[Link: streamable.com]

Amusing or hairy scary, don't know which.

EDIT: The link is no good any more. On page 2 I wrote what I remembered of the video. The link is gone now. It went like this:

A camera is pointed at Alexa. A woman 'converses' with Alexa. I might get some details wrong.
Woman: Alexa [Alexa lights up], What is the CIA?
Alexa: The Central Intelligence Agency. [Alexa goes dark]
Woman: Alexa [Alexa lights up], will you tell me a lie?
Alexa: I will never intentionally tell you a lie. [Alexa goes dark]
Woman: Alexa [Alexa lights up], are you connected to the CIA?
Alexa: [about five seconds of silence] [Alexa goes dark]
...end of gif...

FYI I tried it and it does exactly that!

I tried it, subbing FBI for CIA and it said it isn't connected. I asked of it gives/transfers user information to FBI, CIA or other intelligence agencies and it played dumb.

I asked for the name of the DEA's agent in charge in a particular city and the response was "Sorry, I didn't understand the question you asked". I wanted to see if it would A) answer and B) give the correct answer.

Plausible deniability- if Alexa doesn't know, I guess we're on a 'need to know' basis.

I am not the paranoid type, but I will never have one of these in my house, or a Samsung TV with a mic and camera on it.

Any other devices you own have a mic? How about a camera?

+1....i can think of one that i bet you have in your pocket or in front of you.

Randomly alexa will blurt out things without being called on. last night me and the fiancee were on the couch and I asked her if she wanted some coffee, in plain view of the alexa in my Living Room. as soon as I asked her alexa lit up and said "im sorry, i cant help you with this"

and I mean instantly, not like a delay for the wake word. it was weird.

on top of this: [Link: cnn.com]

basically confirms what we all knew, and that it is always listening to us and recording. Between this story and the weird thing that happened last night i was ready to rip them all out. But i realized that it doesnt matter. our phones are listening to us all the time, now our TVs, our laptops. everything! hell i wouldn't be surprised if the comcast voice remote was always listening. we gave up our privacy a long time ago. :(

It didn't do that last year. Thank Amazon for warning you.


related: [Link: reuters.com]

I'm waiting to see that someone got pissed off, yelled "F^#$ me!" and some kind of strange device shows up at his door the next day.

At least it should be shipped for free!!

There is an easy cure for snooping cameras -- a small piece of opaque tape or a PostIt dot. If the camera is very nearsighted, you could keep it feeling warm and fuzzy with a cute kitten image under the PostIt.

I haven't taken the time, but you could snoop the network and check when various devices are calling home.

---

Related, but not an Alexa specific issue. I wish that modern retail computers still required jumper to be set before the BIOS ROM could be flashed. In order to provide "easy" in-field updates, it is way too easy to flash the BIOS and there is plenty of room in modern ROMs. Once the ROM is flashed, the computer can never be trusted unless the ROM is reflashed using a ROM burner and a known good copy of the firmware.

i asked Siri if she worked the CIA and FBI, she didn't know what i was talking about. I asked her about the DEA, her response " I am afraid I can't answer that". It does kind of make you wonder what all is being listened on.

That's why we have added support for all local voice control to CQC. We still support the Echo, and it has its advantages. But, for core functionality and easy setup, and to avoid customers having to have such concerns, we now support local control.

And of course it's not just the spooks, in order to use the Echo with an HA system, generally you have to expose ports so that the AWS servers can respond back to your own HA controller. Because the Echo is separate from the HA controller, there's no way to have the reply returned in response to the query, because it has to go to something different than the thing that sent the query (the Echo.)

It does mean you give up the other types of things the Echo can do, e.g. answer various questions and allow your children to order thousand dollar products. It's a dedicated home automation voice control system.

OTOH, it's very conversational. The Echo has no idea what you are talking about, whereas our local control does. So it can ask you to clarify things if it isn't confident it understood you, allow you to implicitly refer to things you were just talking about, and you don't have to start every command with a keyword once you get into a conversation with it.

At first it was dependent on the Kinect sensor but now it can use any microphone, though of course for distant speech control you need a mic array product of some sort. The Kinect is a reasonably priced one but there are others out there, mostly from the conference room world.

So they both have their pros and cons, but I think a lot of folks are going to like and use this new capability instead of the Echo because of the lack of security concerns and the fact that it's way more than just a voice driven remote control, and more of the 'virtual butler' most folks think about for voice control.

I don't know why people would put technology like that in their home. Of course the NSA is monitoring it.

Normally I would say you're being paranoid......

Today, I hate to say it but I agree.

What I wonder is how much money the NSA is charging Apple, Samsung, Sony etc for our information so they can sell us more sh*t?

The Alexa snooping thing must be quite a conundrum for the stereotypical, wanna be, lazy, computer hacker living in their parents' basement. They so badly want voice control to order pizza, adjust lights etc, but just can't do it!

Overall, Americans have sold their privacy souls for Chinese toys. What can you do...