this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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On the highest level, they have a constant firehose of as much audio data from a sea of customers as they wish.
Send it to cheap overseas transcribers, use it to train and improve voice recognition and automatic transcription.
Have a backchannel to television viewing and music listening patterns.
Know when different customers are home or not, improving demographics data.
Know what is discussed within the house for data on ad penetration/reach, brand awareness, and better advertisement targeting.
It's not a direct data to money pipeline, but having an always on listening device in someone's home nets you a ton of useful data as an online retailer and advertiser.
They very explicitly do not collect audio when you haven't used a wake word or activated it some other way. They will not "know what is discussed within the house for data on ad penetration/reach" (which is pretty much the only valuable data you've mentioned here), nor will they "have a backchannel to television viewing and music listening patterns" unless you actively discuss it with your device.
I'm not going to put words in your mouth, but if whoever reads this is thinking of replying "are you going to trust that" etc, yes I am. We can track which data an Alexa transmits in real time and directly verify this "always listening" isn't happening. Even if we couldn't independently verify that his is the case, and lets say they contradict their privacy policy and public statements and do it anyway, that's a crazy liability nightmare. Amazon has more than enough lawyers to know that unconsentually recording someone and using that data is very illegal in most places, and would open them up to so many lawsuits if they accidentally leaked or mishandled the data. Take the conspiracy hat off and put your thinking cap on.
Bad for privacy, but also not a $25 billion dollar source of revenue.
Alexa, Google Home, and Siri devices are not good sources of data. If they were, why would Google, king of kings when it comes to data collection, be cutting their Assistant teams so much?
Read the next paragraph, I already addressed you armchair conspiracy theoriests. We can independent verify their claims by analysing the device's network traffic, I've literally done it myself and seen with my own eyes that it doesn't happen. If you don't believe me, you can also check for yourself.
How much computing power do you think it takes to approximately recognise a predefined word or phrase? They do that locally, on device, and then stream whatever audio follows to more powerful computers in AWS (the cloud). To get ahead of whatever conspiratorial crap you're about to say next, Alexa devices are not powerful enough to transcribe arbitrary speech.
Again, to repeat, people smarter than you and me have analysed the network traffic from Alexa devices and independently verified that it is not streaming audio (or transcripts) unless it has heard something close (i.e close enough such that the fairly primative audio processing (which is primitive because it's cheap, not for conspiracy reasons) recognises it) to the wake word. I have also observed this, albeit with less rigorous methodology. You can check this yourself, why don't you do that and verify for yourself whether this conspiracy holds up?
I'm going to treat you with good faith and assume you were using "cool man" in the same way someone might say "that's just like your opinion man", as a saying, but I will remind you that this person has their pronouns in their display name and you need to respect them.
Not a man. My pronouns are in my username. Even you can connect the dots here.
Even on mbin where I can't see your pronouns, your username itself is Emily. There's no excuse for their behavior.
Thank you Emma, genuinely 🩷
I'd love to know why you think it's okay to insult her like that.