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Alexa leaks private wishlists
- swiley 5y agoI don’t know if you could pay me enough to have one of these in my house.
- aquir 5y agoAgree. I don’t see the purpose or the point of these devices. The only place where voice control makes sense it’s in the car.
- Kiro 5y agoIt's not about lack of utility, it's about lack of privacy. There are many great use cases for voice control at home.
- nicolas_t 5y agoI'd love to have voice control at home but I want something that's private and stays within my network, I refuse to install spyware inside my own house
- davnicwil 5y agoAdmittedly it's a pretty trivial usecase for such an expensive device, but one thing it is brilliant at is setting timers, hands free, while cooking.
- secondaryacct 5y agoAfter 97% of asic miners never producing a block in their lifetime in bitcoin, this takes second place in term of energy wasted per utility produced :p
- ivan_gammel 5y agoApple Watch does this job well too.
- innocenat 5y agoYou wear watch while cooking?
- Razengan 5y agoIs that a serious question?
- lnxg33k1 5y agoWell it's not the most hygienic thing, items are hardly sanitisable
- ivan_gammel 5y agoDepends on how and what do you cook.
- innocenat 5y agoFrom a hygenic point of view, yes, it's a serious question.
- zenexer 5y agoYes, I do. I sanitize my Apple Watch regularly anyway, which is why I opted for one of the silicone bands over the fancier options.
- jasonlotito 5y agoJust tried this with my Apple Watch, hands free of course. Didn’t work. Do you have to enable this? Edit: nm I had to be away from my phone for my watch to pick this up over my phone.
- tinyhouse 5y agoWhat about disable people? The fact you don't see a purpose doesn't mean there isn't.
- mnd999 5y agoIf their disability is no concern for their own privacy then sure. Voice control might be a need, Alexa voice control shouldn’t be.
- tinyhouse 5y agoAgain, you're making assumptions that people worry about privacy like you are. You're also making an assumption that people think like you that Alexa harms their privacy. Finally, your first sentence is pretty ignorant I must say. Let people in a wheelchair talk about Alexa and their tradeoffs. Personally I have an Alexa but don't find it too appealing. I barely use it. My kids use it much more often. I don't worry about privacy. I trust Amazon (or Google/Apple/Microsoft) that non of the audio is saved or sent to the cloud unless the device hears the trigger word. Can someone hack it and listen to our interactions at home? I'm assuming it's possible but that's true for our phones too.
- dylan604 5y agoPlease, this is either a serious lack of imagination or a ton of insincerity on your part. Having the ability to speak a command at home to turn on/off lights, adjust the temperature, play music, etc is extremely convenient. I would love to do it at my home, but I will not be using any of these products when they require an internet connection.
- autoliteInline 5y agoI can think of a brilliant use case, but it's the only one I can think of offhand. For the disabled, particularly blind people, it would be great to have interactive voice stuff if that whole ecosystem were really fleshed out. Some of this exists but a world of audio books, online banking, interaction with social media, all with interfaces optimized for voice use/audio listening would be great. Interacting with a screen by having some software read it to you just seems incredibly clumsy. Personally, I think the hands-off case for automotive use is dangerous. Talking on the phone or listening to email while driving is sketchy even though you're still gripping the steering wheel. AM/FM radio interfaces were perfected 75 years ago.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoIf you want to work on this: https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/
- autoliteInline 5y agoThanks, I'll check it out. In order to really reach people with vision issues, it seems like places like Bank of America (just an example) need to do a good job of Alexa skills. Dunno how you deal with security. As a side note, it's funny how absurd online banking websites are. It's a thing that would be well served by simple/secure pure text interfaces but that certainly isn't what you get. The amount of cruft on the web just blows me away, whether it's a weather or real estate or recipe site. We're living in a world of shit.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoTreat the crappy site as an API and make a better interface. Like the SimpleWeb project: https://simple-web.metalune.xyz/ https://simple-web.metalune.xyz/
- ShroudedNight 5y agoHaving worked for and with a few different large companies, my experience has been that multi-national banks are the most pathologically "not a single entity". They have all sorts of factions within often working directly against the interests of each other, with large projects kept secret purely for _internal_ competitive advantage. With that model, the resulting mangled mess they present as an interface makes significantly more sense.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Someone1234 5y agoWhy exactly? This is a technology site, the way these voice assistant works has been posted numerous times and is common knowledge at this point. They've been ripped apart by multiple security pros. Yet every thread we get unjustified replies like this. It is tiresome and frustrating. But I'll post it once again: - Wake phase detection is all handled locally (i.e. on device). - It loops a continuous recording over itself. If no phase is detected within a few seconds the recording is permanently lost. - We can see from data monitoring it isn't continuously transmitting (and that's also what the companies behind it claim). - "It could be modified" is a red herring. You are already carrying ON YOUR PERSON an always connected microphone with not one by two layers of operating system on it (baseband + consumer OS). It should not be popular to post "photographs can steal your soul"-levels of tech-spiracy on a site like this, but yet here we are again.
- xfhgjxcfgh 5y ago>..."photographs can steal your soul"-levels of tech-spiracy... It's a microphone connected to the internet. If corporations and governments choose to use this variety of device nefariously, they won't be stopped. Many people are feel concerned when their society increasingly resembles East Germany.
- perl4ever 5y agoI don't have any particular reason to think the above is incorrect, let alone deliberately false or misleading. You sound more knowledgeable about the device than me. But I think you're tremendously overstating your certainty to contrast with people you're calling paranoid. If lives depended on it, are you that sure you fully understand how things work? Are you that sure of the contrast you point out between Alexa and a smartphone? I'm not questioning your opinions and facts; I'm urging you to examine your own feelings and motivations, which obviously only you can. When people attack doubts in others as paranoia, well, it might be accurate. But strong emotions and especially anger on the subject tend to suggest the underlying issue is suppressing one's own doubts. The general attitude of "we know how it works" always makes me think of the quote "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" and OpenSSL. My rule of thumb is, if something is technically feasible, if it's not possible to casually detect it, and there are likely no immediate, directly applied penalties for it, then it's unwise to bet against it. Something I see people assert to comfort themselves is that companies care about reputation and therefore wouldn't do some thing. I think you have to have blinkers on and somehow repress all your experience working for corporations or consuming products made by them to think that way.
- tinyhouse 5y agoFake title. That is not a data leak.
- mstolpm 5y agoI don't know if I'm really the only one who shares an Amazon account with his significant other? My partner doesn't need Alexa to be notified what's on my wishlist ... she can just look it up. So blaming Alexa to spoil the secret is a bit ... hyperbole?
- weird-eye-issue 5y agoObviously if you are sharing an account nothing is "private". Doesn't this go without saying?
- mstolpm 5y agoIf someone in my house is reading my notifications, is the device or the person to blame?
- Zababa 5y agoI think people using Alexa and equivalents might need an explanation or two about privacy in general.
- Kiro 5y agoThat's very condescending. I use Google Home and I am very well aware of the privacy implications, thank you.
- 5y ago
- jsudi 5y agoNo it doesn’t. If I give you my phone or you are reading my screen over my shoulder my apps aren’t leaking. This title is inflammatory.
- scotth 5y agoThis is a device shared by members of a household. It leaks.
- jsudi 5y agoDon’t use your personal account for a device that is shared by many people.
- CydeWeys 5y agoThen what account should you use? Who has multiple Amazon accounts, and isn't that even against their ToS?
- HappyTypist 5y agoDon't think so, as part of signing up to become an Amazon Flex worker, the app explicitly suggests you create a separate Amazon account.
- tedunangst 5y agoAnd so does your phone and your browser and every other device you allow other people to use. Is it a leak if you allow your wife to use your phone and receive a notification?
- jcims 5y agoI think I've just been in the Amazon ecosystem too long, I can't really figure out which part is surprising that it could be considered a 'leak'. 1 - That Alexa has access to information about any particular Amazon user? To me the registration process and features of the product make this extremely obvious, but maybe its not? 2 - That Alexa will send audio notifications related to the status of the account its linked to? This is the only thing that I feel is of any possible surprise. Most of the marketing around Alexa products show interactions initiated by the user. 3 - That 'private wish lists' aren't excluded from the full set of notifications? Amazon just calls them 'wish lists' and to me they are just cached shopping carts. I don't really see them as any more sensitive than any other information in the account.
- dzink 5y agoUse https://www.dreamlist.com https://www.dreamlist.com instead. It is completely private and ads free. This is not the first time large companies with built in wishlists have ignored or abused their users. There were times when a retailer would direct your loved ones no to your list but to an “Idea” list in a tab right next to it when they went to your link. Most often they just index your list on Google and it becomes a top result when someone searches your name (great SEO for them, bad for you). Or suggest gift cards to stores that are 30% overpriced to your loved ones right at the top of your list, when you never wished for one. I built DreamList by hand over the past few years to prevent these and other abuses with family’s wishes and money and now it’s growing. I would love to get your feedback as well.
- contravariant 5y agoPrivate in what sense? Is it just a company not within FAANG promising to protect your privacy or is there some actual security?
- true_religion 5y agoRather than a promise, I’d like to see things like this written into the actual contract of paid services. Even if the try to limit the liability to just what you paid them, it’s still a useful barrier to selling your data or exposing it. In the case of them blatantly selling it to “partners” you could still go after them for the value they gained by breaking the contract and selling your copyrighted information.
- booleandilemma 5y agoI don’t think this is the same thing as Amazon’s wishlists right? This looks closer to gofundme. If you need a wishlist (in the Amazon sense) and you’re worried about privacy, write down the stuff you wanna buy in a notebook.
- whoknew1122 5y agoOn the internet, you are a consumer or you're the product. You're paying for something, or you yourself are being sold. Dreamlist isn't "completely private." Read their privacy policy. > "We may share information about you in anonymous and/or aggregated form with third parties for industry analysis, demographic profiling, research, analysis and other similar purposes." If you think that savvy companies can't use other databases to aggregate user profiles and deanonymize data... well, you're the perfect user for Dreamlist! EDIT: Or, as I found out by clicking on the parent's user handle, you actually founded Dreamlist. I might humbly suggest at this point, Diana, that you're open and forthright about the fact you sell data to other companies. Even if you're completely dutiful in anonymizing data, you have no control over what is done with the data once you sell it. --- For what it's worth, I'm much more worried about the privacy implications of Dreamlist than Alexa. With Alexa, I know I'm giving access to my logged-in Amazon profile/account to anyone with access to my device. With Dreamlist, no one knows who my data is being sold to.
- Razengan 5y agoI just use the default reminders or notes app for any kind of lists. Easy to share when needed too.
- fnord77 5y ago> jEfF BeZoS Is aLwAyS LiStEnInG To yOu!!1!!!!111! > As long as he gives me cheap same-day delivery, IDGAF. for lower and lower quality of items, with less of a real selection (go look at electric kettles - there's 50 different brands - with weird names - but the kettles all almost look identical). Also the while prices creep up as any competition gets annihilated. The high cost of cheap shipping
- Santosh83 5y agoThis hits the nail on the head. I agree ebay and Amazon are also sometimes the only option for finding obscure stuff, but most of the world now buys most of the mundane stuff from them, and then we act surprised when they become international empires, richer than countries, and more powerful than most of them, and only getting bigger and bigger. Society is simply not equipped to deal with the cascading effects of consumerism and 'free' market, be it privacy, data mining, social security, or the environment.
- RotaryTelephone 5y agoWhat do you recommend instead?
- dpweb 5y agoMore brands means higher likelihood of a used item however. Normally I'll just put in a max price or click the used link. So the $29 kettle is $21. I've never bought a "used" item from Amazon that was unsatisfactory cause it was "used".
- dylan604 5y agoI've bought new items from Amazon that were clearly used that were unsatisfactory. So, maybe I received your item and you received mine.
- edoceo 5y agoHamilton Beach stainless, 1.75 l. Now 5+ years old, used 7 days a week. It's a good kettle.
- djhworld 5y agoIt's an interesting unintended consequence sort of thing, especially as the OP set this list up before even getting an Alexa device. I'd feel the same sense of annoyance if something like that happened to me.
- vmoore 5y agoI have a 16gb USB flash drive encrypted with LUKS[0]. In there are various lists that I don't want anyone to find, however mundane they actually are. Things like shopping lists and 'to buy' lists for Amazon etc. Always presume 'private' stuff you have in the cloud will be leaked via various means (Rogue employee, data breach, sloppy programming etc) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Unified_Key_Setup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Unified_Key_Setup
- bcopa 5y agoWe're building a competitor to Amazon wishlist with https://chestr.app/ https://chestr.app/ We just opened our Beta a week ago If people are looking for an alternative, we'd love to hear your feedback P.S: we have a private list feature ...
- codegladiator 5y agoHow to be an unpaid tester, Step 1
- black_13 5y agoMy wish is jeff bezos pays his taxes
- danbrooks 5y agoWhy not turn off deal notifications for both public and private wishlists? I imagine few users have both types of wishlists and want different deal notifications.
- robmiller 5y agoMy soon-to-be 8 year old son was devastated and ran into his room crying when he asked Alexa what the notification was and she described his hoverboard present just delivered to the front porch. Could we have anticipated that? Maybe. The surprise was the ruining of the surprise instead of the surprise itself.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 5y agoThat actually made me chuckle. That's definitely not a scenario one would have thought of in advance. I wonder if the "Item is a gift" checkbox would have any bearing on how Alexa describes a delivery? Hey Alexa, hint hint...
- AlotOfReading 5y agoThere's a couple of settings for it. One disables the item reading entirely, one disables names for things marked as gifts or items ordered around major holidays.
- quantified 5y agoAlexa is a box, not a butler. Discretion is not part of the makeup.
- dylan604 5y agoIt's a box made by programmers to be used by consumers. Programmers can make it do things that would make it even better and more useful to the consumers. As another comment has already indicated, these programmers have already taken this into consideration and provide the options. Not really sure where you thought anyone was confused by a small box being a butler.
- quantified 5y ago> The surprise was the ruining of the surprise instead of the surprise itself. Not confused, surprised. A hallmark of a butler is discretion. I hope you didn’t read that I was contradicting you or disagreeing? “Don’t spoil the suprise by divulging the nature of the package to the intended recipient” is beyond Alexa’s programming. For a butler, it wouldn’t even be a checkbox option, it would go without saying.
- cube00 5y ago> jEfF BeZoS Is aLwAyS LiStEnInG To yOu!!1!!!!111! > As long as he gives me cheap same-day delivery, IDGAF. It's disappointing that even when people know about the widespread harsh treatment of workers, as long as they get their cheap same day delivery, they don't care.
- edent 5y ago"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism"
- asddubs 5y agoI do think there is truth to that meme but I don't think it's meant to be an invitation to not give a shit about consumption ethics at all
- dylan604 5y agoI'm so sick of this quote. Yes, there is unethical behavior, but there is unethical behavior in all practices. It's not the consumption that is ethical/unethical, it is the person doing the consuming and/or selling.
- jcims 5y agoDid they just fix this? https://imgur.com/dLRlBRb https://imgur.com/dLRlBRb
- Someone1234 5y agoChanging that option doesn't fix the problem the OP mentioned. So, no.
- danielskogly 5y agoI run a simple, free and privacy-friendly wishlist service[0] with zero ads and tracking that's been around for a couple of years now, and I don't even keep your e-mail address in plaintext[1]. It's been exciting to see the user count go from ~500 to ~2500 the last year. Any feedback and feature requests are much appreciated :) [0] https://wishy.gift/ https://wishy.gift/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965671
- Nextgrid 5y agoI keep a list of stuff I need to buy in my usual notes or todo app. This means it's website-agnostic (not limited to Amazon), private, and the shop doesn't know what I want until I actually commit to buying it (so they can't raise prices or do targeted advertising by knowing that I'm interested in a given item). As a bonus, it protects me from these kinds of surprises. I don't get the point of using a proprietary, crappy (in this case) implementation that gives an adversary an edge when a simple text file would do?
- danielskogly 5y agoI'd guess that for many, the point is that it's not simply a list of things they want or need to buy for themselves, but a list they can send to others. In this case, though, a todo-list might have been a better choice, although I myself also keep ideas for others in the wishlist service I use.
- oautholaf 5y agoThis type of thing has also happened to me with Google Maps and Android Auto. I used Google Maps to locate a store to get a gift for my wife. Later, we used the car. When I plugged in my phone, Google Maps displayed the store as a recommended destination on the center console screen. This ruined the surprise. Now, Google Maps has an Incognito mode, but now I know I must use it when buying surprise presents. The problem is this interaction is impossible to anticipate, and makes me not want my preferences on communal devices at all.