I can see why people are quick to think this but I don’t see any compelling evidence this is the case, and as others have pointed out it would be impractical for them to do so.
More likely they use it for consumer lock-in and to collect data through its api endpoints. Collecting media activity and smart home device information is valuable enough on its own, before even approaching the value of collecting recorded audio.
They can already intuit consumer habits/word of mouth exposure from other associated data with your online activity. After locking down all my other privacy, the ads I get are far less relevant to me, even though I have a number of smart listening devices in my home
yesman@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Don’t be paranoid. An Eco Dot literally can’t tell you the time w/o phoning home. You can watch the network traffic it produces. No way it’s transmitting 24h of audio. And if you think about it, millions of Alexa devices recording 24/7 audio would generate more traffic than porn. And that’s before Amazon has paid a nickel to process any of that audio.
When it comes to eavesdropping on “every little conversation” They don’t, they can’t, it would be stupid to try.
n3m37h@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Audio esp for voices can be super compressed, it’s not like music, few hours of low quality audio can be as little as a few MB. There is also hardware transcoding and as the exact modifications of the SOC.
Don’t be naive about how shitty corporations are, they are not really disincentivized to not break laws as the fines are just a cost of business.
Womble@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It doesn’t even have to be that much. Obviously these devices can to sound to text conversion, that’s how they interpret commands. That can convert hours of stored conversation to text, zipped up and sent as a few kilobytes along with the next network request it makes for a legit purpose.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Do you really think one of those cheap little nuggets has the computing power to do that? The only thing it really does locally is listen to the wake word, everything else, including audio, it sends off to the Zon.
No way is it sitting there converting everything it hears to text.
sudo@programming.dev 3 months ago
We would easily be able to tell if an Alexa was constantly streaming audio data by monitoring its network traffic. It’d be just a wasteful inefficient implementation to stream everything 24/7. Makes much more sense to only start recording when it hears certain keywords that it can recognize locally beyond “Alexa”.
n3m37h@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Who says it’s constantly streamed? Who says it’s not stored or transcribed then sent off in a small package?
FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today 3 months ago
Porn is generally video and audio with an acceptable quality standard for consumers, which is incomparable in size to compressed audio.
aStonedSanta@lemm.ee 3 months ago
God. I’m imagining the nightmare this would look like passing through a network. Everyone with more than 1 would probably notice rather quick. The poor router being forced to just spew lol
Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 months ago
It’s weird that people always think the Alexa shit is spying on them, but happily walk around with a smartphone in their pocket which is infinitely more capable of doing do.
sudo@programming.dev 3 months ago
It can only recognize certain hotwords on its own, eg, Alexa. So its not recording 24/7 but it is listening 24/7 for hotwords. They could push additional words and start recording whenever they hear it.
SapientLasagna@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Honestly, they can just send the keywords. No need to send audio if they can match 1000 or so words that are most meaningful to advertisers and send counts of those.
AFAIK this is only speculated, not proven.