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Comment by uzero | Hacker News Reader

Why people are acting surprised about this? To me it has been always more than obvious that whatever you say to any of the internet connected “assistants” will be stored and kept as long as the assistant owning company likes.

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There's a difference between "it's obvious that they're doing it" (which is only true for people above a certain paranoia line) and "here, look at this proof that they're doing it." There are plenty of things that are obvious to me based on my idea of people's motivations and past behavior, but if I talk to someone lower down on the paranoia spectrum they don't believe me - unless I can point to evidence that they're actually doing it. (A fair thing to ask for, after all.)

This reminds me of the announcement that Google will let u delete your history.

Yeh, right, when pigs fly. Your history powers their "AI". Aint no unlearning that.

It seems like you're talking the difference between suspicion and proof? Saying "it's obvious they're doing it" when you mean you suspect they're doing it is just going to start an argument.

I was using it in the sense of the parent comment, I.E. if you put $100 in a room unsupervised with a career thief it's "obvious" that he'll walk out with it. Another way of phrasing it would be, "anyone who isn't suspicious appears negligent."

It's not obvious from interacting with the device that your voice data leaves, or that there's any permanent record made of your commands. That's something you have to know ahead of time.

You don't think it's obvious given that the device is completely non-functional without internet access?

I think this is obvious however I also understand that most people aren't that clever/interested in these things, and would not realize it. This creates a dilemma of how to message this information in a way that is all at once concise so as to not waste people's time, informative, and not alarmist which freaks people out and is counter productive not only to having a viable product but also to the general adoption of technology.

What's obvious to tech workers is not obvious to the general population. Most people don't give a second thought to putting all of their communications with friends and family on facebook's unencrypted messenger app (apparently the new version uses E2E encryption but those millions of person-years of chat logs aren't going anywhere).

Exactly what I thought. I imagined it was clear that anything this thing hears can be kept. I bet the terms of use explicitly say that they can, in readable English

It's not the surprising at all. It is an absolute disgrace though.

Just yet another reminder that GDPR is the bare minimum for something like internet to be tolerable.

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