this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
1015 points (95.9% liked)
Funny: Home of the Haha
5623 readers
389 users here now
Welcome to /c/funny, a place for all your humorous and amusing content.
Looking for mods! Send an application to Stamets!
Our Rules:
-
Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.
-
Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
Other Communities:
-
/c/TenForward@lemmy.world - Star Trek chat, memes and shitposts
-
/c/Memes@lemmy.world - General memes
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For “Hey Google”, “Hey Alexa” or “Hey Siri” to work your phone/smart speaker has to be always listening
This is only partially true. Yes, it's listening for those keywords, but only for them. Sometimes that's even an extra chip in your phone, otherwise it would kill your battery in no time.
Which is one of the reasons you can't just customize the command to whatever you want to say.
If you use those services, I would ask that you do a data takeout and actually HEAR what recordings they have.
We used an Alexa-enabled speaker, and it recorded many, many conversations that were not direct Alexa commands. Perhaps it was an "oops" type of eavesdropping, but Amazon still felt that the recordings needed to be saved on their server.
Mate, your Alexa is plugged in, it's not a phone. You agree to your Alexa constantly listening when you buy it. It's a feature, not a bug.
If your phone would listen as much as your Alexa you'd be out of battery in three hours.
Battery-powered bluetooth speaker.
For sure, I'm just pointing out that these devices are always listening, and someone can agree to the assistant features, that shouldn't include recording entire conversations that have nothing to do with Alexa.
That's more of a bug instead of someone actively monitoring you. The device accidentally thought you activated it, so it started listening.
You wouldn't be able to access those recordings if they were trying to spy on you.
Besides that, you literally agreed to it when buying and setting the device up. This is not the case with your phone (if you switch the assistant off, if it's on and heard the keyword it might still upload data of course).
And the thing is, even if you disable it, it's still listening. It just doesn't answer you.