If you do not want to set your voice recordings setting to 'Don't save recordings,' please follow these steps before March 28th:
Am I the only one curious to know what these steps are? The image cuts off the rest of the email.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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- Unplug your amazon echo devices
- Hit it with a hammer
- Send it to an electronics recycler
How the fuck does anyone even buy one of these
The same people who buy mobile phones; despite those being bugs/spy-devices.
Phones are at least easier to justify since everyone kinda needs one now and there aren't many great private options, especially for the lay person
At least, on mobile devices, it's typically easier to install a privacy-focused firmware (like LineageOS or GrapheneOS). Those AI assistants are completely locked down.
Just sold my 3 devices and shut down Amazon account. It's very liberating and I don't miss it one bit. Have Home Assistant and a couple of really good 2nd hand Sonos speakers.
They literally could just leave the feature on the device, but then you can't force your users to send you all their data, voices, thoughts and first borns
Fuck Amazon, fuck Bezos
Amazon really got people to pay to be spied on. Wild world we live in bois
Who pays for Alexa?
Everyone who didn’t get an echo as a gift, I’d imagine
Plenty of people I know have gotten the little echo dots or the bigger alternative with larger speakers for Christmas or birthdays. Technically they didn't spend money, but their friends and family did.
I see. The initial purchase price is the “payment”. I thought the intimation was some sort of subscription to use Alexa. My bad.
If anyone remembers the Mycroft Mark II Voice Assistant Kickstarter and was disappointed when development challenges and patent trolls caused the company's untimely demise, know that hope is not lost for a FOSS/OSHW voice assistant insulated from Big Tech..
FAQ: OVOS, Neon, and the Future of the Mycroft Voice Assistant
Disclaimer: I do not represent any of these organizations in any way; I just believe in their mission and wish them all the success in getting there by spreading the word.
Want to setup a more privacy friendly solution?
Have a look at Home Assistant! It’s a great open source smart home platform that recently released a local (so not processing requests in the cloud) voice assistant. It’s pretty neat!
home assistant is amazing but it is not yet an alternative to Alexa, the assistant/voice is still in development and far from being usable. it’s impossible for me to remember the specific wording assist demands and voice to text is incorrect like nine out of ten times. And this includes giving up on terrible locally hosted models trying out their cloud which obviously is a huge privacy hole, but even then it was slow and inaccurate. It’s a mystery to me how the foss community is so behind on voice, Siri and Google Assistant started working offline years ago, and they work straight on a mobile device.
I have one big frustration with that: Your voice input has to be understood PERFECTLY by TTS.
If you have a "To Do" list, and speak "Add cooking to my To Do list", it will do it! But if the TTS system understood:
- Todo
- To-do
- to do
- ToDo
- To-Do
- ...
The system will say it couldn't find that list. Same for the names of your lights, asking for the time,..... and you have very little control over this.
HA Voice Assistant either needs to find a PERFECT match, or you need to be running a full-blown LLM as the backend, which honestly works even worse in many ways.
They recently added the option to use LLM as fallback only, but for most people's hardware, that means that a big chunk of requests take a suuuuuuuper long time to get a response.
I do not understand why there's no option to just use the most similar command upon an imperfect matching, through something like the Levenshtein Distance.
Because it takes time to implement. It will come.
I've seen something about this pop up occasionally on my feed, but it's usually a conversation I'm nowhere close to understanding lol
Could you recommend any resources for a complete noob?
This is legal, even in the US?
"Even in the US" seems to imply stronger customer and privacy protections on the US.
"This is legal, even there?" sounds pretty "legal bad there" to me.
"Leopards can eat people's faces, even in the US?"
I didn't even know this was a feature. My understanding has always been that Echo devices work as follows.
- Store a constant small buffer of the past few seconds of audio
- Locally listen for the wake word (typically "Alexa") using onboard hardware. (This is why you cannot use arbitrary wake words.)
- Upon hearing the wake word, send the buffer from step one along with any fresh audio to the cloud to process what was said.
- Act on what was said. (Turn lights on or off, play Spotify, etc.)
Unless they made some that were able to do step 3 locally entirely I don't see this as a big deal. They still have to do step 4 remotely.
Also, while they may be "always recording" they don't transmit everything. It's only so if you say "Alexaturnthelightsoff" really fast it has a better chance of getting the full sentence.
I'm not trying to defend Amazon, and I don't necessarily think this is great news or anything, but it doesn't seem like too too big of a deal unless they made a lot of devices that could parse all speech locally and I didn't know.
It was a non advertised feature only available in the US and in English only
If you traveled back in time and told J. Edgar Hoover that in the future, the American public voluntarily wire-tapped themselves, he would cream his frilly pink panties.
No way! The microphones you put all over your house are listening to you? What a shocker!
If you bought these this is on you. Trash them now.
I can’t believe people are still voluntarily wire tapping themselves in 2025
Do the device you wrote this on have a microphone?
I have always told people to avoid Amazon.
They have doorbells to watch who comes to your house and when.
Indoor and outdoor security cameras to monitor when you go outside, for how long, and why.
They acquired roomba, which not only maps out your house, but they have little cameras in them as well, another angle to monitor you through your house in more personal areas that indoor cameras might not see.
They have the Alexa products meant to record you at all times for their own use and intent.
Why do you think along with Amazon Prime subscriptions you get free cloud storage, free video streaming, free music? They are categorizing you in the most efficient and accurate way possible.
Boycott anything Amazon touches
They backed out of the Roomba deal. Now iRobot is going down the shitter.
I agree with your sentiment and despise Amazon but they do not own roomba the deal fell through.
Christ, finally a win
How disheartening. I knew going in that there would be privacy issues but I figured for the service it was fine. I also figure my phone is always listening anyway.
As someone with limited mobility, my echo has been really nice to control my smart devices like lights and TV with just my voice.
Are there good alternatives or should I just accept things as they are?
There aren't any immediate drop in replacements that won't require some work, but there is Home Assistant Voice - It just requires that you also have a Home Assistant server setup, which is the more labor intensive part. It's not hard, just a lot to learn.
People are saying don't get an echo but this is the tip of an iceberg. My coworkers' cell phones are eavesdropping. My neighbors doorbells record every time I leave the house. Almost every new vehicle mines us for data. We can avoid some of the problem but we cannot avoid it all. We need a bigger, more aggressive solution if we are going to have a solution at all.
How about regulation? Let's start with saying data about me belongs to me, not to whoever collected the data, as is currently the case
My clunky old bike ain't listening to shit bro. Neither is my android phone using a custom rom.
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be aware, everything you say around amazon, apple, alphabet, meta, and any other corporate trash products are being sold, trained on, and sent to your local alphabet agency. it's been this way for a while, but this is a nice reminder to know when to speak and when to listen
Everyone literally carries a personal recording device.
Maybe I misread the actual text, but it sounds like the exact opposite, that it's going to auto-delete what you say.
They delete the recording from your device....after it has been sent to Amazon to be stored and used limitless.
Publicly, that is. They have no doubt been doing it in secret since they launched it.
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So... if you own an inexpensive Alexa device, it just doesn't have the horsepower to process your requests on-device. Your basic $35 device is just a microphone and a wifi streamer (ok, it also handles buttons and fun LED light effects). The Alexa device SDK can run on a $5 ESP-32. That's how little it needs to work on-site.
Everything you say is getting sent to the cloud where it is NLP processed, parsed, then turned into command intents and matched against the devices and services you've installed. It does a match against the phrase 'slots' and returns results which are then turned into voice and played back on the speaker.
With the new LLM-based Alexa+ services, it's all on the cloud. Very little of the processing can happen on-device. If you want to use the service, don't be surprised the voice commands end up on the cloud. In most cases, it already was.
If you don't like it, look into Home Assistant. But last I checked, to keep everything local and not too laggy, you'll need a super beefy (expensive) local home server. Otherwise, it's shipping your audio bits out to the cloud as well. There's no free lunch.
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