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Amazon really got people to pay to be spied on. Wild world we live in bois
Who pays for Alexa?
If anyone remembers the Mycroft Mark II Voice Assistant Kickstarter and was disappointed when development challenges and patent trolls caused the company’s untimely demise, know that hope is not lost for a FOSS/OSHW voice assistant insulated from Big Tech…
FAQ: OVOS, Neon, and the Future of the Mycroft Voice Assistant
Disclaimer: I do not represent any of these organizations in any way; I just believe in their mission and wish them all the success in getting there by spreading the word.
I didn’t even know this was a feature. My understanding has always been that Echo devices work as follows.
- Store a constant small buffer of the past few seconds of audio
- Locally listen for the wake word (typically “Alexa”) using onboard hardware. (This is why you cannot use arbitrary wake words.)
- Upon hearing the wake word, send the buffer from step one along with any fresh audio to the cloud to process what was said.
- Act on what was said. (Turn lights on or off, play Spotify, etc.)
Unless they made some that were able to do step 3 locally entirely I don’t see this as a big deal. They still have to do step 4 remotely.
Also, while they may be “always recording” they don’t transmit everything. It’s only so if you say “Alexaturnthelightsoff” really fast it has a better chance of getting the full sentence.
I’m not trying to defend Amazon, and I don’t necessarily think this is great news or anything, but it doesn’t seem like too too big of a deal unless they made a lot of devices that could parse all speech locally and I didn’t know.
It was a non advertised feature only available in the US and in English only
No way! The microphones you put all over your house are listening to you? What a shocker!
If you bought these this is on you. Trash them now.If you traveled back in time and told J. Edgar Hoover that in the future, the American public voluntarily wire-tapped themselves, he would cream his frilly pink panties.
Maybe I misread the actual text, but it sounds like the exact opposite, that it’s going to auto-delete what you say.
I can’t believe people are still voluntarily wire tapping themselves in 2025
How disheartening. I knew going in that there would be privacy issues but I figured for the service it was fine. I also figure my phone is always listening anyway.
As someone with limited mobility, my echo has been really nice to control my smart devices like lights and TV with just my voice.
Are there good alternatives or should I just accept things as they are?
There aren’t any immediate drop in replacements that won’t require some work, but there is Home Assistant Voice - It just requires that you also have a Home Assistant server setup, which is the more labor intensive part. It’s not hard, just a lot to learn.
I have always told people to avoid Amazon.
They have doorbells to watch who comes to your house and when.
Indoor and outdoor security cameras to monitor when you go outside, for how long, and why.
They acquired roomba, which not only maps out your house, but they have little cameras in them as well, another angle to monitor you through your house in more personal areas that indoor cameras might not see.
They have the Alexa products meant to record you at all times for their own use and intent.
Why do you think along with Amazon Prime subscriptions you get free cloud storage, free video streaming, free music? They are categorizing you in the most efficient and accurate way possible.
Boycott anything Amazon touches
They backed out of the Roomba deal. Now iRobot is going down the shitter.
I agree with your sentiment and despise Amazon but they do not own roomba the deal fell through.
Christ, finally a win
People are saying don’t get an echo but this is the tip of an iceberg. My coworkers’ cell phones are eavesdropping. My neighbors doorbells record every time I leave the house. Almost every new vehicle mines us for data. We can avoid some of the problem but we cannot avoid it all. We need a bigger, more aggressive solution if we are going to have a solution at all.
How about regulation? Let’s start with saying data about me belongs to me, not to whoever collected the data, as is currently the case
My clunky old bike ain’t listening to shit bro. Neither is my android phone using a custom rom.
Jam the mic? https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08Y5GGP4D
Works on my phone…
the irony of posting an amazon link…
be aware, everything you say around amazon, apple, alphabet, meta, and any other corporate trash products are being sold, trained on, and sent to your local alphabet agency. it’s been this way for a while, but this is a nice reminder to know when to speak and when to listen
Everyone literally carries a personal recording device.
So… if you own an inexpensive Alexa device, it just doesn’t have the horsepower to process your requests on-device. Your basic $35 device is just a microphone and a wifi streamer (ok, it also handles buttons and fun LED light effects). The Alexa device SDK can run on a $5 ESP-32. That’s how little it needs to work on-site.
Everything you say is getting sent to the cloud where it is NLP processed, parsed, then turned into command intents and matched against the devices and services you’ve installed. It does a match against the phrase ‘slots’ and returns results which are then turned into voice and played back on the speaker.
With the new LLM-based Alexa+ services, it’s all on the cloud. Very little of the processing can happen on-device. If you want to use the service, don’t be surprised the voice commands end up on the cloud. In most cases, it already was.
If you don’t like it, look into Home Assistant. But last I checked, to keep everything local and not too laggy, you’ll need a super beefy (expensive) local home server. Otherwise, it’s shipping your audio bits out to the cloud as well. There’s no free lunch.
I honestly have no idea why anyone who cares even 1% about their privacy would have ever bought one of these abominations in the first place. If I ever receive one as a gift I will burn it with fire.
I have the things so that I can understand how to protect myself from them. I have a similar thing going on with AI video right now. Hate it but watch the growth to understand it.
Better yet, crack it open and find a way to load alternative firmware onto it
Amazon employee with no piss breaks listening in on my echo:
“How many fucking cats does this guy have? Just chose one name and call it that!”
Edit: “I don’t know Jeff, sell him a fucking dr seuss book or something the guys mental.”
Publicly, that is. They have no doubt been doing it in secret since they launched it.
Off-device processing has been the default from day one. The only thing changing is the removal for local processing on certain devices, likely because the new backing AI model will no longer be able to run on that hardware.
With on-device processing, they don’t need to send audio. They can just send the text, which is infinitely smaller and easier to encrypt as “telemetry”. They’ve probably got logs of conversations in every Alexa household.
This has always blown my mind. Watching people willingly allow Big Brother-esque devices into their home for very, very minor conveniences like turning on some gimmicky multi-colored light bulbs. Now they’re literally using home “security” cameras that store everything on some random cloud server. I’ll truly never understand.
Why has no security researcher published evidence of these devices with microphones uploading random conversations? Nobody working on the inside has ever leaked anything regarding this potentially massive breach of privacy? A perfectly secret conspiracy by everyone involved?
We know more about top secret NSA programs than we do about this proposed Alexa spy mechanism. None of the people working on this at Amazon have wanted to leak anything?
I’m not saying it’s not possible, but it seems extremely improbable to me that everyone’s microphones are listening to their conversations, they’re being uploaded somewhere to serve them better ads, and absolutely nobody has leaked anything or found any evidence.
Nobody working on the inside has ever leaked anything regarding this potentially massive breach of privacy? A perfectly secret conspiracy by everyone involved?
Sure, but that’s not the commonly repeated conspiracy, even by non technical normal people, that everyone’s mics are listening all the time and they’re being used to serve you ads or whatever. The scale of this is not at all comparable to what I’m talking about. Yeah, I’m sure sometimes devices are inactivated inadvertently, those responses are uploaded, and people have listened to those recordings when they didn’t have permission. That is a far cry from all devices listening nearly all the time, using some surreptitious method to upload the data, and what was being recorded being used for some nefarious purpose.
Again, I’m not excusing these devices for being a privacy nightmare, but I just think it’s extremely implausible that Alexa, Siri, Google, etc. are always listening and nobody has discovered a device uploading.
The real privacy nightmare is that recording your conversations is completely unnecessary to build a richly detailed profile of you and your contacts. Regular old device / browser fingerprinting and a few people in your group sharing contacts with apps is enough for that, and it’s not a top secret conspiracy.
Per that article, it only happens when it thinks it’s been activated, and only when you opt in. Not much of a bombshell.
Emphasis on “when it thinks”. Not much point to a privacy control that the device can just ignore for unspecified reasons, and they had 150+ instances of that occurring in this data set.
Because if they would publish it, the other security experts would say “well, duh, that’s how it works”.
It is just the average people that are unaware of it, or don’t seem to care.
It’s better to be safe than sorry is all I’m saying.
Edit: There’s also this.
I’m not saying it’s not possible
There is no argument from ignorance fallacy in what I said. I am not claiming these devices never send audio without you wanting because there’s no evidence to the contrary.
However, the idea that everyone’s microphones are always listening, and that’s why you saw an ad for whatever after talking to your friend, yet not a single person has observed a device uploading this kind of data, nor has anyone ever leaked any kind of information on this supposed system, is extremely unlikely to be true in my opinion.
They don’t need microphones to do this. Regular tracking is plenty to do a good job at suggesting you a highly relevant ad, and frequency illusion does the rest. You’re not noticing the thousand times you see ads that are irrelevant to whatever you were talking about, but the one time you do notice really sticks out.
Frankly there are plenty of more concerning ways of violating our privacy that are out in the open that I believe are a much higher priority than mics always recording, of which there is no evidence for.
If no proof is offered (in either direction), then the proposition can be called unproven, undecided, inconclusive, an open problem or a conjecture.
Stating that you don’t think that it’s possible is irrelevant. It’s either happening or it isn’t. True or false. P or ¬P.
is extremely unlikely to be true in my opinion.
Is an argument from ignorance. Not trying to be rude, but this is basic logic.
Do you own a smartphone?
Yeah, but it’s rooted and running a custom ROM ;)
I mean… I 100% agree, and yet you and I and everyone reading this are carrying around a phone that can do the exact same shit
I am not, thank you very much. Even if I wasn’t, you can simply disable the wake word. And you can go into your account and see/listen to any recordings it has made to verify that it has stopped listening.
This is why jailbreaking/rooting your phone is so important.
If you look at the article, it was only ever possible to do local processing with certain devices and only in English. I assume that those are the ones with enough compute capacity to do local processing, which probably made them cost more, and that the hardware probably isn’t capable of running whatever models Amazon’s running remotely.
I think that there’s a broader problem than Amazon and voice recognition for people who want self-hosted stuff. That is, throwing loads of parallel hardware at something isn’t cheap. It’s worse if you stick it on every device. Companies — even aside from not wanting someone to pirate their model running on the device — are going to have a hard time selling devices with big, costly, power-hungry parallel compute processors.
What they can take advantage of is that for a lot of tasks, the compute demand is only intermittent. So if you buy a parallel compute card, the cost can be spread over many users.
I have a fancy GPU that I got to run LLM stuff that ran about $1000. Say I’m doing AI image generation with it 3% of the time. It’d be possible to do that compute on a shared system off in the Internet, and my actual hardware costs would be about $33. That’s a heckofa big improvement.
And the situation that they’re dealing with is even larger, since there might be multiple devices in a household that want to do parallel-compute-requiring tasks. So now you’re talking about maybe $1k in hardware for each of them, not to mention the supporting hardware like a beefy power supply.
This isn’t specific to Amazon. Like, this is true of all devices that want to take advantage of heavyweight parallel compute.
I think that one thing that it might be worth considering for the self-hosted world is the creation of a hardened network parallel compute node that exposes its services over the network. So, in a scenario like that, you would have one (well, or more, but could just have one) device that provides generic parallel compute services. Then your smaller, weaker, lower-power devices — phones, Alexa-type speakers, whatever — make use of it over your network, using a generic API. There are some issues that come with this. It needs to be hardened, can’t leak information from one device to another. Some tasks require storing a lot of state — like, AI image generation requires uploading a large model, and you want to cache that. If you have, say, two parallel compute cards/servers, you want to use them intelligently, keep the model loaded on one of them insofar as is reasonable, to avoid needing to reload it. Some devices are very latency-sensitive — like voice recognition — and some, like image generation, are amenable to batch use, so some kind of priority system is probably warranted. So there are some technical problems to solve.
But otherwise, the only real option for heavy parallel compute is going to be sending your data out to the cloud. And even if you don’t care about the privacy implications or the possibility of a company going under, as I saw some home automation person once point out, you don’t want your light switches to stop working just because your Internet connection is out.
Having per-household self-hosted parallel compute on one node is still probably more-costly than sharing parallel compute among users. But it’s cheaper than putting parallel compute on every device.
Linux has some highly-isolated computing environments like seccomp that might be appropriate for implementing the compute portion of such a server, though I don’t know whether it’s too-restrictive to permit running parallel compute tasks.
In such a scenario, you’d have a “household parallel compute server”, in much the way that one might have a “household music player” hooked up to a house-wide speaker system running something like mpd or a “household media server” providing storage of media, or suchlike.
