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”.
Comment on Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions
n3m37h@sh.itjust.works 3 months agoAudio 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.
sudo@programming.dev 3 months ago
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?
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.
n3m37h@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
If my cheap ass $250 cad phone can do it locally I’m sure the echo can too