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Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions (www.wsj.com)

submitted 3 months ago by just_another_person@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] LifeOfChance@lemmy.world 79 points 3 months ago (31 children)

I call absolute bullshit on this. They're losing out on the sale of the device but make up for it 20 fold by selling and manipulating data it collects in your house. This isn't even conspiracy loads of people report Alexa going off randomly without any sort of prompt. Don't tell me the device isn't listening closely to every little conversation you have.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

This isn't even conspiracy loads of people report Alexa going off randomly without any sort of prompt. Don't tell me the device isn't listening closely to every little conversation you have.

This definitely is conspiracy. You're claiming that Amazon is secretly conspiring to make Alexa devices behave differently than they advertise them to. That's like the definition of conspiracy lol. But that aside, I really don't believe this. What's the exact claim, that they're always listening? No, they don't. People can analyze the traffic and tell that's false. That they're intentionally overly sensitive? I have an easier time beginning to buy that but I still think we'd see more quantitative articles about that if it were true. Like we haven't had whistle blowers or security researchers saying anything like that.

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

We have had stories like this one where marketers claim to be able to actively listen:

https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/

Whether you believe them or not is important. But they are secretly claiming to have this capability.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev -1 points 3 months ago

Article doesn't mention Alexa which is specifically what we're talking about, but I get your point.

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