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I can understand why. Most billionaires don't have a microphone recording 24-7 in millions of homes like Bezos does. So it's much harder for them to gain levera

I can understand why. Most billionaires don't have a microphone recording 24-7 in millions of homes like Bezos does. So it's much harder for them to gain leverage over their potential blackmailers.

imgabe 8y ago
What did Alexa have to do with the Bezos blackmail controversy? I don't recall Bezos using anything gathered from Alexa to defend himself. He just published the blackmail threat.
- mcv 8y ago
  No, but he could easily have access to tons of blackmail material about others. Everybody is blindly trusting Amazon's honestly that they won't use it. And I certainly don't expect them to abuse it, but it's still weird to give them a permanently listening microphone in your home.
  - imgabe 8y ago
    I agree and I don't own one myself for that reason. But, if Bezos had done that, it would have completely overwhelmed the story about him being blackmailed and torpedoed any public sympathy for him. We wouldn't be talking about the Enquirer blackmailing him, we'd be proposing laws to ban Alexa. It would be totally counterproductive for him.
- adventured 8y ago
  What the parent is, I suppose, trying to refer to is the premise of Bezos as a hypocrite. They're sarcastially saying that Bezos has access to vast systems to snoop on and blackmail (or counter blackmail) other people using Amazon services. One of the sub stories occasionally being carried along with the larger selfie blackmail story (particularly among the privacy vanguard), is the notion that Bezos is a hypocrite. That's based on the premise that Alexa and other aspects of Amazon.com are abusers of privacy.
  - imgabe 8y ago
    But there is zero evidence that he has blackmailed anyone. He would be a hypocrite if he did do it, but just because he has the ability to doesn't make him one. That's ridiculous. That's like saying "You advocate against drinking and driving, but you yourself have alcohol in your house and own a car so you could drink and drive and that makes you a hypocrite". That's dumb.
  - radicalbyte 8y ago
    I'm not trying to all Bezos a hypocrite - I would be extremely surprised if he or Amazon made use of their data. They have too much to lose if caught. However there are other actors who are both unethical and have nothing to lose who most likely are taking advantage of these devices..
dhimes 8y ago
My understanding is that these devices (Siri, Echo) do their speech processing online, so by design everything gets uploaded in order to be interpreted. How hard would it be to have a device like echo that didn't do its speech processing locally and only went online to get data it didn't have? So if I ask for an alarm in an hour, or to play a song I own, or something else that doesn't require data from the "cloud" the command never leaves the house- and, in fact, all conversations stay private and only the "fetch" is external to the system.
- feistypharit 8y ago
  Except they don't do anything locally. They can't play music from your nas. Only the cloud, which I'd argue even though you may pay for it, you don't own it.
  - dhimes 8y ago
    Siri doesn't need to go to the cloud to play songs on my iTunes or set an alarm to wake me up in an hour or dictate a message- that's all on my phone. It only needs to use the cloud for the speech processing. Which is what prompted my comment. There's no reason a voice-activated app couldn't play music from my network-attached storage if it could parse the commands.
- greenmountin 8y ago
  There is an early-stage community-sourced device which does processing offline: mycroft.ai
  - dhimes 8y ago
    cool-thanks.
- la6470 8y ago
  Dumb

I can understand why. Most billionaires don't have a microphone recording 24-7 in millions of homes like Bezos does. So it's much harder for them to gain leverage over their potential blackmailers.

imgabe 8y ago

What did Alexa have to do with the Bezos blackmail controversy? I don't recall Bezos using anything gathered from Alexa to defend himself. He just published the blackmail threat.

mcv 8y ago
No, but he could easily have access to tons of blackmail material about others. Everybody is blindly trusting Amazon's honestly that they won't use it. And I certainly don't expect them to abuse it, but it's still weird to give them a permanently listening microphone in your home.
- imgabe 8y ago
  I agree and I don't own one myself for that reason. But, if Bezos had done that, it would have completely overwhelmed the story about him being blackmailed and torpedoed any public sympathy for him. We wouldn't be talking about the Enquirer blackmailing him, we'd be proposing laws to ban Alexa. It would be totally counterproductive for him.
adventured 8y ago
What the parent is, I suppose, trying to refer to is the premise of Bezos as a hypocrite. They're sarcastially saying that Bezos has access to vast systems to snoop on and blackmail (or counter blackmail) other people using Amazon services. One of the sub stories occasionally being carried along with the larger selfie blackmail story (particularly among the privacy vanguard), is the notion that Bezos is a hypocrite. That's based on the premise that Alexa and other aspects of Amazon.com are abusers of privacy.
- imgabe 8y ago
  But there is zero evidence that he has blackmailed anyone. He would be a hypocrite if he did do it, but just because he has the ability to doesn't make him one. That's ridiculous. That's like saying "You advocate against drinking and driving, but you yourself have alcohol in your house and own a car so you could drink and drive and that makes you a hypocrite". That's dumb.
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  I'm not trying to all Bezos a hypocrite - I would be extremely surprised if he or Amazon made use of their data. They have too much to lose if caught. However there are other actors who are both unethical and have nothing to lose who most likely are taking advantage of these devices..

dhimes 8y ago

My understanding is that these devices (Siri, Echo) do their speech processing online, so by design everything gets uploaded in order to be interpreted. How hard would it be to have a device like echo that didn't do its speech processing locally and only went online to get data it didn't have? So if I ask for an alarm in an hour, or to play a song I own, or something else that doesn't require data from the "cloud" the command never leaves the house- and, in fact, all conversations stay private and only the "fetch" is external to the system.

feistypharit 8y ago
Except they don't do anything locally. They can't play music from your nas. Only the cloud, which I'd argue even though you may pay for it, you don't own it.
- dhimes 8y ago
  Siri doesn't need to go to the cloud to play songs on my iTunes or set an alarm to wake me up in an hour or dictate a message- that's all on my phone. It only needs to use the cloud for the speech processing. Which is what prompted my comment. There's no reason a voice-activated app couldn't play music from my network-attached storage if it could parse the commands.
greenmountin 8y ago
There is an early-stage community-sourced device which does processing offline: mycroft.ai
- dhimes 8y ago
  cool-thanks.
la6470 8y ago
Dumb