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Comment by not_a_cop75 | Hacker News Reader

Call me crazy but, but paying 30 dollars to lose all of my privacy just so I don't have to get up to turn off the light at night seems like a poor trade. Maybe not useless, but I honestly think you can do better.

And a basic raspberry pi could be programmed to cycle through the weather, alarms, lights, time. I guess the crux of doing it that way however, is taking personal responsibility for security, which still seems better if you're slightly lax at it, than sharing your "house microphone" with a multi-billion dollar company with motivation to exploit it.

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I already own other microphones, for example my smartphone, laptop, various earbud/microphone combos, etc.

I already trust all those manufacturers not to secretly upload everything I say to the cloud. Why is amazon any different?

Because it does upload everything you say to the cloud, and saves it for undisclosed amount of time, and has the ability to link those recordings to your account and the motivation to exploit it for business purposes? Not to mention possible data breaches in case that data is not perfectly secured.

> Because it does upload everything you say to the cloud

What evidence do you have of this?

That's a necessary component of how it works: these devices don't do the speech recognition locally. They upload it to their cloud and run it through their machine learning network.

They're not supposed to upload "everything" you say, only the stuff you say after the wake phrase. The issue is that they're known to wake up and start recording when they're not supposed to, because they're not perfect about recognizing the wake phrase. There's also the fact that they have to be _listening_ all of the time in order to hear the wake phrase, and the security fear is that, due to a bug or malicious software, they could end up recording and uploading everything they hear as well. That's not a problem of the stated intent of the device, it's a problem of the latent capabilities being used improperly. The best way to secure the device is to remove those capabilities.

Yes, everything you said is true, but none of it contradicts my point.

"You could hypothetically be giving up all your privacy if there are bugs, and in some cases there are known bugs causing you to give up a limited amount of privacy" is a very different level of threat from "you are giving up all your privacy to Amazon who will use it for ad targeting".

I'm willing to accept the former, in return for the amount of convenience I get from the device.

However, others in this thread are arguing that nobody should accept the latter, which is irrelevant because it's not the real situation.

Not that I agree 100% with this argument, but it's the best I've heard.

With laptops, smartphones, earbuds, etc. they're not designed to be heard from across the room.. Or even in your pocket. Even when my phones on speaker across the room people will have problems hearing me properly. With Alexa, Google Home, and others, the microphones are specifically designed to hear you from a distance away, over music and other ambient noises.

Simply put, an Alexa or Google Home is a much more effective listening device.

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