The option to do some on-device processing came on later devices and, as I understand it, wasn't even enabled by default. Furthermore, on-device processing would still send the parsed commands to the cloud.
The headline is vague, but it's misleading a lot of people into thinking that only now Amazon will start sending commands to the cloud. It's actually always been that way. I suspect the number of people who enabled on-device processing was very, very small.
I don't love Amazon, but I love ginned up outrage over tech the author never bothered to understand even less.
And 99% of Echo owners disagree with this. No one cares if a reporter mixed up "amazon is starting to spy on you tomorrow" vs "amazon has been spying on you since the first echo was launched". Only amazon would make an argument like "yeah but we've been doing this for years now and no one made a big deal about it..."
Thanks for saying something anyways. I wish more people would follow your example.
The Sauron's Eye of public sentiment can only pay attention to one thing at a time. If you justify today on the basis that it wasn't paying attention yesterday, you can rationalize anything.
The search engines are crap. There was a story some years ago where Amazon employees from an Eastern European country were actually listening to your Alexa and sent the relevant commands back to the device.
I'm not disappointed that this "non-event" is drawing attention to this comparison. Even if it's farfetched to dream that bringing privacy more to the forefront of the news zeitgeist will result in a shift of the status quo for our industry - heaven knows that if privacy stories don't get mindshare, the status quo could get far worse.