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I believe that I have provided sufficient background from which you can acquire your own evidence. My involvement with Amazon's speech services is something I r

I believe that I have provided sufficient background from which you can acquire your own evidence. My involvement with Amazon's speech services is something I regret and wish to help others make better sense of, but I also am bound to contractual obligations that prohibit me from going into the explicit detail that you ask for. If you've ever worked for Amazon, you'd know how dangerous it would be to go into the level of specificity that you are demanding. I refuse to satisfy some loud-mouthed internet user just because of the "seriousness" of my claim. It would be extremely easy for you to test my claims yourself.

spdustin 11y ago
Please refrain from suggesting I'm some "loud-mouthed" internet user. You do not know me. I, as well, do not know you, so I'm unable to accept a drive-by accusation that having an Echo means I'll "not ever have privacy again", a bold claim indeed. Lots of people shout out things that seem plausible, even flash a bit of confidence-inspiring bravado, and have no intention of actually helping clear the air on a topic like this. I stand corrected on one thing; I do see that Echo transmits a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word. I also know, from when I was doing my own debugging/hacking a while back, that there are requests made in cleartext to download packaged code during firmware updates, and based on the limited console hacking I did way back then (though I don't know enough about signal processing to have gotten more than that from the test pads on the bottom), Echo appears to have two bootable partitions, and swaps between them upon a successful upgrade - pretty standard stuff, it didn't appear that one partition was hiding anything, just that it had older packages. My network analysis at the time was inconclusive in some respects due to some traffic being encoded/encrypted in a way I didn't immediately recognize -- frankly, my efforts at that time were focused on what was coming back to the Echo, and I will certainly investigate more of what's going out. Your commentary thus far does not suggest anything privacy destroying (they know who I am and what I've bought? So?) but I will be happy to share what I find if I find anything. I know of many people smarter than I who've intercepted and analyzed the traffic and didn't find anything that suggests users "would not ever have privacy again", so I don't have high hopes of finding enlightenment without the assistance of someone who professes to have the answers.

spdustin 11y ago

Please refrain from suggesting I'm some "loud-mouthed" internet user. You do not know me. I, as well, do not know you, so I'm unable to accept a drive-by accusation that having an Echo means I'll "not ever have privacy again", a bold claim indeed. Lots of people shout out things that seem plausible, even flash a bit of confidence-inspiring bravado, and have no intention of actually helping clear the air on a topic like this. I stand corrected on one thing; I do see that Echo transmits a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word. I also know, from when I was doing my own debugging/hacking a while back, that there are requests made in cleartext to download packaged code during firmware updates, and based on the limited console hacking I did way back then (though I don't know enough about signal processing to have gotten more than that from the test pads on the bottom), Echo appears to have two bootable partitions, and swaps between them upon a successful upgrade - pretty standard stuff, it didn't appear that one partition was hiding anything, just that it had older packages. My network analysis at the time was inconclusive in some respects due to some traffic being encoded/encrypted in a way I didn't immediately recognize -- frankly, my efforts at that time were focused on what was coming back to the Echo, and I will certainly investigate more of what's going out. Your commentary thus far does not suggest anything privacy destroying (they know who I am and what I've bought? So?) but I will be happy to share what I find if I find anything. I know of many people smarter than I who've intercepted and analyzed the traffic and didn't find anything that suggests users "would not ever have privacy again", so I don't have high hopes of finding enlightenment without the assistance of someone who professes to have the answers.