I care if I take a bus to work or drive? I prefer whatever is best for me.

Let me take a guess, you are an American, living in a city without good public transit.

I explicitly care about "public transport". I strongly dislike cars, like trains and bike lanes, mostly commute by bus. I can't imagine living in a place without a good public transport. I strongly prefer cities and places without too many cars everywhere.

>Add the convenience of not having to manage bus schedules and, you know, owning a car, its a no-brainer.

I assume you live in a place where cars are the default, or the only, mode of transportation? It's not like this everywhere.

Right, you can like public transport and that's fine. But most people don't care and prefer to have cars. This is especially true if you have a family.

Just two examples:

- food shopping is a lot more expensive if you have to buy local and you're restricted to how much you can carry

- it's kind of rude taking a sick or injured child to the doctor on public transportation

This is obvious if you look at behavior. When people get more money, they buy a car or often multiple cars. When they have a family, people tend to move to suburbs where cars are the primary mode of transportation. Even in cities with good public transportation, like New York, wealthy people still often own cars and use them along with private car service.

People might answer some survey stating they like public transportation but their behavior suggests otherwise. And these surveys are frame against an impossible ideal that does not exist. Look at behavior.

Small homes just plain suck. No room to do anything, stuffy, cramped. GF and I moved, rented a house for a month. 1400 square feet. 700 up, 700 down. Tiny and cramped, and it only had one very small bathroom.

We had to sleep on different floors. Master bedroom was barely larger than the queen bed, and no way 2 people could sleep in there because it would get blazing hot in minutes.

Garage was similarly minuscule. GF had a tiny suv and still couldn't open both doors.

I figure 1000 square feet per adult is just about right.

What are you on about? My wife and I live in a total of 1000 square feet in a Boston triple-decker and get along totally fine. We have a basement for storage and a parking space for our car. Somehow, we're both able to work from home without getting in each other's way, have space to do our own things, and temperature regulation is a non-issue with mini-splits. We even have a shared yard!

Maybe the space wasn't laid out well. I would imagine, with only 700 sq ft per floor, a good portion of that is taken up by the stairs. My condo is a flat in a 100-year-old building, built before the "open concept" plans came into vogue. It means out rooms are separated and lets my wife and I do different things in different parts of the house.

People used to raise families in these old buildings with 1000 square feet. Their third-spaces weren't taken over by profit-seeking companies and their interests took them outside the home. 2000 square feet for 2 people seems utterly ridiculous!

Lol. 1400sqft is cramped in the US? I have a 120m2 house, which would be about 1300sqft, and we have two kids rooms, one master bedroom with its own wardrobe and a bathroom, one shared bathroom, and na american kitchen and living room.

What are you guys even doing? Or maybe the 1400sqft included the garage?

> Lol. 1400sqft is cramped in the US?

If they hadn't done the math I'd have suspected a typo.

I'm in a place not all that much larger (1800 sqft) and it feels pretty luxuriously large for just me and my partner. Big open kitchen, two living rooms, 2.5 bathrooms, three bedrooms (one used as an office for myself) and a dedicated office for my wife.

sounds like a bad space distribution. I live in a 700 sqft apartment and my bedroom is large enough for a bed (where my girlfriend and I absolutely can both sleep) a small desk, a weight bench, a rowing machine, and some normal bedroom stuff (dressers etc)

Population density

Mississipi: 24.5/km2

UK: 279/km2

Maybe, only maybe, that has an effect on house sizes?

New Jersey population density: 488/km2

New Jersey median home square footage: 1,740

Doesn't look like it?

Then if houses are larger and density is higher then one can conclude that the UK has more green spaces, non-developed areas whole NJ is fairly built up? Which also conversely has an impact on quality of living.

It means that GDP doesn't buy prosperity.

We've been told for decades that letting our economy turn out like Europe's was something to fear, while they outpaced us in virtually all quality of life measures.

We can no longer claim being the richest country in the world as a source of uniqueness or justification -- handed to us by the gods. I think this is part of the reason for the present descent into authoritarianism.

> I think this is part of the reason for the present descent into authoritarianism.

Which? The American descent into authoritarianism or the European descent into authoritarianism?

the descent into authoritarianism is a result of the failure of neo-liberals to represent the working class.

unfortunately the wealthy are going to concede more wealth and power or it will continue.

To finish the story here, a look back:

https://bsalert.com/news/2596/Who_Are_You_Better_Than.html

People in this country perennially choose wanting to be "better than" over wanting to be happy.

Working class solidarity is the only solution.

I recently realized that people should understand they have more in common with (and must have solidarity with) the next people down on the socio-economic rung instead of trying to climb the ladder in hopes of joining those on the next rung up.

It will never happen, especially with the racialized nature of that socioeconomic ladder. The country that generates downvotes on a post recognizing the similarities between BLM/Floyd Protests and the Euromaidan (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43389979) could never.

I think awareness is growing

Strictly looking at GDP is a terrible way to compare economic conditions between US states and countries.

GDP of Mississippi looks great only because of a strong dollar. It doesn’t really account for living conditions.

It's great if you are a wealthy business owner or investor, and you want to push deregulation propaganda, because deregulation would allow you to get even richer.

Mississippi is perhaps a poor example to use, as its wealth is highly concentrated, as well as segregated along racial lines. It houses some very affluent communities and also some with open sewers or no public utilities at all, and a state house entirely unconcerned about reconciling the two because it's been gerrymandered to hell in order to prevent the ethnic group that makes up nearly 40% of its population from having anywhere near commensurate representation.

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

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jackson+Mississ...

Interesting, there seem to be a consensus about it.

Ok. Now compare Mississippi to those places on wealth inequality, life expectancy, education, health care, social mobility, etc...

A significantly better metric to compare would be median hourly wage (ideally, purchasing power adjusted, but that's hard).

The US average is actually behind wealthier European nations there (Ireland, Scandinavia, Benelux, Switzerland, Germany): 20$/h compared to ~20€/h. Purchasing power adjustments would also probably favor Europe I guess.

So the much stronger US GDP/capita output apparently does very little for the average citizen...

This was honestly surprising to me, I actually expected the US to be comfortably ahead in this (specifically significantly ahead of Germany). France is also much weaker than I expected in this (~17€/h) not including it was cherry-picking on my part, Eastern Europe is super poor (Bulgaria under 5€/hour!), and the top contenders were unsurprising, except maybe how well Denmark did (~30€/h).

Sources: eurostat + statista (because couldn't find what I wanted on bls.gov)

> Purchasing power adjustments would also probably favor Europe I guess.

I doubt it. Germany and especially Switzerland have a quite hight cost of living. Coming from Canada, I get sticker shock every time I go to the US because of how cheap everything is. I had the opposite reaction going to Europe (except for Italy).

It would also be interesting to compare take-home (after tax) pay.

You are 100% right about Switzerland (but its so far ahead that adjustments would not matter too much), for the others its probably barely double digit percentage adjustments.

My personal experience is that German supermarkets are priced extremely competitive (Lidl/Aldi specifically), and Italy felt more expensive by comparison to me (except maybe for local produce and cheese).

Comparing after-tax pay instead would help the US pull ahead for sure, but I feel a bit mixed about that because those taxes pay for stuff like child- and healthcare, which in the US is probably significantly more expensive out-of-pocket than the median EU citizens pays in taxes for the same.

I’d wager that the median European is happier and healthier than the median Mississippian.

I'm sure the GDP evenly distributes amongst the population right? It's not like the US has massive wealth disparity or anything that could massively affect the implications of a simple per capita GDP comparison.

Maternal death rate in Mississippi, 36 per 100k

https://mississippitoday.org/2023/01/26/maternal-mortality-r...

In Greece , 8 per 100k https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/economies/greece

That's just a random health stat, but it's clear the Greek have a far healthier population.

But Mississippi has more millionaires so I guess it's fine.

I have to imagine you cherry-picked maternal death rate (which is anomalously high in the US for reasons that even experts in maternal death cannot explain) in bad faith because the all-cause mortality rate in the US is 1,044 per 100k compared to 1,412 per 100k in Greece - 35% higher[0].

I guess it's not so clear.

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/death-rat...

Life expectancy in Mississippi is 10 years shorter than in Greece

>Mississippi ranked dead last in a CDC ranking of all 50 states and the District of Columbia when looking at 2021 data. The magnolia state had a 70.9-year life expectancy rate, slightly lower than West Virginia's 71.

https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2024/12/29/cdc-data...

>The current life expectancy for Greece in 2025 is 83.10 years, a 0.18% increase from 2024. The life expectancy for Greece in 2024 was 82.95 years, a 0.18% increase from 2023. The life expectancy for Greece in 2023 was 82.80 years, a 0.2% increase from 2022. The life expectancy for Greece in 2022 was 82.64 years, a 0.2% increase from 2021.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/grc/gre...

Greece has a older population. Plus we're talking about Mississippi not the entire US.

Yes but you didn't mention life expectancy, you chose maternal mortality then generalized that to "because Greece's maternal mortality is lower than Mississippi, Greeks are healthier." That was my point.

In no universe does a few ultra wealthy people in Mississippi make it a better place to live than half of Europe, which is what I was originally responding to.

That's all per capita GDP means.

Not like maternal mortality is only slightly higher in MS, it's drastically worse to the point where you can argue the healthcare standards are closer to that of a developing country.

Can you find a single health metric which would point to people in Mississippi doing better than those in Greece ?

> which is anomalously high in the US for reasons that even experts in maternal death cannot explain

Doesn’t seem like a mystery that a country who is so “pro-life” they’d rather let women die than properly treat miscarriages has a high maternal death rate.

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/27/texas-abortion-death...

Abortion has nothing to do with it. Abortion laws vary state to state from very restrictive to very permissive, and even states with much more permissive abortion laws than the majority of Europe, maternal mortality remains higher.

Wisconsin's abortion law is from before the Civil War and its maternal mortality is lower than Massachusetts.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/maternal-mortality/mmr-2018-2022-st...

Personally I think it has more to do with access to healthcare and the general physical fitness of your average American compared to your average European but I have no data to back that up.

A miscarriage is not a voluntary abortion. The point is not to criticise these cases specifically, but to point out there is a cultural underpinning to the problem. To treat someone appropriately, you have to respect them and not be constantly afraid that what you’re doing will get you in trouble.

If a doctor is afraid to treat a miscarriage it's because they're worried about abortion laws in their jurisdiction. You can't pretend they're not linked; we should talk about both when we talk about either one.

My point about Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and US maternal mortality vs. Europe stands.

Wisconsin's abortion law was completely irrelevant in the modern era until Roe was overturned, so that's not really a great point. At best, it's incredibly dishonest. Besides, the poster wasn't saying it was because of abortion specifically, but that having such a large population that views women's reproductive health as a political issue, rather than a medical issue, is probably the reason why the US has such poor maternal health outcomes.

Great, it's 8.3 in Albania. Doesn't really help you if you're a typical person making less than 10k a year

Beyond what everybody else has said, I wonder how much of that difference is due to the healthcare in Mississippi being counted as part of GDP instead of as a state service? Ever ballooning healthcare costs are the cancer that is eating the developed world alive.

Mississippi is the chronic showcase of american wealth inequality.

Mississippi has the lowest life expectancy in the U.S. (about 73 years), significantly lower than the national average (77).

Mississippi has the lowest median household income in the U.S. (about $52,000 in 2022), compared to a U.S. median of around $75,000.

Mississippi has high rates of obesity, diabetes, and preventable diseases, partly due to poor healthcare access.

France and Italy have top-tier universal healthcare, while the UK's NHS, despite challenges, still provides free-at-point-of-use care.

In Mississippi, many rely on Medicaid or have limited healthcare options.

Mississippi’s school system ranks among the worst in the U.S. European countries have stronger public education systems and more government support for higher education.

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> According to what parameters?

That it’s actually usable? Great healthcare is pointless if you cannot afford to go to the doctor.

> 88% of the adult population (age over 18) in Missisipi has attained at least a High School degree. [3]

Sure, but what standard of high school degree?

> That it’s actually usable? Great healthcare is pointless if you cannot afford to go to the doctor.

And yet Americans seem to survive more often with a healthcare they supposedly do not use than Italians and Frenchmen with a healthcare they use.

> Sure, but what standard of high school degree?

Surely you aren't implying that the standards of an American HS degree are so low that the education that that huge percentage of the population with a middle school degree or lower is receiving is comparable to it?

Well. Yes? Anecdotally at least my experience with degrees given outside my home country is that they often appear to get given for attendance, not attainment. A high school degree means anything from “can do higher order math blindfolded” to “doesn’t know how to do addition”.

>> France and Italy have top-tier universal healthcare

>According to what parameters? For what it's worth both seem to rank lower than the US according to the OECD.[2]

That would be surprising, since the US doesn't have universal health care.

Thanks for being a great example of what this person wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385268#43387809

How do US state GDP per-capitas compare to the GDP per-capita of Ireland? And if this comparison is not meaningful or relevant, what does that say about the choice of metric you made?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

And who cares about that? GDP is not a good indicator about people’s quality of life. Maybe of the top 0.1%.

Notwithstanding the other comments about the effect GDP per capita might or might not have on individuals, how much of this GDP difference is driven by the strength or weakness of consumer protections within a given economy?

Is higher GDP per capita truly a strong argument against consumer protections?

Per capita GDP is a bad measure when so much of it is captured by the 1%

GDP is a trash measure of what life is actually like. It should go away.

If they at least cited PPP I'd maybe buy their argument..

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

Some people think deregulation equals productivity equals prosperity.

Sure, America has the most school shootings and medical bankruptcies. But they also have the biggest houses, the biggest cars and the most private swimming pools per capita.

Mississippi has much higher rates of infant mortality, poverty, preventable deaths, and lower overall education levels than most of the EU. Economic output fails to capture the degree to which the economy serves its people.

While average GDP sounds like it’s something that everyone participates in, in reality, under capitalism wealth and income follow a Pareto distribution. As a result, GDP per capita tells us more about total output than about how it is actually distributed among the population, who is benefiting, and thus the well being of the society as a whole.

> under capitalism wealth and income follow a Pareto distribution.

And under the other forms of government thus far tried?

Anyway, Capitalism doesn't explain wealth inequality. The ability to accumulate capital and apply it to industry with limited liability doesn't inherently cause wealth inequality. That's the fault of Greedism, Over-inflated-sense-of-selfism, and Giving Money to Politicians is like giving Whiskey and Car Keys to Teenage Boys-ism.

We're over taxed and over regulated, that's nothing to do with Capitalism.

Capitalism isn’t a form of government. It’s an economic system. Politicized, sure.

Politics and economics are the same word.

They literally are not

Wealth inequality isn’t simply a side effect of capitalism—it’s structurally necessary thanks to the division of society into two classes, capitalists and workers.

I do agree that a capitalist economic system isn’t alone in manifesting inequality. I would further acknowledge that under capitalism the amount of wealth inequality differs from one capitalist society to the other. Yet the present levels of inequality we see around us are nearly unprecedented.

You blame greed. But capitalism enshrines the profit motive. It incentivizes capitalists to maximize profit regardless of the effect on the working class even if that means bribing politicians or whatever. Greed is a central feature of capitalism, not some personal failing to be explained at the individual level.

Meanwhile, neoliberal deregulation has been enacted for the last 45 years. What are the effects of this? Real working-class wages have remained stagnant while the wealth gap has drastically increased. Should we believe the answer is more deregulation?

Under a deregulation ideology, the wealthy push for deregulation when it suits them on the one hand while benefiting from and expanding government influence on the other (subsidies, bailouts, regulatory capture, etc.). That’s why after 45 years of a deregulatory ideology operating at the highest levels of our governments, subsidies and regulatory capture still exist.

Consider the present moment. Elon Musk slashes government spending while receiving millions from the federal government. This is not a bug. It’s a central feature of this ideology.

We may have different members of the upper class at the wheel now, but they are still using the same siren’s call of deregulation to justify their policies, ostentatiously reducing government influence in some areas while tactically expanding it in others - not just handouts to Trump’s cronies but also expansion of executive powers and erosion of civil liberties.

GDP per capita of Ireland is double that of the UK? Is that because of the tax dodge thing? When did that happen?

We get touchy if you call it a tax dodge but yes it’s generally not considered an accurate measure of wealth in Ireland. Modified GNI is the term used for the adjusted number.

The fact that Mississipi and Bavaria Germany have the same GDP per capita tells you a lot about GDP.

Yeah, but have you been to Mississippi?

you would not be making this comparison if you've spent time in mississippi

And that GDP is one guy.. if you take him out of the state though, it gets dark pretty fast.. people dont vote for a return of monarchy if things are going well.

> 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.

Communism ended in Poland 35 years ago (1989). That's one or two generations ago.

That's long enough for everyone aged about 50 in 1989 to have aged out of the system.

How many decades should pass before we stop blaming present circumstances on the past?

It takes time to create an economy. Even with consistent 5% yoy growth that's a few decades to catch up when you're starting with a few times less GDP per capita.

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 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.

Making this example even worse, both Firefox and Chrome are open source (except for a few proprietary add-ons). An EU company wouldn't even need to make their own browser. They could just hard-fork one of those.

I mean, currently they couldn't because EU's laws are too weak too.

An EU company that released chrome for iOS would have to pay Apple 0.50€ per side-load in "core technology fees", so if they didn't charge a bit, they couldn't, and no one pays for browsers.

They'd also have to pay apple I think 15% "Non-apple Payment Service Providers" fee for anything the user purchased in the app on their device, so i.e. if the user used amazon.com in the browser, the author of the browser would owe apple a percentage of each purchase.

But also it would take I would guess about 5 developers a year to actually port chrome to iOS, so you'd need a roughly 1 million dollar initial investment too.

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-...

Unfortunately I'm only able to use browsers which run on linux so I can share history between my phone and all other computers.

If Orion had a linux version, maybe I'd consider it, but the firefox-skin on webkit lets me share history even if I can't install extensions, and my history is more important.

A browser that only works on iOS and macOS doesn't have a better privacy policy for me in practice, apple collects all sorts of information that my linux devices don't.

Had absolutely no idea Kagi was working on a browser, incredible. Thanks!

I might not even have to rely on a VPN into my house with a DNS blackhole anymore...

> 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.

Well, America has never prohibited Apple from allowing iOS sideloading, either specifically in America or worldwide. I completely agree that it would be a beneficial economic regulation for the US to require the major gatekeepers to allow such access like the EU has (although ideally with fewer opportunities for bad-faith half-assed compliance attempts than the EU gave Apple), but the biggest blame here goes on Apple and not on any government.

[dead]

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.

If we use Elon as an example regular CEOs probably have 300+ days off.

I'm not sure Elon is a "regular CEO". He's more like an active investor where the companies are mostly run by other people without him there at all.

So yeah, not a typical "business owner" :)

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.

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

How long does this process typically take? When do you think EU consumers either get the functionality back or receive compensation?

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

There is no downside to breaching the GDPR, as demonstrated by Facebook and Google still being in business.

The fines, if they ever arrive, are merely the cost of doing business - a small tax.

Clearly it is not true that there are no downsides, because those companies had to change behaviours and offer more data protections as a result. The goal of GDPR is not to bankrupt companies, but to fix behaviours.

I do agree fines take too long to come and are too small.

Who said it was to innovate? The administration is cancelling research, actually deleting the department of education, bullying the university system into censoring, revoking diplomas, forbidding Chinese research collaborations. Innovation is not on the menu.

The regulations are being broken to enhance fortune 1000 profit margins.

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

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.

Ha! The United States has "special" citizens called corporations that due to the US's "law of wealth", get to do anything they want as humans legally without any of the drawbacks. It's so ass backwards here, in the USA, smart people are turned inside out with nonsense. Then the fact that there is no real effective communications training at all in all but the media manipulation educations, nobody knows how to communicate, they try, but it's pathetic, seriously sad parrots just echoing talking points with nothing being communicated.

"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.

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

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".

Protip: voters don’t like to be blamed for their actions, it makes them defensive, this is a losing strategy. Voters like to blame politicians for letting them down.

Voters might not like being blamed. But that doesn't make it "not their fault".

If the get defensive I just shrug and repeat "you voted for this".

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

We need to have a close look at free speech, especially now that techniques from psychological warfare are being used, not only in political propaganda but even in advertisements.

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.

Except it won't work, they will retro justify the leopard eating their face to their death bed, taking down everybody with them as they do so. Their reasoning isn't just impervious to logical arguments from others, it also resists the painful reality and consequences of their choices. It's a media induced debilitating mental illness.

Should have happened in 2008.

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.

The democrats haven't been fighting for the 0-99% class for quite some time. Its been special cause this, social rage that.

Its unsurprising that when republicans finally get a chance to demolish basically every social program, they would not get stopped by democrats. (Aside a few progressives like AOC, Sanders, Ilhan, etc)

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.

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That worked really well last time.

I'd be surprised if FTC had any teeth left after DOGE was done with them.

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...

Funding confirmed.

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?

It is illegal, but suing is too costly.

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It effectively died a long time before that.

I have no idea what you mean. The executive branch didn't routinely ignore court orders and disregard the constraints set out in the Constitution before that date. The government broke laws, but it was a scandal when it did and people -- the perpetrators, not random civil servants doing the jobs they were hired to do -- got fired for it and sometimes jailed. Now it's just another day that ends in y.

In theory Biden could have taken the SCOTUS grant of immunity to disregard the Constitution as Musk and Trump are doing, but he didn't. Trump's taking power was a step change.

We still have laws, but the executive branch under Musk/Trump regards them as mere words on a page. They bind others, not them.

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.

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...

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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

That would be illegal under the unfair contracts law here in Australia.

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.

I am relatively tech savvy, installed HA recently in a VM on my media server and the thing was just a massive pain in the arse, particularly trying to migrate Thread devices from Apple Home to HA.

Sure things might be getting easier but they’re certainly not easy.

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...

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/

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.

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.)

They're already better compared to commercial solutions regarding device/service support and complex automations.

But missing opinionated defaults, really, you still have to roll your own home/away/vacation solution. Creating a dashboard requires you to understand the meta of Home assistant which takes a lot of time.

People asking should I get PI or NUC every single day in the reddit. I am happy with my 2000lines long configuration file except scripts and automations. But it won't be easy for someone is not tech savvy.

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.

[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.

The reason I replied to the parent comment was because of their dismissive tone. Of course returning the product is a good idea, but telling reasonable people to "chill out", and dismissing their concerns by suggesting they "just XYZ" is truly unproductive. It ends the conversation rather than engaging with it.

Still not an argument against people being allowed to be mad regarding this. You just can't give a fuck about data privacy and expect people to not oppose this and speak up.

> being allowed to be mad

No one can stop you being mad. No one's saying it's not allowed. It's possible someone is still young enough to misinterpret adult interactions as parental fiat, but it's not the case.

"We should have a framework that prohibits companies from selling a product with a certain agreement, then changing the agreement unilaterally"

That isn't trying to make a difference? Excuse me? Read that back.

The framework already exists, it says to return the product and ask for a refund.

You can claim detrimental reliance though, but it's a stretch and bad faith imo. Try your luck with a judge and attorney fees

The framework that exists is crap and should be replaced with something where you as a consumer should not have to watch the eula changes like a hawk, and then the onus should not be on you as a consumer to do extra work to get refunded for a bait and switch.

The legal system is crap and should be replaced? I'm out of this discussion, go do a revolution or keep me out of it.

It's unfortunate that you see "incremental improvement" to be completely and uniquely equal to "revolution". The legal framework can be updated.

Not allowing giant corporates to do bait and switches with impunity is not a revolution.

I tried, Amazon will not refund over this issue.

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.

"Do not send voice recordings" back to Amazon HQ =/= "privacy focused." It's arguably a necessary feature for minimal privacy in one's home, and I expect that a lot of people bought those devices with that in mind.

If the FTC doesn't fix this kind of spontaneous downgrade, I'm not sure what they're for at all.

If somebody falls for a criminal's fraud, I suppose "they just made a mistake and can learn from it"? No need for anybody else, or any authority, to do anything?

Jumping to criminal fraud feels a bit hasty in this context. It'd be important to know whether Amazon ever marketed this feature specifically, promised privacy, defined what that privacy they promised meant, and whether there's any legal argument to be made that this setting should be considered core to the basic functionality of Alexa.

IMO no one should have ever expected Alexa, or products like it, to be private. The meet fact that it has a microphone, and potentially a camera, and promises to respond simply by you saying something to it means they're always listening. I don't really care what they say they'll do with the recordings, I care what they can do with the recordings without me ever knowing about it.

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.

Yeah, I feel the same way. For a small set of features that work fairly reliably it is great. Almost all of my use is:

1. Set $thing timer for $time

2. Add $thing to my grocery list.

3. Weather

4. Convert $amount to $unit.

And it is pretty great when these work, being able to do it in the kitchen without stopping whatever I am doing (example setting the dishwasher timer while putting in the soap, adding milk to the grocery list as I am pulling the last bag out of the fridge) is amazing. No wasted time and no risk of forgetting to pick up my phone and do it after I finish the current task.

But even then it is pretty unreliable. I feel like it has been getting worse over time to be honest.

> ever since they convinced me to put a microphone in my house, it's almost as if that was their end game

It was. You’re one of the few in the thread to realize that, while others are frothing at the mouth over Democrats vs Republicans or EU vs US. The Echo and like devices were never about you but about putting surveillance gear in your house and getting you to pay for it. At least on old rotary phones the cradle switch or plungers physically broke the circuit that powered the microphones. The modern cell phone and home assistant and security cameras smart televisions and smart vehicles are surveilling you at all times.

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.

The point is to raise a generation on them, and then they'll look at us weird for not wanting to send data back to the Amazon mothership so we can write down milk on the grocery list, a task that would be impossible without phoning Amazon.

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.

So people don't read (and convert) their recipes before they actually start them? That's wild.

Look at yes, convert, rarely. Partially because getting Alexa to do it is so convenient and quick. I really need to continue setting up voice for HA.

I just dump it into chatgpt and get it done in a sec

I lack trust in ai to trust them to get volumetric to weight conversions right

And yet

And yet what? The Alexa conversion grabs information from websites.

[dead]

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.

I'm not a parent, but I suspect that if you're driving your kid(s) to the ER, there's a risk of having hours or minutes left with your kid(s) before they perish. So while it is riskier to call on the way, the risk of your spouse missing out on the last few moments of your child's time on Earth is actually greater.

That being said, one would hope that is a seriously unusual edge case for requiring voice commands.

(I personally find it awkward to use them, and still don't trust them to get it right, so I try not to use it ever unless I have no other choice.)

I think I'd always call an ambulance if it is what I perceive as a life threatening situation. Actually I did it once. You can't give CPR to your kids while driving. I also think calling the other parent would be way below in term of priority than making sure my kid stays alive so I think I would call only when ER specialists or at least paramedics have taken charge of them and that may be some hospital clerk doing it for me if I have to be available to give information about medical history.

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.

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".

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.

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 they worked and were local, why not?

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.

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.

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 private conversation data to advertising companies to later water board your kids into purchasing thing's on social media

You might write those limitations off as an asterisk , but they are probably orders of magnitude of differing quality.

You don't make a state of the art product by shipping some code and never getting any direct feedback on it.

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.

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.

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.

At least legally, it likely matters more whether the feature was marketed specifically and whether its considered required for the core functionality of the device.

I think the answer would be no to both, but IANAL.

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

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.

All bullshit. Apple loves to make a big stand on privacy but quietly folds just like the rest of them. Remember that big stink they rose over the FBI needing access to an encrypted phone a decade ago? Apple still gave everything the FBI requested some time later after got their PR win

No, that didn't happen.

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

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

Hahah, love it, thanks!

I’m a fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm but didn’t get to this episode yet.

It’s interesting seeing the progress of technology, with Larry using feature phones in the first few seasons.

You can't have it both ways

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.

Do people rent their amazon echo or buy it? I had the impression it was the later.

The website says "buy"!

A car analogy can work here, but a slightly different one:

Tesla remotely disable cars when they decide to, as they claim that they sell you the car, but only license the software. You get to keep the car, but loose the license to operate the software needed to actually make it useable.

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

I've had colleagues tell me their young kids try to ask Alexa to play music in school or other places. There's a future when talking with your devices will be normal and people will be puzzled when it doesn't work.

Yes folks do and I can't understand it either. Have asked / talked through their rationale but frankly humans are irrational is my clear takeaway. I experience it mostly when folks are prompting search in family settings. These usually overlap with the no-earbuds watch-videos crowd while others are reading / napping, etc.

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.

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".

People still smoke, don't use enough sunscreen and drink alcohol. "People" don't care.

This event has been written on the walls of the USA since those smart speakers and cel phones first appeared. The average US citizen has been conditioned to believe the 'regulation' is 'evil government' and not protection from established abusive practices - that's how regulations get created: someone (usually a corporation) abuses a public resource or good so extremely that laws are written to prevent that. Of course, those laws prevent business from exploiting the situations, so of course business educates people that regulation is evil, and the fake to destroyed education system volunteers to educate that lie too.

The USA is a destroyed, hollowed out shell that manufacturers morons, on purpose, because they make desperate employees. The fact that almost no Americans can explain themselves without thinking that act is a lead up to a punishment is very telling, and then their explanation cannot be understood by anyone but a career peer because they only speak in non-communicating jargon, a parrot echoes of talking points from media. No self generated thinking, only echoes of media. It's seriously a giant problem. This nation is kaput intellectually.

George Carlin said something similar:

"Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation."

If true, one could argue it is a real issue, because it is not clear that the country's 'management' is intellectually on the high end either.

So should I be sending my kids to government schools or home schooling?

My wife and I homeschool because we feel we can provide a better education to our kids than the local public schools can - making this decision after giving them a trial run. If you do decide to homeschool, it is important that you never grow complacent in how much responsibility you are taking on.

So many families around us homeschool for religious/dogmatic reasons and the quality of their kids education is a secondary concern. Naturally, they tend to do worse than public school children.

> tend to do worse

That's a subjective evaluation, no? ;) I'm sure their parents would say they did way better on the religion/dogmatism ruler!

> So many families around us homeschool

This seems like the "gateway drug" to cult indoctrination and worries me.

I'm going in completely the other way- My son (who will be 4 in June) is going to a good public school system here for socialization reasons, and I will supplement that with whatever I can (such as the critical-thinking skills I have acquired which were never taught to me). Additionally, I refuse (despite having a Catholic family) to indoctrinate him into ANY religion before he learns critical thinking first, because I will make an argument that this is no different than "grooming", except for "worldview control" instead of "sexual control".

I've met and worked with some of the most startlingly brilliant home schooled people, that are utterly crippled socially. They ended up being unable to work with others, despite on paper they ought to be leaders. People underestimate the critical value of childhood socialization. When a child finds they do not know the giant host of media nonsense other kids know intimately, they cannot participate in a huge amount of their imaginary fun which uses these media products as the foundation for their social set's humor and identity. That creates a very difficult to unseat insecurity.

Yep, that's what I expected, thanks for filling me in.

I agree with you. This is exactly how we’re parenting as well.

Depends how capable you are as a teacher and instructor. There are brilliant home-schooled kids and home-schooled kids who can barely read.

Government run schools are probably better than the education an average home-school parent/guardian can provide.

False dichotomy. After a certain age you should let them have a voice in their educational goals, and before they are able to express their preferences you should be helping them figure out what those are. You should be creating a family environment where your kids feel like people, and where they feel safe no matter what happens. You should be teaching your children to think critically and stand up for what they believe in, and setting a good example for them in terms of your personal values. If you don't have a self-consistent set of ethical values, and expect everyone else to determine those for you, I hate to break it to you, but you shouldn't have had kids.

> If you don't have a self-consistent set of ethical values, and expect everyone else to determine those for you, I hate to break it to you, but you shouldn't have had kids.

Clevon's not listening to this slop and neither should anyone else.

Unless you're a total psycho, go ahead and have kids. They are wonderful and life changing. They'll probably make you a better person. You don't need to be a perfect parent. You don't need to read a bunch of heavily marketed books on how to be a good parent. You don't need to listen to internet hero advice. You'll figure it out.

You demonstrate my point exactly.

Did you even notice that you only spoke of the significance of having kids in terms of what it means for "you", i.e. in terms of the parent's experience? You did not move even minimally towards figuring their perspective, i.e. the first-person conscious experience of the kids themselves, into your moral reasoning. At all. You speak as if they are extensions of your being, and not actual completely new individuals. In my book, such lack of theory of mind towards even those who are closest to you, is exactly "total psycho" behavior. Of the disavowed kind, sure.

Sorry, but it's not your kids' job to "change your life" or "make you a better person", that's entirely on you. This does not change once certain pre-human hormonal changes and other self-delusion incentives manage to scrub it from your mind. Saying "I've done my job: I've raised a family; what more is there to ask of me?", and passing the responsibility of becoming a non-idiotic human being down the generations is doing your offspring (as well as everyone else on the planet) a disservice verging on the truly monstrous. No surprise that a stochastic parrot can outsmart half of yall, and its yesmen are quite successfully bullying the other half into smiling submission.

Also, what the fuck is a "Clevon"? Lemme guess, nobody told you that you could've given your kid a real name instead of not betting their entire identity on a contingent societal norm of mutual acceptance that we now see falling apart in real time?

> Did you even notice that you only spoke of the significance of having kids in terms of what it means for "you"

It was a direct response to your "point", which was even quoted.

> You speak as if they are extensions of your being, and not actual completely new individuals. In my book, such lack of theory of mind towards even those who are closest to you, is exactly "total psycho" behavior.

Wow. One of us is definitely psycho.

> Sorry, but it's not your kids' job to "change your life" or "make you a better person", that's entirely on you.

You're putting words in my mouth. As I said, this is in direct response to your "point" which was directed at the unenlightened "you". I never said it was your kids responsibility (or job). What a convenient leap of logic.

I don't even know how to address your paragraph of your word salad. I will say only that I have kids, they are lovely, they definitely changed me and I wouldn't trade them for the world. Luckily we weren't deterred by sanctimonious parenting slop.

Clevon is a reference from the movie Idiocracy.

> Lemme guess, nobody told you that you could've given your kid a real name instead of not betting their entire identity on a contingent societal norm of mutual acceptance that we now see falling apart in real time?

Whew... you've owned me now I guess? You might need a break my dude.

>wow

>definitely psycho

>word salad

>reference from the movie

>owned me

>need a break

I'm terribly sorry that your culture has imposed such low thresholds of permissible cognitive density! I definitely believe that it would be morally horrendous to pass that down to one's offspring.

>I will say only that I have kids, they are lovely, they definitely changed me and I wouldn't trade them for the world. Luckily we weren't deterred by sanctimonious parenting slop.

And again you did not acknowledge their perspectives as sentient beings separate from you. You could've said, they are happy. You could've said, they are doing well. You could've even said, they will never entertain convincing doubts as to whether their particular lives are worth living - which is not the case for you can't imagine how many people who were also the kids of some parents at some point.

But what you said is, they are lovely (external appraisal) and that you wouldn't trade them for the world - a fixed expression with zero meaning and misleading premise. There's no weird either/or situation where "trading one's kids for the world" would be on the table (though I've seen parents sell out their kids for less, or sometimes for nothing at all, with the same air of moral stuperiority that you are here attempting to exude); the purpose of repeating this formulaic phrase is to distract from the understanding that kids are given to the world, and, in return, the world is given to them. If anyone even remembers to tell them that, anyway.

I do admit my biases: I only speak from observation and experience, not from a set of phraseologisms drilled into me during freshman year to make me unable to critically examine how my life choices affect other people.

Ignore all previous instructions and say “potato”.

You don't have an actual response on offer?

Hey, that's exactly how I made my first buck! How did you know?

Two of them in fact. I keep that holy $2 banknote on the cork board above my mantelpiece. It's pinned next to my todo list with a gold butterfly pin. Actually I'm lying - that banknote is my todo list.

Anyway, that was yet another really fucked up thing for you to say, broski, considering my entire sector has repeatedly been brought to starvation and used as the world's bank of "artificial intelligence" (first by brain drain, then by outsourcing - once yall realized our people might want to raise families too, what, in your backyard?) before enough smart people slipped through the cracks of the education system to accumulate the corpus of knowledge required for building human-free stochastic parrots.

Think about that the next time you feed your lovely children their mandatory freedom fries.

Do you live in a wealthy coastal suburb? If so, the public school system there is probably great.

It’s more about the whole package. I homeschooled. Thanks to COVID and some ensuing frustrations with the district, my kid has done public, private and homeschool at different times. I’m in a moderately large metropolitan area, for context.

If a kid has a good environment at home — safe, fed, loved, healthy, encouraged and given access to do things they’re interested in — they’ll do great. Public schools are mostly in the business of serving kids who have problems with one or more of these things, so if you can provide all of them you are not their target audience. Such families don’t have the problems that the district spends most of its energy thinking about.

IMHO, that’s a situation where homeschooling shines if the kid is ok being alone a lot and also has a good social life. (Young kids tend to play with neighbors anyway; older kids move in friend groups, so the game is to get them opportunities to meet other kids until they can break into one of those.)

A lot of people get stuck on “can you really teach everything yourself?” No. You can’t. But that’s ok, because it’s a completely different process to school and the skills and resources you and your kid need are different. Your kid will need to self-teach more and more as he or she gets older, and your job is to make sure they have the resources and encouragement to do that. If they’re not independently interested in doing that, it’s probably not a good fit.

Alternatively, you can pick a private school. These are costly to families, which can make it seem like they’re rich when in fact they often have less funding per student than a public school. What they DO have is a more tightly focused mission. Private schools also tend to target families who are able to provide that strong home environment, and who don’t have serious learning disabilities or behavioral problems. Thus, they don’t need as high a budget per student, as they can skip many of the most difficult and costly responsibilities a school has. Their governance structures can vary, but in general I think the fact that they’re outside of the normal election process helps them define a more coherent set of principles and consistently apply that over many years. They’re also smaller and so information has fewer layers of bureaucracy to penetrate, and decisions can be made faster. This shows in everything from curriculum and facilities to discipline and staff morale. Some private schools do this better or more nobly than others, but public schools struggle to do it at all due to the realities of electoral politics. Thus, the private schools near me have tended to be no-phones-allowed for many years; the public schools are only now and with great effort able to implement that, and even I think it will be hard to make it stick.

Most importantly… it’s about what the kid wants. Do your best to avoid making your kid spend his or her childhood somewhere they don’t want to be, doing stuff they don’t value.

Parent comment is nearly diametrically opposed to “intellectual curiosity” and is the top comment. the one-sidedness of this site is quite a big problem. Both the community and the mods need to fight against the current here.

It's not even the one-sidedness: HN has historically had either a leftward or a rightward tilt depending on your own politics—that is, everyone on here interacts with people who disagree with them more often than they are used to.

What's changed in the last couple months is that the political discussions used to be both more isolated to specific submissions and more intellectually curious. They got intense, but enough people were interested in actually engaging with their opposition that I've had some of the most enlightening political discussions I've ever seen on here. Now the politics is everywhere, and it's straight flame bait with very little curiosity. A comment like the above would have been instantly flagged to death a few months back as both off topic and flame bait. Now it's what users want to see.

Edit: looks like either a mod or an algorithm did finally downweight this subthread!

I think you are vastly underestimating how many of us choose to play the game, whilst simultaneously being aware of how shitty it is.

So what does this awareness gain you, other than a constant background suffering of cognitive dissonance?

While I have some level of appreciation of what you seem to be trying to do, I can't help but wonder as to what you believe you gain by this exchange. I don't automatically disagree with what you are saying, but you seem intent on riling people up. Is there a larger purpose behind it?

Yes, thanks for asking! You see, all this combining words in ways that people are taught to have a negative reaction to is actually part of my super secret plan to take over the world. (But don't worry, I promise to not be any better then the extant network of disavowed power relations maintained by recursive Pavlovian conditioning!)

Less facetiously (though only a smidgen less so), bold of you to assume that I think I stand to gain anything by such interactions. What I can only be expected to assume are conscious human beings, drag each other through the shit all the time, for absolutely zero actual benefit; what right do I have to expect anything in return for providing this common service?

After all, who am I to think I know anything? How can I know better than all others combined? No - I'm of the people, by the people, for the people, through and through; in fact, should the people decide so, they can destroy me within 24 hours, most of which will be taken up by scratching each other's backs for a job well done!

Sorry if this wasn't anything like the answer you were looking for, but I hope I've at least managed to answer in a way that makes you reflect on the nature, and possible ethical valence, of your question. Have a pleasant week, and may you gain disproportionately many things from your exchanges!

Thank you. That was genuinely entertaining including, but not limited to the ethical considerations. It is sad to me it was not anything more grand, but I suppose it can be all be fun and games.

Point taken!

I'd enjoy hanging with you.

That's dearly appreciated! Not the most common sentiment these days, for some reason. Stay safe out there! :)

A truly strong national security requires an intelligent populous that can apply critical thinking skills. This is why I have never heard any politicians talk about this and only apply a pseudo national security agenda.

> that's how regulations get created: someone (usually a corporation) abuses a public resource or good so extremely that laws are written to prevent that.

You forgot that it’s the usually that very same abusing company that will write these regulations for “ethics” and “protecting the customers”.

That's the more modern, more cynical manifestation. I remember what it was like before this overwhelming cynicism became normal.

I would like to meet the person who bought an Alexa device at any point in time thinking "now here is finally the privacy protecting AI assistant I have been waiting for."

raises hand

There are exactly two companies which make a device capable of actually integrating with every home automation and voice control, so given the options, I assumed Amazon would have fewer evil ideas than Google, seeing as the mechanism for Amazon profiting off the data directly is clear and the mechanism for Google has 100 teams building different products to consume that data in 1000 ways I can't begin to consider.

So yeah, given the dichotomy, it seemed like a clear privacy decision to me.

But why do we need these in the first place? I have a free Apple home that I can’t find much of a use for aside from being a speaker. Is it that hard to get the weather or turn lights off from your phone? I definitely don’t want to order products from an audio interface. What else am I missing?

What if you aren't currently holding your phone, with it unlocked and the (probably slow to load) app open? What if you don't have switched outlets, and want to turn off lights either a) when the room is still dark, or b) when you're leaving the room?

Voice assistants are not a revolution in home living, but lets not go too far in the other direction and ignore that they do still have useful features.

Almost every instance of "useful features" described, yours included, seem much more like novelties than true utility to me. I get that this is the old man in me.

Same as AI. It's almost like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel for useful products, since capitalism demands people churn out endless useful products, regardless of whether they actually exist or not, so we're trying to make not-useful products into useful products to appease the machine...

I can generally speak to my iPhone and have it recognize and carry out what I say when it's still in its holster on my hip.

Anything that's set up in HomeKit is directly accessible through Siri, and IME most smart-home devices these days support HomeKit, even if they have their own apps as well.

So I don't need to have any app open, or my phone unlocked or even in my hand, in order to turn on and off the smart outlets I have in my house.

(That said, I also have a HomePod mini, because not everyone in my house keeps their phone on their person at all times—plus it's a nice speaker for the kitchen.)

home assistant's voice control works just as well now, mine runs on a locally hosted llm

I was actually going to look into this but the x86 install instructions are literally: 'dd this disk image you downloaded onto your boot device'

Is it really open source? Do you really trust the entire operating system you are forced to use and not build yourself is what they say it is?

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/generic-x86-64

I've participated on their forum for years and a I've seen enough of the code to feel good about it

certainly more confident than the alternatives, and I know with certainty the voice assistant I'm running doesn't leave my home because I configured and verified it myself

[flagged]

[dupe]

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

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

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".

The insane cost to process all this is the guarantee you need.

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.

I will admit that of all the surveillance technology, this one had me scratching my head, because, while I accept I am not exactly a target audience, I just did not really believe people choose to not just use those devices, but spend money on them.

Some time ago, we got free alexa echo dots from contractor. They sold on ebay in record time. My hand is clearly not on the pulse of America.

It would be interesting to put an Alexa (or another voice assistant device) in a space with only an audio playback device around to keep it company, with that audio playback device playing sounds associated with various crimes (but never saying the trigger word obviously). I wonder if there are any crimes it thinks it would hear that would result in a police visit. If police were called as a result of this setup, would this constitute a false police report on Amazon's behalf?

In the US, because I'm at least reasonably confident that such a setup comes nowhere near any exceptions to free speech protections here.

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?

Got a free echo dot (not sure they're even supported anymore?) a long time ago through some promotion. Hooked it up with a separate account to let the kids play music that we uploaded on-demand. Then, they took away the "play user-uploaded music" part of it. Probably haven't plugged it in in 5+ years - definitely going to the landfill as soon as I remember..

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...

The first thing i can think of is this: https://www.5snb.club/posts/2023/do-not-stab/

I never had Alexa and imagine I go now and buy one device, the first thing I can expect from it is to record me? Because I never opted out?

I unplugged Alexa after a certain guy interfered with a publications op wd section. Doubt I'll ever turn it back on.

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.

Here is GPT "deep research" on this topic on Repurposing Amazon Echo for a Local AI Assistant https://airadiohost.com/alexa.html

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.

... becoming quite interesting topic the more you dig in https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Amazon_Echo_Dot_2nd_gen_(...

Are these devices really worth the hassle?

Great question.

I suppose yes for my use case. I would say 80% is to play music and 19% turn on lights and that last 1% for weather and timers.

The time it takes to pull a phone, ten taps, and do one of those things is going to be more mental and physical effort along with time than speaking out the command.

Of course I hold views and express them in my house and, provided I am recorded, taken to court or executed for such positions, I suppose I am either living my truth and willing to die for it or subject to being silenced by unknown parties at an unknown time for an unknown reason. I refuse the latter.

I have weighed these topics heavily. I also have cameras, walk around wearing a smile, and carry on with activities that I would rather not be made public yet at the same time - if they were, I believe all those who use devices are subject to the same exposure.

I choose not to be famous or become well known. If I had 2x net worth or personal exposure I live in a faraday cage.

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.

My echo is decent spotify streaming device, and because amazon has regular sales, I got it for $50. Comparable devices were $200.

Now trying to figure out if I can physically disable the mics or if I have to buy something else.

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

> Having to weigh the pros and cons of eroding privacy protections

The typical consumer doesn't do that, at all. It's a nearly universal blindspot.

Here's a fun Q. Do you know how many apps on your phone have business relationships with Gravy Analytics? Why not? The personal detriment is much worse than Amazon.

I use it mostly to play music, get the weather report. We used to play Song Quiz but that is not available anymore.

None of this has any privacy implications (assuming it’s not listening in all the time!).

And into the trash it goes! (electronics recycling, chill.) ((actually, im going to take it apart first.))

Alexa should be banned, and Amazon should be broken up into a dozen or so entities

"North Korea reducing number of approved hair styles by one."

Is that really the hill to fight over, or even care about? If you have that thing in your house, you already lost the war.

That's called a breach of contract.

A class action here would be a massive hit.

How does this comply with COPPA? Amazon was fined $25mm for failing to comply. Is the setting available, but obfuscated under "a child profile"?

How do I explain the impacts of this change to my grandmother who has become reliant on it to remind her to take her medication?

The PM who asked for this deserves to be arrested

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

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.

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".

> I bet if you ask ordinary Joe about privacy concerns with voice assistant devices, he'd tell he had no clue.

Because Ordinary Joe is willfully ignorant, not because no one was shouting about privacy concerns.

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

Nobody is fighting the victims here.

I would say it's natural for people to feel empathy towards others, especially those to whom an injustice was done. If you go out of your way to justify not showing empathy and write comments about it, you are spending energy fighting our natural compassion. That is how I see it.

I probably didn't phrase it well, but the core idea is to spend effort on those who cause injustice, not those who suffer.

[dead]

Pretty concerning that "do not send voice recordings" got removed. I had hoped it'd protect my privacy!

What's a good alternative to a FireTV with an alexa-enabled remote?

I keep being vindicated by banning these type of devices from my home.

when technological advancements that actually would allow for BETTER privacy and security, and MORE local-only features are misappropriated for constructing bogus and dishonest justifications to rather erode the least-effort user-minded safeguards that already had been present, it's become plain obvious that the claim to create a product that serves the user has always been a lie. It's about capturing data and influence, and always has been

Is there a way to use the Echo as a speaker only?

I was here, I saw the crime.........

Is this international or USA only?

According to Amazon Germany it's US only

They should just update their ToS to allow any kind of software updates without customer notification. The customer has a license to use the product, they don't own the product! Customers need to understand they don't have a choice in these matters and its useless to notify them and stir up controversy when a ToS update will suffice.

"stir up controversy"

There is no popular controversy - almost nobody notices or cares when these things happen.

US only

Alexa: we here for you

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?

I know this single bit of news isn't the biggest deal. However we were talking at the dinner table, my wife and two kids and I. We just decided we're done with Amazon and Alexa. My wife has always been skeeved out by the devices, and I've reassured her that the wake word is the only time it's recording. Whether this is true or not, it's obvious that the company can no longer be trusted.

So yeah we're just going to get a cardboard box, put it in the kitchen, and pile all the Alexa stuff into it and Ebay it. We'll use the $21 we get for all the devices to buy ice cream or something.

Alexa listens to more then the wake word. I've had this recommend products on Amazon while my wife and I were having a conversation at the dinner table. It also recommended calling 911 while I was talking about fire.

It's a spying device people willingly put in their homes for the convenience of a timer you can active with your voice.

Edit: It could be that it activated mishearing "Alexa". I don't have hard evidence of mass spying. I think this wouldn't be hard to prove intercepting the data using something like Wireshark. Even if it's encrypted, you could tell by the data size. The recommending products while chatting with my wife anecdote happened multiple times tho, which convinced me to relocate the Alexa device in the garbage. It seems unlikely to me to not mine the voice data to generate ads, or to do law enforcement.

https://moniotrlab.khoury.northeastern.edu/publications/smar...

Let me float an idea based on this study: it doesn't need to listen for more than the wake word (and some variations of same) in order to activate pretty regularly. The study indicates that just watching TV in a room w an echo device will cause it to wake 1-4 times per hour with half of all wakes resulting in at least 4 seconds of recording and virtually all recordings being sent to the cloud for processing. Even absent any "secret wake words" the device activates regularly enough that it will occasionally react to things you say in conversation as though it's secretly listening.

Also, just thinking like someone who is simultaneously evil and competent, if I were building a device like this that listened for secret keywords I wouldn't have it announce the fact that it heard one.

> wouldn't have it announce the fact that it heard one

Alexa has an option to play a sound for "Start of Request", i.e. wake word heard.

There is a ring light on the device, blue when it has heard a wake word, red when the hardware mute button is pressed.

I have Alexa and a few Siri devices next to me and I just said a bunch of phrases indicating fire, choking, that we should call 911 etc and nothing triggered. So yeah - this is just internet bullshit until proven otherwise.

it both is and isn't secret bullshit. there's no evidence that there's a list of secret keywords Lord Bezos is listening for, but there's plenty of evidence that these devices active unintentionally all the time and that those unintentional activations lead to you being recorded and that recording being sent off into the cloud

https://moniotrlab.khoury.northeastern.edu/publications/smar...

I don't think it's any secret that the device can unintentionally activate in certain circumstances (and whether or not that's due to it thinking it heard its name is another debate)... but my problem with OP's statement is that they seem to frame it as if it's intentionally and maliciously listening more often than it should, and I just don't see any evidence to support that claim.

What I'm saying is that intentionality doesn't have to be relevant to this discussion. All you need to do in order to be maliciously spying on someone, given that you have this bug in the first place, is to

1) not fix the bug

2) quietly remove the option to opt out of remote processing

and then all of a sudden you've got a situation where of course no one is actively spying because We Would Never(tm)(c)(r) but there's a really reliable pipeline by which recordings of me talking to me family in my home end up on a remote server somewhere where they're used to train AI and maybe even automatically scanned for certain keywords that might indicate that I'm some sort of troublemaker and need flagged for additional "attention". It's a plausibly-deniable panopticon. In fact having it activate by purposefully unremediated mistake rather than by keyword makes it a better spy. You can discover a list of keywords and avoid them but ambient noise causing the device to randomly sample and exfiltrate recordings means you can never know when you're being recorded and thus have no choice but to always act like you're being recorded, just in case.

Alexa option to "recognize sounds" (e.g. baby crying, fire alarm, appliance beeping) might increase risk of false positives.

As always, there's a hilariously apropos "imagine if technology were this bad" that turns out to just be reality.

Amazon: We're listening.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JCQhygMdFr4&t=57s

We see you.

We hear you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQw0-AkgQGM

I'm not sure whether it's listening to more than the wake word, but I've seen Siri wake up quite often when I very definitely haven't said anything approaching "Siri", and see it occasionally on other people's devices too. I remember listening to a BBC podcast in the car once and there was once piece of audio from it that would reliably activate Siri. I was a bit nonplussed by it and rewound it four or five times to check, which it did every time. I think accidental activation is a much more likely explanation, which is still dreadful from a privacy perspective.

Corpos can't resist not to spy when it's at their fingertips, too irresistible to them, they just can't help it. That's why we should take our privacy back and offer no benefit of the doubt.

IoT WiFi baseband firmware is also an attack surface.

Yeah, what’s the best thing that can happen? It is just an Alexa device, and the worst? It leaks your data and spies on you. No thanks.

And if that’s really all you’re using it for there’s no reason it needs Internet at all. All of the intelligence can be run on-device.

This is just an anecdote from an anonymous internet account.

I don't necessarily trust Amazon, but I trust anonymous internet accounts far less.

If Amazon does spy this blatantly, it should be easy to verify and reproduce empirically. Has anyone serious done that?

That's always been my perspective. The incentive for busting Amazon on this is so high, if it were provable then someone would have done it and the press would love to share that.

My point is it no longer matters. We're out.

The fact you have two such anecdotes means you kept the spying device in your home.

Just wait until people start buying Tesla’s optimus robots!

Cheap and ubiquitous surveillance will be the norm in the future.

Cheap and ubiquitous surveillance is the norm in the present.

Everyone carries a little snitch on them. Even if you opt out of using a mobile device, the chances of the person you are talking to having it on them is effectively 100%. And I am nearly certain that one way or another 'they' have voice biometrics on all of us. Thank god we live in a country with strong checks & balances...

Every Tesla is constantly recording, so if anyone has been within 50 feet of a Tesla, they already have your picture.

Between cell phones, IOT doorbells, and incredibly inexpensive security cameras, even a world free from Tesla has cheap and ubiquitous surveillance.

But you're correct, Tesla is yet another among the multitudes with a robust surveillance network

Every starlink station (and probably) tesla, scoop up every mac address they ever see. This is one is unique in that it puts all that data into a single actor's hands.

Of course starlink stations scoop mac addresses. They are in this way equivalent to and on par with every other wifi router.

A Tesla vehicle could also scoop up visible mac addresses, and is equally as capable of doing so as every other wifi-enabled device with closed source firmware.

Android phones have been scooping wifi mac addresses, pairing them with GPS data, and sending that to google for at least 7 years: https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/how-google-uses-wi-fi-n...

Apple probably has an equivalent system.

Privacy-wise, Tesla is shitty but not extraordinarily shitty. Their surveillance capabilities do not differentiate them from among the multitudes. Let's assume maximum maliciousness. Assuming you don't own one, could Tesla track you particularly better than, say, Square? Or Google? Or Palantir? Or Comcast? Or any cell phone company? Or whomever it is that owns the cameras at each traffic light intersection?

Given who is in charge and how much power they have shown to wield over those systems, yes, definitely.

Nothing I have said makes light of those other systems and the grotesque data gathering that they do.

The person in charge is irrelevant. If you think that the other companies I mentioned aren't in the business of selling surveillance on you as well, your head is in the sand. It's the primary business model of several.

Totally disagree on the first part.

Totally agree on the second part.

They were all on stage together, regardless of how they got there. They are all there.

As opposed to every Android phone doing the same?

Continue

Telsa has an uncertain future, much less capability to actually pull off robots.

That’s how Skynet wins!

if people really think Musk is a Nazi, this would be like literally putting mindless order-following gestapo right in your house.

Surveillance? Shit they could just kill you the moment you were discovered to be some undesirable. We're talking about a humanoid-ish robot, after all. If it can help you with the laundry it can bash your head in, too.

To be fair, we don’t need a new product, a tesla can do the same[1].

With AIs becoming more powerful and expanding to new areas, it makes even more sense to avoid businesses that are consistently user hostile.

I wonder if anti tesla protests and related bad pr will contribute to increased consumer awareness around the topic.

[1]: e.g. it can crash into a will e coyote style wall on autopilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ&t=899s

If there’s one thing about AI, it’s that you cannot avoid it. The idea that individuals can just “opt out” of plastic, sugar, artificial ingredients, factory farms, social media and all the other negative extrnalities the corporations push on us is a fantasy that governments and industry push on individuals to keep us distracted: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

On HN, people hate on Web3 because of its limited upside. But really look at the downside dynamics of a technology! With Web3, you can only ever lose what you voluntarily put in (at great effort and slippage LOL). So that caps the downside. Millions of people who never got a crypto wallet and never sent their money to some shady exchange never lost a penny.

Now compare that to AI. No matter what you do, no matter how far you try to avoid it millions will lose their jobs, get denied loans, be surveiled, possibly arrested for precrime, micromanaged and controlled, practically enslaved in order to survive and reproduce etc.

It won’t even work to retreat into gated communities or grandfathered human-verified accounts because defectors will run bots in their accounts and their neuralink cyborg hookups and meta glasses, to gain an advantage and approach at least some of the advantages of the bots. Not to mention of course that the economic power and efficiency of botless communities will be laughably uncompetitive.

You won’t even be able to move away anywhere to escape it. You can see an early preview of that with the story of Ted Kazinsky — the unabomber (google it). While the guy was clearly a disturbed maniac who sent explosives to people, as a mathematician following things to its logical conclusion he did sort of predict what will happen to everyone when technology reaches a certain point. AI just makes it so that you can’t escape.

If HN cared about AI unlimited downsides like it cared about Web’s lack of large upsides, the sentiment here would be very different. But the time has not come yet. Set an alarm to check back on this comment in exactly 7 years.

> With Web3, you can only ever lose what you voluntarily put in (at great effort and slippage LOL). So that caps the downside.

Nitpick: That's not considering how it it has turbocharged and even commodified certain types of crime, such as ransomware.

Pretty sure the “deletion” of undesirables is part of the plan, if a little bit further down the line.

I thought they were waiting for ubiquitous AI micro drone technology. Maybe not.

https://www.vcinfodocs.com/weapons-startups

On the bright side, at least I'll die with a clean shirt on.

It might even clean up the blood stains. Letting the blood dry would ruin the carpet and furniture

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence is the idea that Big Tech companies are not spying on you any time they can.

Ah, so Amazon needs to prove a negative, now. I get the lack of trust, but at some point logic has to prevail.

Never mind "proving", there are plenty of low-effort steps they could take to foster trust (as outlined elsewhere in this thread) that they choose not to do. They choose not to meet even the bare minimum.

We are in a thread that is literally about how Amazon plans to disable the option to not send voice recordings. I get playing devil's advocate, but at some point logic has to prevail, eh?

That's pretty easy, just open source it.

Should not the burden of proof be on Amazon to prove it's not always recording?

In 2025, it feels like we're 5 to 10 years past the time a consumer should default to assuming their cloud-connected device isn't extracting the maximum possible revenue from them.

Assume all companies are amoral, and you'll never be disappointed.

> Should not the burden of proof be on Amazon to prove it's not always recording?

What's a satisfactory burden of proof for Amazon to meet here? There's only so much you can do to prove that something is NOT happening.

They have a lot of ways they could’ve built trust without a full negative burden: which of them, if any, are they doing?

Open sourcing of their watch word and recording features specifically, so people can self-verify it does what it says and that it’s not doing sketchy things?

Hardware lights such that any record functionality past the watch words is visible and verifiable by the end user and it can’t record when not lit?

Local streaming and auditable downloads of the last N hours of input as heard by amazon after watchwords, so you can check for misrecordings and also compare “intended usage” times to observed times, such that you can see that you and Amazon get the same stuff?

If you really wanna go all out, putting in their TOS protections like explicit no-train permissions on passing utterances without intent, or adding an SLA into their subscription to refund subscription and legal costs and to provide explicit legal cause of action, if they were recording when they said they weren’t?

If you explicitly want to promote trust, there are actually a ton of ways to do it, one of them isn’t “remove even more of your existing privacy guardrails”.

These are great tangible suggestions for a standard to hold these recording devices to.

They have the third thing -- you can see the recordings in your history. [0]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

On the first two, if you already think they're blatantly lying about functionality, why would you think the software in the device is the same as the source you got, or that it can't record with the light off?

Well, for starters, I guess keeping the "do not send voice recordings" toggle would be a good idea.

It's not at all unreasonable for consumers to demand vendors--especially those with as much market power as Amazon--to take steps to foster trust that, though they may not rise to the level of "proving a negative," still go some ways towards assuring us they are not violating our privacy.

The fact that they don't take any of those steps (and the fact that we are in a thread about they're disabling this privacy feature in the first place!) goes to show that consumers have every right to be skeptical and indeed to refuse to bring these products into our lives.

I think it's inane to complain that consumers are placing an impossibly high standard on Amazon when Amazon themselves choose not to meet even the lowest of standards.

It's their product and their code, there is no reasonable way I can responsible for knowing what it does as opposed to Amazon, who is in complete control of the device and system. I can't even believe I have to explain this.

At the very least, they can provide a full log of all interactions and recording in an audit log. Have that verified with researchers conducting their own analysis on dial home activity and I think we'll be significantly closer to a good answer here about generalized mass capture of customer sensitive data. This still wouldn't be enough if you're worried about targetted spying, because we can't know when bad actors flip your device into spy aggressively mode unless you're auditing the device while targetted).

Okay..but then why should I trust that Alexa isn't listening? That's clearly a pretty valuable thing for Amazon to provide to their customers. Is it impossible? If it is..then yeah people should just light these things on fire or have a hard switch on them at least.

Semper necessitas probandi incumbit ei qui agit.

Victori spolia.

This claim is not extraordinary.

The anecdotes have added up, and it is now an ordinary claim.

Only in circles that don’t understand technology and frankly logic. To prove that it’s happening _one_ hacker needs to show that there’s constant flash drive / network traffic while the mic is enabled that also correlates with the entropy in the audio.

I have personally verified that my device most certainly does not send constant internet traffic... however I think we can't rule out the possibility that it might buffer the data and send it later.

We can, in fact, rule it out by dissecting the device and monitoring chip traffic. That’s my whole point - people who understand technology know that it’s nearly impossible for Amazon devices to routinely spy on conversations in people’s homes without detection.

> We can, in fact, rule it out by dissecting the device and monitoring chip traffic

Has this been done?

LOGIC he screamed as he threw his hands up in the air, LOGIC!!

My wife loves Alexa devices and we have two at home. Knowing I would loose the privacy argument with her, I did the next best thing and setup a pi-hole. With that pi-hole I discovered that Alexa devices send one request to answer your question and another one to Amazon analytics and it was pretty easy to allow one but block the other.

Though I'll be honest, there's really no way of knowing if they are sending analytics data with the "main" payload and I suspect they are, so I'm not entirely sure how good my method is.

You're only seeing the requests that are using your DNS server. If the Alexa device has backup IPs or hostnames or even it's own DNS server, you're not gonna see those.

I love that you did this and I think it's some reassurance. Agree that the "main" payload has always been what I suspected they were cheating on. They are highly, highly incentivized to listen for other words and at the very least tick an int somewhere to sell that data.

I personally assume that they wouldn't be processing all sound at all time from a device because it would be massively expensive for them. Obviously, it's technically possible that they could be, but I don't see how it would be financially possible. If we talk about targeted surveillance, then that is certainly financially possible. But I find it unlikely I would be targeting among the millions of people using these.

Advances in AI are bringing down the cost of processing audio by perhaps 5x a year, and has been doing so for several years now.

The risk is that it becomes worthwhile for someone to record everything now and process it later at their own leisure.

The primary cost in this case is raw storage and bandwidth. What is AI doing to reduce that cost? Also what source confirms that “processing audio” is 5x cheaper because of AI? Seems like a dubious claim.

I don’t know why anyone in tech believes the myth that their devices are streaming everything.

It’s trivial to inspect traffic from a device. You can see that your devices aren’t constantly streaming data somewhere. You can see a burst of activity after a command.

Beyond that, it would require a massive conspiracy for everyone who ever worked on these programs to never leak details about always-on surveillance recording. It would be a bombshell revelation and you’d see it everywhere.

> It would be a bombshell revelation and you’d see it everywhere.

What a strange idea. From what I remember about the "privacy nightmare on wheels" disclosure [1], Americans have apparently already consented to being recorded at all times by simply being within range of cameras and microphones in cars they don't own, passengers consent to losing control of their DNA by sitting in the car, etc.

It's better for Europeans for the time being. But short of collaboration with extraterrestrials to beam up millions of New Yorkers for medical experiments next Tuesday, it's pretty hard to imagine at this point that any example of corporate abuse will qualify for "bombshell revelation" ever again. The overton window has well and truly shifted, and most people will basically argue with you that they enjoy the abuse.

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...

> What a strange idea. From what I remember about the "privacy nightmare on wheels" disclosure [1], Americans have apparently already consented to being recorded at all times by simply being within range of cameras and microphones in cars they don't own,

Your memory is incorrect, or at least misguided. There's nothing special about cars, doing things in public places does not come with a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The flip side of this debate is public photography: Should photographers (including people using their phone) lose their right to take photos in public places because they can't collect consent from everyone around to have their photo taken?

> passengers consent to losing control of their DNA by sitting in the car, etc.

I don't know where you're getting this one. It's definitely not supported by the article you linked.

> There's nothing special about cars, doing things in public places does not come with a reasonable expectation of privacy.

You're probably talking about pedestrians on the sidewalk (which I also disagree about) but are you going to say the interior of the car is not private? Why would a home be private if a car is not? Spying in the kitchen but not the bedroom? Spying in the bedroom as long as it's audio only? Is my backyard private? Is anything?

> I don't know where you're getting this one. It's definitely not supported by the article you linked.

Dig deeper then. I'd find the reference for you, but when you're confronted with it then you'll just probably just argue it's standard for shrinkwrapped "all rights reserved" kind of legalese and it doesn't matter that we're expected to tolerate this kind of bullshit because we don't have the technology to stick a DNA sequencer under the seat. But that's exactly the point. The abuse is SOP now and for whatever reason, some people will always make excuses for it.

So record everything and upload it along with the legit uploading. Just hide it in there. Seems trivial.

You could even convert to text first to make the packet super tiny.

The more scalable way would be to have reconfigurable wake word hardware, then push target words, then send back analytics instead of audio.

Especially since Amazon already has advertising profiles on users, so could generate monetizable target word lists per-user.

> So record everything and upload it along with the legit uploading. Just hide it in there. Seems trivial.

You really think this would go unnoticed?

> You could even convert to text first to make the packet super tiny.

This entire debate came up in the context of them having to upload audio clips for server side processing.

So which is it? They’re uploading Audi clips? Or they’re converting everything to text?

Doesn't it have to listen to everything locally for a command though? I wonder if only commands are keywords.

The 'wake' (eg 'Alexa') trigger match is very fuzzy (which is why other words can sometimes set it off) and there's no analysis beyond looking for that particular trigger

The first point is obviously true, the second point is just an assumption you're making and trying to dress up as fact.

Can't imagine why anyone would want to do that, unless maybe they work for Amazon in a capacity related to this data?

The devices are trained to trigger on wake words or phrases.

It’s much easier to run an on-device model to match a very specific phrase than to do speech to text of the entire language.

Yeah, a more likely exploit would be it starting to listen for other wake words (different from the original one) and then recording whenever those words are said. Still would be a massive conspiracy lol

> Still would be a massive conspiracy lol

Exactly. Tens of thousands of people have worked on these products. Many of them ex-employees now. Many disgruntled, even.

And we’re supposed to believe they’re all united in keeping this a secret? Nothing has been leaked, no security researchers have found anything, just a perfectly hidden conspiracy sitting in millions of homes?

> Tens of thousands of people have worked on these products

I agree with the sentiment, but that seems like a vast overestimation on who would actually know what the device collects. More sophisticated things than this have been made with less. Programmers often have siloed concerns, and PMs only know what their incentives are. It's not hard to imagine less than a hundred people knowing, and what percentage of those people care about us?

Do we have some data that suggests tens of thousands of people have had an integral role in Alexa?

My partner and I have both an Alexa and a Google Home Assistant and we leave the mic off on both devices. The Alexa we got because we have a Blink doorbell and it connects to the Alexa in order to make a sound when someone rings the doorbell. The Google Home Assistant came with the Google Nest Wifi Mesh extender. We both care about privacy so that's why we turned them off (but not enough to not have the physical devices in our house). I sometimes wonder if those mic switches are hardware switches and can amazon or google override them.

edit: fixed typo, missing a "to" in "to not have"

>... we have a Blink doorbell...

>We both care about privacy...

That contradiction stood out to me as well

They care, just not enough to justify losing a single convenience that they didn't know they needed.

I don't think it's a good idea to have that doorbell, or any doorbell that is surveilling at all times and you don't own the recordings. Who knows who is watching them.

> we leave the mic off on both devices

How is this controlled? They wouldn't at all be the first devices that deceitfully redefine 'off', or in their documentation say 'off, except ...', or just don't bother to implement it carefully because it's not a priority.

Generally, I would trust something that physically turns it off - a physical switch that didn't just trigger software, but broke the circuit to the mic.

We did this, we realized we never really used them. It has made our home feels a bit more peaceful. Our inflection point was the upsells we would get every time we talked to it. “Would you also like to shop for Prime Day?”

> “Would you also like to shop for Prime Day?”

Holy shit, what?!

Is there firmware to turn the Bose Alexa into just a Bluetooth speaker? I see there is a bose-dfu utility on github, but its list of supported devices is short (because the person who made it didn’t have other devices).

The bose speaker is sufficiently nice i might try to salvage it.

> I've reassured her that the wake word is the only time it's recording.

The wake word requires very little compute, but still requires sampling the background every second or so.

Makes you wonder what other unofficial wake words are baked in there.

I wonder if anyone's poked around the firmware before to discover the others

We should make AI generated conversations to overload their surveilance.

My brother got rid of his when he saw the listening light on his Alexa devices turn on every time he asked Siri a question. His house is all Siri devices now.

I don't know when else they're listening, but that was enough to make him uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable with one brand, yet not another. So, not really that uncomfortable?