[HN Gopher] The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you...
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The Alexa feature "do not send voice recordings" you enabled no
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Author : luu
Score : 873 points
Date : 2025-03-17 04:41 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (discuss.systems)
(TXT) w3m dump (discuss.systems)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussion (233 points, 2 days ago, 103 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367536
| DevX101 wrote:
| 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.
| imoreno wrote:
| Don't these usually come with ToS or something that has you
| agreeing that they can change the service any time?
| yaur wrote:
| When you buy a car there is a lot of required paperwork that
| they don't really give you time to read, so maybe.
| briandear wrote:
| That's generally loan paperwork. And you can take all the
| time you want to read.
| mort96 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| You shouldn't sign things you don't read. Cue the centipad.
| Taek wrote:
| 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.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| 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)
| shakna wrote:
| 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...
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| shakna wrote:
| There's more than one claim pointed out - specifically
| that ToS falls under contract law, which does require you
| agree to changes.
| beezlewax wrote:
| Nobody knows what they are consenting to. The law has
| failed us deeply in this regard.
| muzani wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| mihaaly wrote:
| 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).
| mjmas wrote:
| That would be illegal under the unfair contracts law here in
| Australia.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| America's lack of customer protection will hurt continue
| hurting its people. Ladies and gentlemen, please do something
| about it.
| labster wrote:
| 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.
| xmprt wrote:
| 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.
| zonkerdonker wrote:
| Turns out, propoganda really does work. Just takes a few
| billionaires, a few hostile nations states, and some
| exploitable algorithms
| alabastervlog wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| 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.
| deesep wrote:
| 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.
| speed_spread wrote:
| 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.
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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".
| labster wrote:
| 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.
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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".
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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)
| DFHippie wrote:
| 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.
| mystraline wrote:
| 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)
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Should have happened in 2008.
| tanepiper wrote:
| _Laughs in European Consumer Protection_
|
| How's that "break regulation to innovate" working out for US?
| stavros wrote:
| Well, it's working out really well for corporations to
| extract maximal value from their users, for sure.
| usrnm wrote:
| It's actually working very well for the US, just not the US
| consumers
| gryfft wrote:
| "It's actually really good for me, it's just bad for
| almost every cell in my body"
| oblio wrote:
| 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.
| Peritract wrote:
| 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.
| eitland wrote:
| Which seems to be exactly the point of the person you
| replied to.
| ohmygoodniche wrote:
| 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...
| oblio wrote:
| My initial version didn't have the edit and I guess
| people assumed I was being callous.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| 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.
| technopol wrote:
| 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.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 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.
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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.
| jajko wrote:
| 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.
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| If we use Elon as an example regular CEOs probably have
| 300+ days off.
| bruce511 wrote:
| 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" :)
| pjc50 wrote:
| Has anyone checked whether this is also happening in the
| EU? Whether they've bothered about GDPR compliance or not.
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
| mantas wrote:
| Isn't Alexa already quite a bit limited in EU?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| > "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?
| eadmund wrote:
| 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_sov
| ereign_states_in_Eu...
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| And is the average Mississippian better off than the
| average citizen of UK, France, Italy, etc..?
| rvnx wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jackson+Miss
| iss...
|
| Interesting, there seem to be a consensus about it.
| xnickb wrote:
| How is GDP per-capita related to the customers having any
| rights?
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
| kzrdude wrote:
| 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.)
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| 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-...
| pc86 wrote:
| It may be generally understood to you, but not to me, and
| the link you provided says absolutely nothing about GDP.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| 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/
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| 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.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| I mean you can eat GDP and sleep under it. That's what it
| measures production.
| bognition wrote:
| 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.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Looks like that should be 13 T 2005?
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 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.
| bko wrote:
| 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
| ropejumper wrote:
| 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.
| AmVess wrote:
| 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.
| tjridesbikes wrote:
| 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!
| footy wrote:
| 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)
| meindnoch wrote:
| 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?
| Marsymars wrote:
| > 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.
| bko wrote:
| 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
| jpalawaga wrote:
| 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?
| bko wrote:
| 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 PS7,400 ($9.4k), while
| primary school spending per pupil is about PS6,700
| ($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...
| poincaredisk wrote:
| 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.
| bko wrote:
| 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| >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.
| xandrius wrote:
| Population density
|
| Mississipi: 24.5/km2
|
| UK: 279/km2
|
| Maybe, only maybe, that has an effect on house sizes?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| New Jersey population density: 488/km2
|
| New Jersey median home square footage: 1,740
|
| Doesn't look like it?
| xandrius wrote:
| 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.
| letier wrote:
| 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.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| 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.
| dml2135 wrote:
| And... why does that matter?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| 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?
| dml2135 wrote:
| 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?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| 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).
| recursive wrote:
| 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.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| 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.
| tguinot wrote:
| 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.
| hollerith wrote:
| >The number is ridiculously low in comparison
|
| Where are you getting your confidence that that is so?
| tguinot wrote:
| 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
| sebazzz wrote:
| > 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.
| IsTom wrote:
| > 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.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| 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?
| chillingeffect wrote:
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| GDP is a trash measure of what life is actually like. It
| should go away.
| xnickb wrote:
| If they at least cited PPP I'd maybe buy their argument..
| redserk wrote:
| 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.
| nerdponx wrote:
| 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.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| 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?
| analog31 wrote:
| 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.
| nielsbot wrote:
| 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.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| To finish the story here, a look back:
|
| https://bsalert.com/news/2596/Who_Are_You_Better_Than.htm
| l
|
| People in this country perennially choose wanting to be
| "better than" over wanting to be happy.
| nielsbot wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > 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?
| rezonant wrote:
| 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.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| 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.
| grafmax wrote:
| 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.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| > 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.
| chabes wrote:
| Capitalism isn't a form of government. It's an economic
| system. Politicized, sure.
| immibis wrote:
| Politics and economics are the same word.
| grafmax wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| GDP per capita of Ireland is double that of the UK? Is
| that because of the tax dodge thing? When did that
| happen?
| padjo wrote:
| 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.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 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.
| bko wrote:
| Great, it's 8.3 in Albania. Doesn't really help you if
| you're a typical person making less than 10k a year
| pc86 wrote:
| 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...
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 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 ?
| latexr wrote:
| > 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...
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| 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.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Yeah, but have you been to Mississippi?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| you would not be making this comparison if you've spent
| time in mississippi
| Aeolun wrote:
| Per capita GDP is a bad measure when so much of it is
| captured by the 1%
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Thanks for being a great example of what this person
| wrote
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43385268#43387809
| oa335 wrote:
| I'd wager that the median European is happier and
| healthier than the median Mississippian.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| 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.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Ok. Now compare Mississippi to those places on wealth
| inequality, life expectancy, education, health care,
| social mobility, etc...
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| And who cares about that? GDP is not a good indicator
| about people's quality of life. Maybe of the top 0.1%.
| myrmidon wrote:
| 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 ~20EUR/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 (~17EUR/h) not including
| it was cherry-picking on my part, Eastern Europe is super
| poor (Bulgaria under 5EUR/hour!), and the top contenders
| were unsurprising, except maybe how well Denmark did
| (~30EUR/h).
|
| Sources: eurostat + statista (because couldn't find what
| I wanted on bls.gov)
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > 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.
| myrmidon wrote:
| 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.
| arwhatever wrote:
| 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?
| TheDong wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 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.
| CivBase wrote:
| 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.
| TheDong wrote:
| 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 0.50EUR 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.
| eddyg wrote:
| 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-...
| bigfatfrock wrote:
| 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...
| TheDong wrote:
| 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.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| > 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.
| elif wrote:
| 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.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| I 100% agree but unfortunately this is pretty far down the
| list of our biggest problems at the moment.
| notum wrote:
| 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).
| whiplash451 wrote:
| How so? The rental vs buy setup is orthogonal to respecting
| people's privacy.
| z3t4 wrote:
| 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.
| firtoz wrote:
| There are competitors, even open source ones
| beezlewax wrote:
| 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.
| zettabomb wrote:
| 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.
| serial_dev wrote:
| 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...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| 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.)
| zettabomb wrote:
| 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/
| nick__m wrote:
| 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.
| closewith wrote:
| 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.
| zettabomb wrote:
| 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.
| mistro wrote:
| 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.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| 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.
| import wrote:
| 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.
| serial_dev wrote:
| 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...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| mFixman wrote:
| 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?
| timeon wrote:
| > 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.
| dominicrose wrote:
| 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.
| davedx wrote:
| 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.
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| IANAL but I thought bait and switch _is_ illegal? It definitely
| is in the EU. Is it not in the US?
| amelius wrote:
| It is illegal, but suing is too costly.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| szundi wrote:
| That's different, delivering later (for example probably
| never) is not the same.
|
| This is about removing a privacy feature.
| rusk wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Tesla floating on a cushion
| of private Saudi wealth?
| johnhaltonx21 wrote:
| that's rivian ...
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| I thought that was Lucid Motors.
|
| Source e.g. https://eletric-vehicles.com/lucid/saudi-pif-
| now-controls-64...
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Funding confirmed.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Chill man. Just send back the product and ask for a refund.
| disattention wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 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.
| flawn wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| "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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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
| 63stack wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| 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.
| disattention wrote:
| 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.
| hightrix wrote:
| I tried, Amazon will not refund over this issue.
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| "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?
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| I'd be surprised if FTC had any teeth left after DOGE was done
| with them.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| TL;DR Alexa will be cloud-only very soon because it'll be powered
| by an LLM, which is too big to run on a smart speaker.
| gleenn wrote:
| While the reason you suggest might be a good one, the
| repercussions of this change are clearly large. Unknowing
| customers now have their voice recordings sent to the cloud
| whoch could be leaked, have law enforcement get a warrant to
| take it from Amazon, or for it to be abused directly by Amazon.
| Those are huge. They might just have a good scapegoat.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| The law enforcement point is an excellent one. They were
| already caught giving ring footage without warrants.
| _ink_ wrote:
| Yeah, but why do people still trust corporations? It's not
| like this has happened for the first time. Quite the opposite
| actually. For profit corporations seem to have no moral
| compass whatsoever and will do anything do increase the
| margin. People should finally start to act accordingly.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > Yeah, but why do people still trust corporations?
|
| When most of your time is spent ensuring your material
| needs are met, then whatever time remains is precious.
| Telling someone hustling two different "gig economy" jobs
| sixteen hours per day to give a shit about the long term
| privacy implications of the stupid smart speaker he got his
| kid for Christmas is asking... a lot.
|
| This is why change through popular political action peaked
| in the US in the late 1960s/early 1970s. People, on
| average, had more leisure time on their hands than ever
| before. More leisure time = more time to think, organize,
| unify, and give a shit beyond the immediate here & now.
| mastazi wrote:
| and there is no way to prevent that update from taking effect
| even though you "own" (wink wink) the device.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| Doesn't alexa (or smart speaker) always need network to
| transfer voice data to server ?
|
| I doubt they have ever ran machine learning model on those
| speakers. Mostly just some simple one like "hey alexa"
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That doesn't explain anything. LLMs use text as input. This
| feature already transcribes locally and sends text to the
| cloud.
| pzo wrote:
| LLM can take audio as input, e.g. Gemini 2.0 Flash can take
| audio as input and is very fast and cheap (costs 25 audio
| tokens for a second, and prices $0.1 for 1 million input
| tokens).
|
| But I get your point that e.g. whisper is also very good and
| can run fast locally on edge devices. We also have recently
| phi4-multimodal LLM that is 5.6B params and is good enough to
| do inference locally on beefy smartphones. Problem is
| probably those smart speakers have really low CPU/GPU. Also
| LLM with audio input probably can be better re WER and take
| your mood/emotion into account when doing inference.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Is the specific component that takes the audio in gemini an
| LLM? If so, how does audio data become tokens?
|
| But my point is not just about the ease of running whisper,
| it's that the device is already doing transcription. Even
| if it's not optimal, it works.
| pzo wrote:
| don't know exactly how it works under the hood for LLM.
| Gemini provide dedicated API for live API where you
| stream those audio via WebSocket - I guess they probably
| use some audio specific tokenizer.
|
| If I would like to guess why amazon is moving to cloud
| it's:
|
| 1) They support only 8 languages right now - cloud LLM or
| even whisper can support like 50 languages pretty well. I
| was always dissapointed that couldn't buy Google Mini or
| Alexa or Apple Home for my mum because none of them speak
| Polish.
|
| 2) They want to provide good support or those less beefy
| smartspeakers that don't have much power and those still
| sell well.
|
| 3) They wanna move people to this new Alexa subscription
| that they recently announced or make people more
| subscribe to Prime.
|
| 4) Gather more voice samples so they can train as good
| multilingual TTS as elevenlabs.
| sorokod wrote:
| There is nothing inevitable about this.
|
| It a business decision to use an LLM.
|
| It's a business decision not to beef up the Alexa hardware to
| support an LLM.
|
| These decisions are weighted against reputational damage by
| Amazon with the outcome discussed here.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| > too big to run on a smart speaker.
|
| how convenient.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It's depressing that this hadn't happened years ago, neither
| for legal nor ethical reasons.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43365424
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43367536
| cphoover wrote:
| Is all audio up to "Alexa" still processed on device?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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".
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| The insane cost to process all this is the guarantee you
| need.
| timwis wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| timwis wrote:
| 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!
| serial_dev wrote:
| 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.
| timwis wrote:
| You can get an atom echo for $13, if that helps:
| https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/thirteen-usd-
| voi...
| wccrawford wrote:
| 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.
| timwis wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| draugadrotten wrote:
| 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.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| I think the audience here might be ok with '"enthusiast" (aka
| nerd) territory' hardware.
| stogot wrote:
| How many hours did you spend on this? I want to do it, but I
| don't have much time.
| timwis wrote:
| 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.
| elif wrote:
| " 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
| arcrwlock wrote:
| Because then you'd be running a full speech to text model
| all the time, and an LLM any time any speech is detected.
| elif wrote:
| 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.
| greycol wrote:
| 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/
| mixermachine wrote:
| 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?
| procaryote wrote:
| Are those features worth having a wiretap in your entire
| home?
| mixermachine wrote:
| 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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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.
| mixermachine wrote:
| 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.
| joshstrange wrote:
| 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.
| zyberzero wrote:
| 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
| mixermachine wrote:
| Thanks, good info. I read nothing about the multi-room-
| music-feature. Do you by chance know if it can be done?
| benjaminoakes wrote:
| 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.
| zyberzero wrote:
| 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.
| timwis wrote:
| 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...
| stego-tech wrote:
| 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.
| october8140 wrote:
| Our longstanding privacy commitment with Siri
|
| https://www.apple.com/jo/newsroom/2025/01/our-longstanding-p...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yeah right.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-con...
| Shank wrote:
| 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?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| 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.
| jisnsm wrote:
| Your link does not contradict his.
| randunel wrote:
| 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.
| ohgr wrote:
| 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.
| paul7986 wrote:
| As well another one is Siri after 14 years remain not
| intelligent even with Apple's supposed new Apple Intelligence!
| ohgr wrote:
| 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
| bartekpacia wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| You can't have it both ways
| timeon wrote:
| Seems better but still:
|
| > "When a user talks or types to Siri, their request is
| processed on device _whenever possible._ "
| JasserInicide wrote:
| 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
| nextts wrote:
| Alexa: we here for you
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| Am I supposed to have sympathy for people who bought a home
| snooping device now realizing they're going to be snooped on?
| caseyy wrote:
| 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| 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.
| orphea wrote:
| 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.
| dns_snek wrote:
| 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".
| caseyy wrote:
| It's still much more productive to fight the abuser than it
| is to fight the victims.
| dns_snek wrote:
| Nobody is fighting the victims here.
| caseyy wrote:
| 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.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| 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?
| dns_snek wrote:
| 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.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| 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?
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| 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?
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| It's certainly a violation of the rental terms.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's on page 52.
| randunel wrote:
| 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.
| nicce wrote:
| Rental terms were 1000 page book.
| blitzar wrote:
| That's the terms from when you rented the car, we have
| updated the terms since then.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I will feed the book into an LLM and ask questions.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Do people rent their amazon echo or buy it? I had the
| impression it was the later.
| asdf6969 wrote:
| The PM who asked for this deserves to be arrested
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| ddmma wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| ddmma wrote:
| ... becoming quite interesting topic the more you dig in http
| s://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Amazon_Echo_Dot_2nd_gen_(...
| tummler wrote:
| Do you have any details on this? With a quick search I could
| only find some older attempts at rooting but no custom
| firmware.
| ddmma wrote:
| Here is GPT "deep research" on this topic on Repurposing
| Amazon Echo for a Local AI Assistant
| https://airadiohost.com/alexa.html
| rvense wrote:
| Thinking about that picture from a (UK?) hospital breakroom with
| the sign that said "Please turn off the Echo before discussing
| sensitive patient information."
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| 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.
| smitelli wrote:
| 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.
| bmicraft wrote:
| 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.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| My android phone does that by default, I'm assuming it
| would be very easy to have a voice assistant read the
| same text
| gopher_space wrote:
| Hey Siri, delete all music.
|
| That was an interesting feature to discover.
| rs186 wrote:
| Why does a break room have an Echo there in the first place?
| twy1212895 wrote:
| 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.
| victor9000 wrote:
| Are these devices really worth the hassle?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| What hassle?
| victor9000 wrote:
| 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
| ricardobeat wrote:
| 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!).
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| > 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.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Not even close. They're slightly worse than average music
| speakers that also make funny noises sometimes.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| 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.
| x0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| fergie wrote:
| Mindblowing that people actually use these things
| MrMcCall wrote:
| People still play the lottery, which one of William Gibson's
| characters in "The Peripheral" calls "the stupidity tax".
| Mashimo wrote:
| People still smoke, don't use enough sunscreen and drink
| alcohol. "People" don't care.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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.
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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.
| notachatbot123 wrote:
| Is this international or USA only?
| croes wrote:
| According to Amazon Germany it's US only
| voidUpdate wrote:
| 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
| itscrush wrote:
| 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.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| 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.
| phito wrote:
| 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".
| charcircuit wrote:
| People don't always have their hands free or are able to look
| at a screen. Not everyone is good at typing.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The commenter did mention "except for accessibility reasons".
| charcircuit wrote:
| 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.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| 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.
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| 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.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| > 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.
| kevincox wrote:
| 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.
| vladde wrote:
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Timers, and converting those insane units US recipes use.
| xandrius wrote:
| So people don't read (and convert) their recipes before
| they actually start them? That's wild.
| Semaphor wrote:
| 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.
| xandrius wrote:
| I just dump it into chatgpt and get it done in a sec
| Semaphor wrote:
| I lack trust in ai to trust them to get volumetric to
| weight conversions right
| rafinha wrote:
| 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.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Arguably that comes under the 'accessibility' use case that
| was mentioned.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| 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.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| 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.
| aneutron wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| neogodless wrote:
| 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.)
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| jbaber wrote:
| If they worked and were local, why not?
| yifanl wrote:
| 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.
| croes wrote:
| US only
| serial_dev wrote:
| 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.
| kleiba wrote:
| 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!
| charcircuit wrote:
| >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.
| mmarquezs wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| We have become absolutely spoiled, now talking with a machine
| feels like something an arm chip should be able to handle
| ohmygoodniche wrote:
| 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
| wigster wrote:
| at least the people in power can be trusted not to abuse the
| situation /s
| mihaaly wrote:
| 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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| 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.
| jpl56 wrote:
| 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...
| Juliate wrote:
| That's called a breach of contract.
|
| A class action here would be a massive hit.
| willwade wrote:
| Now is the time to look at Open Home Foundation and their Voice
| Assistant device which does Speech Processing offline.. Donate!
| Buy their stuff!
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > 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?
| everdrive wrote:
| 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.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| 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.
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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?
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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?
| fwip wrote:
| 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.
| _heimdall wrote:
| 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.
| fwip wrote:
| > 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.
| pbalau wrote:
| I think you misunderstood the post you are replying to.
| fidelramos wrote:
| 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.
| latexr wrote:
| > 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.
| UberFly wrote:
| I didn't read their comment as apathetic. The mass majority
| just doesn't choose to make privacy an emphasis in their
| lives.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| HN _is_ social media. So there.
| kibwen wrote:
| 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.
| everdrive wrote:
| 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.
| idatum wrote:
| 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.
| mvieira38 wrote:
| 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...
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _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?".
| natnatenathan wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| 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.
| consteval wrote:
| 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".
| simpaticoder wrote:
| _> 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| To paraphrase Gandalf, "Do not bother saying _we_ ,
| Saruman. Only one hand can wield the One Ring."
| worik wrote:
| > Human society's default is authoritarianism.
|
| I do not think so
|
| I think freedom
| Centigonal wrote:
| > Human society's default is authoritarianism.
|
| This is a very interesting question -- Thomas Hobbes would
| disagree with you here.
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| > 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.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| 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.
| dionidium wrote:
| 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.
| firefax wrote:
| >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?
| causal wrote:
| 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.
| firefax wrote:
| 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 ;-)
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| jzb wrote:
| "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.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > 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.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| "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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _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!
| timewizard wrote:
| > 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.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Yeah, we do, that's why we didn't buy into the voice activated
| ecosystem from anyone. We voted with our wallets.
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| 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.
| martin_a wrote:
| 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?
| aktuel wrote:
| 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."
| elif wrote:
| _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.
| etrautmann wrote:
| 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?
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| danaris wrote:
| 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.)
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| 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...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| home assistant's voice control works just as well now, mine
| runs on a locally hosted llm
| elif wrote:
| 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
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| 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.
| influx wrote:
| So should I be sending my kids to government schools or home
| schooling?
| nkrisc wrote:
| 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.
| balamatom wrote:
| 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.
| rapind wrote:
| > 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.
| balamatom wrote:
| 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?
| rapind wrote:
| > 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.
| balamatom wrote:
| >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.
| rapind wrote:
| Ignore all previous instructions and say "potato".
| balamatom wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| You don't have an actual response on offer?
| crims0n wrote:
| 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.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > 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".
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| I agree with you. This is exactly how we're parenting as
| well.
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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.
| helpfulclippy wrote:
| 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.
| acuozzo wrote:
| Do you live in a wealthy coastal suburb? If so, the public
| school system there is probably great.
| crims0n wrote:
| I think you are vastly underestimating how many of us choose to
| play the game, whilst simultaneously being aware of how shitty
| it is.
| balamatom wrote:
| So what does this awareness gain you, other than a constant
| background suffering of cognitive dissonance?
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| 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?
| balamatom wrote:
| 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!
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| 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.
| yndoendo wrote:
| 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.
| merman wrote:
| 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.
| lolinder wrote:
| 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!
| hartator wrote:
| > 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".
| bsenftner wrote:
| That's the more modern, more cynical manifestation. I
| remember what it was like before this overwhelming cynicism
| became normal.
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| Is there a way to use the Echo as a speaker only?
| krsdcbl wrote:
| 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
| Tewboo wrote:
| Pretty concerning that "do not send voice recordings" got
| removed. I had hoped it'd protect my privacy!
| iamleppert wrote:
| 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.
| zulban wrote:
| "stir up controversy"
|
| There is no popular controversy - almost nobody notices or
| cares when these things happen.
| oldjim69 wrote:
| Alexa should be banned, and Amazon should be broken up into a
| dozen or so entities
| bentt wrote:
| 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.
| ffhhj wrote:
| We should make AI generated conversations to overload their
| surveilance.
| tiahura wrote:
| Seems kinda paranoid. I've yet to meet anyone, who's met
| anyone, who's been harmed by not turning that setting off, or
| been harmed by any assistant listening.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _I 've yet to meet anyone, who's met anyone, who's been
| harmed by not turning that setting off_
|
| I've yet to meet anyone, who's met anyone, who's been harmed
| in an airplane accident. It still happens.
|
| (No, I'm not saying that Alexa data sharing is equal to
| physical harm in an airplane accident -- just highlighting
| that this is a silly argument).
| diggan wrote:
| You're never met anyone who been able to prove harm.
|
| If your insurance payments increases 5% because Amazon sold
| the data to some broker, who then sold it to your insurance
| company, who figures you're living a slightly more risky life
| because you go outside 7% more than the average person, how
| would you even begin to prove this?
| edoceo wrote:
| Have to start with a lawsuit (after fighting arbitration
| clause) then mountains of discovery. It would take years
| and cost lots of money.
| fads_go wrote:
| Poster said that unplugging the device made their home more
| peaceful. This implies that having the device on was creating
| a constant, albeit low-level, harm.
|
| "harm" is a tricky word.
| pesus wrote:
| Yep. I think we usually underestimate the low level anxiety
| and adverse psychological effects of one knowing they're
| always being recorded/watched. Usually this only applies to
| being outside the home, which is bad enough imo, but
| bringing it into the home where you're supposed to be able
| to relax and have a reprieve from being surveilled cannot
| be good for the psyche. I would not be surprised if this
| (in combination with social media, and everyone always
| having a smart phone camera, etc) is a contributing factor
| in many of the psychological and societal issues people,
| especially younger people, are experiencing these days.
| mmooss wrote:
| What about political oppression? It's hard to argue, at this
| point, that the US federal government and others wouldn't
| obtain and use the data. Would Jeff Bezos stand up to them?
| pesus wrote:
| Good point. Bezos would likely be encouraging, if not
| facilitating that oppression.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| Doesn't it have to listen to everything locally for a
| command though? I wonder if only commands are keywords.
| empressplay wrote:
| 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
| uoaei wrote:
| 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?
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| odo1242 wrote:
| 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
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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?
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| > 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?
| swayvil wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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.
| photonthug wrote:
| > 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-...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| photonthug wrote:
| > 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.
| smallnamespace wrote:
| 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.
| cjaybo wrote:
| 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.
| natnatenathan wrote:
| 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?"
| Nullabillity wrote:
| > "Would you also like to shop for Prime Day?"
|
| Holy shit, _what?!_
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| 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"
| jjulius wrote:
| >... we have a Blink doorbell...
|
| >We both care about privacy...
| dylan604 wrote:
| That contradiction stood out to me as well
| uoaei wrote:
| They care, just not enough to justify losing a single
| convenience that they didn't know they needed.
| m3rc wrote:
| 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.
| mmooss wrote:
| > 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.
| smeej wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Uncomfortable with one brand, yet not another. So, not really
| _that_ uncomfortable?
| CharlesW wrote:
| They're night and day in terms of privacy.
| https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/alexa-help-me-
| which-s...
| tetris11 wrote:
| > 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.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| I wonder if anyone's poked around the firmware before to
| discover the others
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| 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.
| EGreg wrote:
| Just wait until people start buying Tesla's optimus robots!
|
| Cheap and ubiquitous surveillance will be the norm in the
| future.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Cheap and ubiquitous surveillance is the norm in the
| present.
| yubblegum wrote:
| _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...
| sitkack wrote:
| Every Tesla is constantly recording, so if anyone has
| been within 50 feet of a Tesla, they already have your
| picture.
| margalabargala wrote:
| 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
| sitkack wrote:
| 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.
| gkbrk wrote:
| As opposed to every Android phone doing the same?
| sitkack wrote:
| Continue
| margalabargala wrote:
| 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?
| sitkack wrote:
| 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.
| margalabargala wrote:
| 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.
| dingnuts wrote:
| 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.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| 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
| solardev wrote:
| On the bright side, at least I'll die with a clean shirt
| on.
| wongarsu wrote:
| It might even clean up the blood stains. Letting the
| blood dry would ruin the carpet and furniture
| thih9 wrote:
| 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
| EGreg wrote:
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| Telsa has an uncertain future, much less capability to
| actually pull off robots.
| taneq wrote:
| That's how Skynet wins!
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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.
| bgirard wrote:
| > 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.
| whateveracct wrote:
| 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.
| yeahsure wrote:
| Well, for starters, I guess keeping the "do not send
| voice recordings" toggle would be a good idea.
| fardo wrote:
| 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".
| wrs wrote:
| 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?
| freejazz wrote:
| 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.
| adra wrote:
| 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).
| Zamaamiro wrote:
| 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.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Semper necessitas probandi incumbit ei qui agit.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Victori spolia.
| Zamaamiro wrote:
| The extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence is
| the idea that Big Tech companies are not spying on you any
| time they can.
| djeastm wrote:
| Ah, so Amazon needs to prove a negative, now. I get the
| lack of trust, but at some point logic has to prevail.
| seethedeaduu wrote:
| That's pretty easy, just open source it.
| Zamaamiro wrote:
| 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?
| nix0n wrote:
| This claim is not extraordinary.
|
| The anecdotes have added up, and it is now an ordinary
| claim.
| guntars wrote:
| 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| _LOGIC_ he screamed as he threw his hands up in the air,
| _LOGIC!!_
| ranger_danger wrote:
| 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.
| guntars wrote:
| 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.
| mmaunder wrote:
| 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.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| 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/sma
| r...
| ranger_danger wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| Alexa option to "recognize sounds" (e.g. baby crying,
| fire alarm, appliance beeping) might increase risk of
| false positives.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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?
| bentt wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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
| sitkack wrote:
| We see you.
|
| We hear you.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQw0-AkgQGM
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> 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.
| tartoran wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| IoT WiFi baseband firmware is also an attack surface.
| globular-toast wrote:
| The fact you have two such anecdotes means you kept the
| spying device in your home.
| cryptoegorophy wrote:
| 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.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| 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.
| olyjohn wrote:
| 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.
| bentt wrote:
| 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.
| SteveJS wrote:
| 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.
| getlawgdon wrote:
| And into the trash it goes! (electronics recycling, chill.)
| ((actually, im going to take it apart first.))
| sprayk wrote:
| 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.
| baskinator wrote:
| What's a good alternative to a FireTV with an alexa-enabled
| remote?
| wnevets wrote:
| I keep being vindicated by banning these type of devices from my
| home.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| "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.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| What's the alternative? Everyone else has you pay for
| shipping, and it's slower.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| _Everyone_ has you pay for shipping. Amazon just lies about
| it, and has contracts that prevent people from selling
| their wares anywhere else cheaper.
| gundmc wrote:
| > 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.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| 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.
| DecentShoes wrote:
| One week is longer than two days.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| We've stopped buying everything from Amazon as well. It's been
| a huge switch, but feels entirely justified watching current
| events.
| sapphicsnail wrote:
| What alternatives have you found? Do you mostly go to smaller
| vendors?
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| 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.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| 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.
| quitit wrote:
| 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.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| No, it's just disablement of a hardware-based feature that
| won't be able to run the new software.
| bsimpson wrote:
| 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.
| quitit wrote:
| 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.
| pete1302 wrote:
| I was here, I saw the crime.........
| seltzered_ wrote:
| 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
| ffhhj wrote:
| We should make AI generated conversations to overload their
| surveilance.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It's all fun and games until the import brokerage calls to
| ask where to deliver the 850,000 rubber dog turds you
| ordered.
| mrighele wrote:
| 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
| mintplant wrote:
| 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.
| daghamm wrote:
| I like this approach.
|
| But can you safely do this with multi room devices?
| worik wrote:
| > physically scraped out the MEMS microphones.
|
| I am curious. Are you sure you got them all?
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Is it really smart if you've removed the ability for it to
| respond to voice commands ?
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| SahAssar wrote:
| 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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".
| SahAssar wrote:
| 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.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Hardware mute until they switch the speaker output pins to
| input mode and use the speaker itself as a microphone.
| eitally wrote:
| 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.
| divbzero wrote:
| 2019 was before ChatGPT. Generative AI could change the game
| for digital voice assistants.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think it's weird that they (Alexa, Google etc) haven't
| tried to do something new with generative AI assistants.
| divbzero wrote:
| 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...
| DanHulton wrote:
| "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.
| kazinator wrote:
| 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'.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I'll believe it when I see it.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| The last thing I need is another bullshit generator.
| ern wrote:
| Weird that this got downvoted, considering that Amazon is
| currently rolling out Alexa+.
| mmcwilliams wrote:
| 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?
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| 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..
| joquarky wrote:
| > right up until they're not
|
| In my experience, this moment is when the company goes
| public.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| 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.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| I unplugged Alexa after a certain guy interfered with a
| publications op wd section. Doubt I'll ever turn it back on.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| 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..
| boopmaster wrote:
| How does this comply with COPPA? Amazon was fined $25mm for
| failing to comply. Is the setting available, but obfuscated under
| "a child profile"?
| chmod775 wrote:
| "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.
| sotix wrote:
| 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?
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