this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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Amazon has disabled two key privacy features in its Alexa smart speakers, in a push to introduce artificial intelligence-powered "agentic capabilities" and turn a profit from the popular devices.

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[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

For 99.97% of Alexa users nothing will change.

This is the point people are missing, because of headlines like this that have been implying or saying outright that "everything Alwxa hears you say" will be sent to Amazon from now on. Completely false true. As explained in the article (please read it) what you tell Alexa to do *after saying "Alexa" *will be sent to the cloud for processing, as already happens 99.97% of the time. The only exceptions until now have been for 0.03% of users who set an option to process all voice commands locally (which limits the quality of the response, since the Echo dot has limited processing power). Starting today this option won't work anymore - so if you are one of those 0.03% of users, you'll be affected. If you're one of the 99.97% of users, nothing will change. Amazon will receive the same information it always has.

The amount of misinformation that's been circulating about this is really mind-boggling, and some people will probably douchevote me for trying to clear it up. Note: I am NOT defending any Amazon business policies, working conditions, strikebreaking, actions or words of Jeff Bezos, or anything else. But I'm absolutely sure some people will see it that way, cuz we're not supposed to object to "good" misinformation.

[–] YarHarSuperstar@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago (4 children)

But if it's listening for "Alexa" and that listening happens in Amazon's cloud server, they could record everything that is happening at all times with very little extra work.

[–] theterrasque@infosec.pub 1 points 3 months ago

Trigger word analysis happens locally. It's when that's triggered that audio gets sent to cloud

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