Its easy, people simply dont even think that it could be used to spy on them. Its just handy and funny tool. There is HUGE problem in the world with majority still naively trusting corporations to such extent saying anything to contrary seems like you are some conspiracy nut. Or if they don't trust them naively, they are so apathetic that they just think their information leaking doesnt matter, it can't be stopped anyway and that they just dont care about it.
Something really should be done to start having people care about things again, otherwise everyone will lose all rights to privacy eventually.
I mean, I have some, because I already know my phone is spying on me even more aggressively.
I don't have any illusion that I had privacy in the first place
I have HomePods to activate my lights, and listen to the news in the shower. Sure, it doesn’t do all the fancy shit that Alexa does, but at least Apple has a track record of respecting privacy.
They do, so far. I test these machines for privacy claims as a hobby and have been a bit surprised to find Apple stuff mostly delivering on those claims. I’m used to seeing a lot of dark patterns in testing and it’s made me expect the worst, but so far they’ve followed through on (in particular) their end-to-end encryption and on-device processing guarantees. Security audit failures so far have appeared to be engineering oversights, and the ones I reported have been patched already.
The majority of user data they collect appears to be optional analytics and diagnostics that are properly encrypted and anonymized using the same pooling strategy used for their built-in VPN service. They recently started doing processing off-device for some new features related to the Apple intelligence thing (I haven’t gotten around to testing most of that) but otherwise anything siri-related is indeed processed locally. You can toggle a setting to allow anonymized siri recordings to be sent to Apple for quality control but they ask you permission each time you reset a device and re-confirm when you install updates, which IMO is adequate.
Edit: Yes this is the opposite of what the other guy said. He is, to put it delicately, talking out his ass. There are good reasons to hate Apple, such as the fact that it’s a massive soulless corporation raping the planet to make luxury electronics for affluent consumers, but for most of the rabid apple conspiracy theorists I find online the reasons seem to be far more selfish and petty than that.
To see whether a small incentive could influence a decision about privacy, researchers offered one group of students a free pizza — as long as they disclosed three friends’ email addresses.An overwhelming majority of the students chose pizza over protecting their friends’ privacy.
While I don't dispute the thesis, this is deeply flawed.
Based on the article, it lets her ask them things that she doesn't want to ask her parents, though I'm not sure that if I were 9 years old that I'd suddenly want to discover that my parents have a list of everything I've asked it and are reading through it, much less that Amazon has a database.
Yeah, that is a terrible violation of trust. A parent should stop listening when they find out that they have a copy of such conversations of their child. They shouldn't write a newspaper article with citations about it
Edit: No one answers the question yet downvotes me for asking a simple question that wasn’t clearly answered in the article. That article really didn’t say anything outside of Amazon documents every prompt ever.
To add to the other responses, and I suspect the real reason, is that Coco is listening to Audible Audio books regularly and/or music. It's mentioned and then dropped by the article fairly quickly.
Interesting how every comment on the article is doing the "you're a terrible parent, how could you do that" routine when I'll bet it's there because Coco either took the first one in or asked for a second one. Kid wants, kid normally gets one way or another.
Also, surely this device is no different to a phone in that neither is meant to be listening indiscriminately. There's a chance a 9 year old has a phone nowadays I'd imagine
Its kinda depressing that the takeaway they seem have here is "we don't always have enough time for our family, but luckily Alexa can pick up the slack 😌"
Instead of "society pushes us to spend less time making meaningful connections and more time relying on services that cost you money or privacy"
Somebody's toddler is going to eat rocks after AI tells them it's safe, especially if you're giving your kids unfettered access to the internet, which is what Alexa is. You're just hoping Jeffy moderates good, when you and I both know rules and restrictions for an LLM are very hard to enforce.
I was thinking about their horrifying conclusion as well, and your comment made me pine for the days when you wouldn't know something. Think about it, back before the internet, if you had a random question, you either had to interact with some trusted person, or you went to the library and looked it up. It's like the ever-present access to all information has quelled or killed any notion of curiosity or boredom, and it's within those frames of mind that learning and inspiration come. I remember as a kid when I wouldn't know the answer to something, I'd think on it for days, weeks. I'd get stuck on a video game level, and hit my head against the wall for hours trying to overcome it, only to pick up a random gamer magazine off the rack at the mall, and read the solution. Treating that magazine like it was the lost treasure map of some ancient expedition, passing it around my group of friends... Interactions and experiences that are gone forever.
The idea that we've gradually went from relying on trusted professionals, learned educators, and scientific rigor, replacing them with a corporations data-harvesting LLM, on-line influencers, and click-bait "journals" cosplaying as academic centers with integrity. This article is basically celebrating the fact that we've off-shored all of our thinking, curiosity, and inquisitiveness to machines, all the while we struggle for scraps in a corporation dominated life devoid of genuine human interaction. We're all to busy sipping dopamine hits from a screen instead of actually living our lives.
I grew up while the internet was being slowly rolled out, and being from the last generation to remember what it was like before the internet, I can say that the things I miss most are privacy, the ability to be bored, and not knowing.
It's worse now, and it's harder everyday to imagine that life on this planet will improve.
I asked my google home the same question and it told me that I told it that my dog is a good girl 3 times. I know it's not great for privacy, but it made me chuckle.
I asked that to chatgpt once and it's answer was something like "You like to translate R code to Python" just because I sometimes ask it's to translate R to Python, but I don't personally like it
It's completely irrelevant to the article, but I can't believe nobody mentioned how many fucking headphones this person goes through lol
particulars of every purchase I’ve ever made – from the noir novel I bought on the day that Amazon UK launched to the 28th pair of headphones acquired in as many years
I absolutely tear through headphones. When they're wired, the wire breaks where it meets the earpiece. When they're wireless, the battery last like two hours. The USB port on my phone is long dead, and they don't sell phones with the old headphone jack that didn't break.
But I still refuse to be that guy playing music on the bus.
You need to buy a pair of good ones. Not hyped, not endorsed by whatever weird rap singer, but good ones.
I bought a pair of good BT headphones 10 years ago, and they still going great. 10 years ago the battery lasted 20 hours, now it's around 12 or so, which is still more than enough.
Buy some on-ears or (better yet) over-ears, still rocking my Sony WH-CH700N for almost 6 years. Can't find a successor for them, CH710N and CH720N for unknown reasons got rid of aptX ;_;