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Comment by andrepd | Hacker News Reader

Very curious why you would wiretap your home with 5 always-on internet-connected speakers running opaque software for a tech giant.

I dunno, it's the sort of thing that would be fit for a robocop-like dystopia just a couple decades ago but is seemingly... "normal" now.

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Because they're convenient. In my house, you'll hear - Alexa, when is the Bills game? Alexa, when is daylight savings. Alexa, play Christmas music. Alexa, what is the etymology of wanker? Alexa, is Chipotle still open? Alexa, how old is Patrick Maholmes? Alexa, what time is it in Kenya? Alexa, ad nauseum.

If Amazon wants to datamine the dickens out of that to sell me more socks and USB cables, I really don't care.

Actually Alexa gets most of those same requests in my house, too ;-) Anyway, it's at 12:30.

Isn't this the most trivial and minor of conveniences? Wouldn't it take roughly the same amount of time to pick up your phone and type that? Don't you feel the least bit uncomfortable that the trade-off for that is that a tech giant gets a 24/7 audio feed into your and your family's home?

Boggles the mind.

The expected value of harm caused by tech giant listening to my house = 0. Trivial and minor > 0.

We leave most of them on "mute" most of the time. The one we don't, we use to play music, mostly.

There is no such thing as mute

Maybe. The cameras have a physical shutter that you can keep closed, but the mute buttons are always just an electronic button that you have to trust Amazon to respect. Still, I don't think I've seen anybody claim that Amazon is lying about it, and there's enough people on the internet—especially here—that monitor their traffic, and would have noticed if echo devices were sending recordings that they shouldn't have taken.

Not everyone's paranoid about that kind of thing and not everyone actually values privacy that much

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