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Why do people buy and use these things? And why have they taught their kids to use them? (And what looks like for fun...). I feel like we're on the verge
by 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
Why do people buy and use these things?
And why have they taught their kids to use them? (And what looks like for fun...).
I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house.
Not only is it unnecessary, but as you can see from thia tweet, they're never going to be perfect.
- donatj 5y agoNothing is perfect. If we required perfection to accept a technology, we'd still be workshopping fire. I walk into my house and say "Alexa lights on" and my first floor lights turn on, it's magical. You get used to it to the point that using a light switch feels like changing the channel with a knob on a TV.
- rzz3 5y agoI never liked talking to technology, and I’m not elderly either. I don’t know why people find this better than just pulling out their phone and tapping a couple of buttons.
- maccard 5y agoPersonally I don't know why people find pulling out their phone is better than powering up their desktop and googling something from there? Sarcasm aside, voice is another interface. A mouse allows things a keyboard can't do alone. Touch and haptics allow things that a keyboard and mouse doesn't, and voice allows things that the others don't. Alexa and Co aren't just voice interfaces though, they're speech to text combined with NLP. It's the equivalent of knowing ls, find, grep, sort and using that to display the attributes of the newest mp4 in your folder versus typing in 'what is the newest video in my videos' and getting the same answer. These devices support context (if I ask Google what's on today, it will give me my calendar, and if my partner asks it will respond with theirs), are intuitive, easy to manage and cheap. It's no wonder they're so popular
- nightfly 5y agoI'd keep my Google home even if its only feature was "ok google find my phone". Timers and controlling music without having to move my hands can be incredibly useful. Everything else is hit-and-miss
- Aeolun 5y agoI’d like it better if those were the only things it ever did.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoThere's clearly market for "dumb" smart devices (albeit a small one). Anyone know of any companies doing this? Preferably open source?
- walrus01 5y agoBecause I've been using the Internet since 1993 and doing network security things professionally since 1999, I own exactly zero of these devices.
- ckdarby 5y agoYet you have your phone, laptop, your family + family members also have laptop & phone. You're already being tracked and listened to all the time. You're only as strong as the weakest device on you and or in your phone at any point.
- rzz3 5y agoSome of us actively take steps to avoid being tracked all of the time. People like you are the reason people like me have to try so hard. I’m so sick of this argument.
- walrus01 5y agoI wholeheartedly agree, but that doesn't mean I want to add the additional attack surface/threat model of having an always on Alexa or Google home device, even before I consider the additional privacy and data sharing implications.
- circularfoyers 5y agoI feel like this argument is not productive for improving privacy because it suggests we shouldn't try. I think improving privacy is incremental and these improvements can make a difference, however small. It's never going to be complete, but neither are security measures.
- notriddle 5y agoThe end point of the argument is that there is no such thing as individual privacy. Privacy is defined by the ability to distinguish people, even if it’s just process of elimination (you know that all but one of the houses on the block has a smart oven, and you can figure out that somebody in the block turned an oven on based on the minute changes in natural gas pressure, therefore you can spy on that last person almost as effectively as if they had installed a smart oven themselves). Either everybody is private, or nobody is. There is no such thing as “f u, got mine” here. Privacy is inherently a collective problem, so it must be solved by political means, not by individual choices.
- yeetaccount4 5y agoI’ve never even seen one. I’m sure lots of people have them, but I don’t know any. I’m more concerned about the latest generation of teens that haven’t been more than a day in their lives without an internet connected device in front of them since they were toddlers. They’re going to be fucked up. Their parents know it too, but if they take the device away from them, they’ll have to get off their own devices and…interact with their children.
- mcphage 5y agoInteract with my children? Sorry, can’t see them around the massive newspaper blocking me off from the world.
- mattlondon 5y agoWhy do you think that access to information is a bad thing? You could have said the same thing about kids with access to books.
- maccard 5y agoHow did the previous generations cope with the battle of video games being so addictive, or film and television, or rock music, or fiction books?
- SyzygistSix 5y agoBy limiting tv and video game time. Although my reading time was not ever limited, at least until I was older and I had to do my math homework first.
- userbinator 5y agoI've found that although I'm the "most techy" person in my group, yet I'm also the most "luddist" --- I have zero "smart devices" in my home, and all my white goods are mid-century if not older. The idea of having an always-on surveillance device owned by Big Tech in one's home has always felt incredibly dystopian. As a comment on an article when Alexa first came out said: "we don't need to force the proles to install telescreens, they'll do it themselves."
- CyberRabbi 5y ago> The idea of having an always-on surveillance device owned by Big Tech in one's home has always felt incredibly dystopian. The layman’s capacity for embracing dystopia cannot be underestimated.
- shrimp_emoji 5y agoThe laser eye surgeon with glasses. ;)
- seanhunter 5y agoI get the irony, but sometimes you can have a problem that is easily correctable with glasses yet falls within the error bars for laser eye surgery. I need glasses for everyday life (including having any kind of low-light vision at all), but when I looked into having laser eye surgery they told me my current vision was within the bounds of what they would consider a successful outcome of the surgery and therefore I shouldn't have it done unless my vision deteriorated further.
- desine 5y agoThis became a bit of a text meme for a bit. I think there's actually an origin in some fantasy fiction narrative about a wizard and a magic rock, but I cannot find it now. Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise. source: https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoI've been gifted Alexa devices nearly every holiday season since they came out. My partners mother says it's so we can talk to each other. I put my sandal down and don't allow any of it on my LAN. The social stigma is strong. Google Home was nice for awhile because I could ask simple things without pulling out my phone (and giving it a chance to hook me) but I've since removed all smart devices. Good riddance.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago> My partners mother says it's so we can talk to each other. Like... A phone? Maybe a speaker phone? Am I missing something here?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoThat was my reply to her. We all have cellphones.
- datavirtue 5y agoSame here. I went all in, had dots everywhere. After confirming the complete lack of privacy the final straw was when I asked Alexa for customer service and "she" looked up customer service and read me the definition. I unplugged them all and threw them in a junk bin.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fooblitzky 5y agoThe kids teach themselves. They are surprisingly good at listening to sounds and observing correlated effects.
- schnevets 5y agoIt's how I feel about kids being glued to YouTube screens with auto-suggest. The success measurement is based on stickiness and the algorithm is learning based on failure. Tech spent so long celebrating the virtue of failure, they neglected to recognize that some failure can be magnitudes more dangerous than others (like a web page failing to load compared to YouTube suggesting an inappropriate video to a 5 year old).
- necovek 5y agoIt's actually quite funny: they could possibly implement an algorithm that's going to move to more boring (not in child's interest) suggestions after some time (eg 1h of screen time) to encourage healthier viewing habits. But I think that's a harder problem to solve since all creators are going for addictive content, so figuring out interest is most important.
- rattlesnakedave 5y agoI have a couple I use for smart home automation and I like them. Doing things like setting timers, getting the weather, info about Amazon shipments, etc. is nice to have and convenient. “They’re never going to be perfect” is true, but I generally ask very little of my smart devices, and they perform very well for the majority of peoples use cases.
- dangrossman 5y agoBecause they make my life better? I enjoy being able to use a simple voice command to change the temperature of the room, dim a light, play a song, check the outdoor temperature before taking my dog on a walk, or close the garage door from my bedroom because I forgot to do it before going up for the night. It feels like living in the Star Trek universe to me. I have a smart speaker in every room. I knew I wanted this long ago. I had coded my own version of Alexa before smart speakers were a thing. It ran on a tablet PC I hung on the living room wall, using a mishmash of free and commercial APIs for voice recognition, text to speech, and smart home device control. A software engineer at Liftmaster emailed me back then about my strange website usage when I hacked up an API for voice control of my smart garage door opener. But all that was replaced by Echo speakers when the Echo Plus came out and was able to become my new Zigbee hub.
- donkarma 5y ago
- rglullis 5y agoDoes it have to come with the surveillance apparatus, the absolute lack of legal responsibility for potentially fatal actions and the perverse incentives for mindless consumerism, though? You know how the sausage is made. Wouldn't you like to at least fund a viable ethical alternative?
- astura 5y ago
- dangrossman 5y agoI'm perfectly content with Amazon's product. I am happy to fund it in exchange for the utility it provides me.
- rglullis 5y agoIt's interesting to point out that your answer does not defend the ethical aspect of Amazon and consequently your own choice. And you don't think that you can do anything to counter the bad side of it? Don't you think there is no externality that you should be paying for?
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Why do people buy and use these things? Because they are convenient for lots of routine tasks. > And why have they taught their kids to use them? If they are in a house with kids, the kids don't need to be actively taught to start using them. > I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house. Pretty close, yeah. > Not only is it unnecessary Unless you are dirt poor, chances are most of the things you have and use are unnecessary. > but as you can see from thia tweet, they're never going to be perfect. This tweet tells how they are (well, Alexa is) now, not what they will (n)ever be. But, yes, nothing is ever perfect. Clothes dryers are both unnecessary and imperfect, and kill people every year: are you going to go on a crusade against them, next?
- perfopt 5y agoClothes dryers - please elaborate. Why are they dangerous? (serious question)
- knodi123 5y agoFire risk, largely from people who don't know there's a lint trap and that they're supposed to clean it.
- ndsipa_pomu 5y agoWell, that sounds like a design flaw if lint is being deliberately held where a heater can set it on fire. (Disclaimer - my HotPoint tumble dryer got recalled due to this kind of design flaw burning down a few houses)
- Kalium 5y agoThere's also a fire risk from the vent getting clogged with tiny bits of lint that weren't caught by the trap.
- cyounkins 5y agoI'm guessing fire risk - https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-tools/US-Fire-Problem/Home-fires-involving-clothes-dryers-and-washing-machines https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-too...
- paxys 5y agoDo you have a smartphone in your pocket right now? What's the difference?
- pdonis 5y agoYou can take steps to lock down your smartphone and limit its ability to spy on you, since you only need it to hear what you're saying when you're using it as a phone. You can't do that with these smart home devices; an intrinsic part of their function is that they have to be always listening.
- paxys 5y agoHow do you stop your phone from always listening to you? It has a microphone and an internet connection. The hardware and software are closed source and out of your control. It is also orders of magnitude more powerful than a smart home device and is within listening distance of you pretty much 24x7. If you are scared about an Echo in your house then you should be keeping your phone, tablet, laptop and 50 other similar devices locked up in Faraday cages at all times.
- f1refly 5y agoUsing lineageos without microg at least severely reduces the chance for an "oopsie daisy yes so our microphone really was listenig the whole time and we accidentally used that data for targeting but hey, we're veeery sorry and you're getting a 50ct prime voucher ;)" This is not about escaping every slight chance someone might surveil you, which one can't do anything about anyways, but to make make sure you're at least not part of a dragnet effort powered through the blackbox computer provided by a hostile entity whose only purpose for existing is recording your voice.
- rzz3 5y agoIf Apple was doing this, everyone would know by now. That’s why I buy Apple. They at least pretend to give a shit about privacy.
- Lapsa 5y ago
- malauxyeux 5y ago> Why do people buy and use these things? I don't own one myself, but I gave my legally blind 80-year-old neighbor an Amazon Dot — after explaining the privacy concerns. He'd never used any internet-connected device, but the voice interface was almost instantly accessible to him. That's a really big deal. For context, he told me that if his 1970s stove breaks, he won't replace it because he won't be able to learn a new stove's interface. He regularly uses it for news headlines, sports scores, and checking the weather. He also uses it to access internet radio stations that play music from his era. That music was unavailable to him previously and now he can access it instantly and for free.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y agoThat's actually a heart warming story. thanks for sharing.
- throwaway2037 5y agoFrom Waymo PR videos on YouTube, I see many of the first riders were visually impaired / blind or physically disabled. While is a bunch of corpo PR, I'm still very happy to see these people have greater mobility!
- bambax 5y agoOkay, that's one use that I can relate to.
- WalterBright 5y ago> Why do people buy and use these things? I'd buy one if I was disabled.
- Underphil 5y agoThat's a really good point, I hadn't thought of the accessibility benefits.
- WalterBright 5y agoIn the meantime, as long as I can stand up and walk, I'm gonna walk over to the light switch to turn it on/off.
- Underphil 5y agoLikewise bud, but in answering the original question, this was a very valid reason.
- Kaze404 5y agoHonestly this was the only inconvenience that got me to purchase a "smart" device. I got cheap rebranded smart bulbs that are always-online, but at least they don't have microphones and can be controlled through an app.
- corobo 5y agoYou trust some cheap brand over Amazon? I'm not saying Amazon should be trusted but that's a really odd stance to take. You've got their app on your phone and their device on your LAN.. I'd just assume I was already a part of someone's botnet
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Kaze404 5y agoI don't, but the threat is much lower. I'll personally take being part of someone's botnet over having an Amazon microphone in my house, but I understand why other people might not.
- Underphil 5y agoEach to their own, I guess. I was given one for Christmas a couple of years back and within 24 hours it was powered off and in the 'junk drawer'. Some people like home automation and such, and if they're willing to accept the (arguably minimal) potential risks then more power to them. Luckily you and I don't have to use one, at least not yet.
- thathndude 5y agoJokes on all those users. I have HomePods, which absolutely suck at returning any information. But they play music well. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature!
- naavis 5y ago> I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house. This mostly applies to the USA.
- SwiftyBug 5y ago> I feel like we're on the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house. Are you aware that [1]37% of the people in the world has never used the internet? Also technology is not as accessible everywhere as it is in the US. In my home country, for example, more than 60% of students couldn't catch up with remote classes during the pandemic because they either didn't have a mobile phone (they certainly don't have computers) or they didn't have reliable internet connection. This resulted in the lowest attendance to our SATs in our history. If people still don't have access to entry-level smartphones and internet connection, I doubt they'll have home assistants anytime soon. While I share your worries of having these devices inside peoples homes, I'd like to point that we are far from "the verge of an age where every single person is used to, and just has an Alexa/google home voice assist in their house". [1]: https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2021-11-29-FactsFigures.aspx https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2021-11-29-Facts...
- naavis 5y agoSmart speakers are very marginal products even in many very developed but non-English-speaking countries because their native language is not supported. Quick googling says Alexa supports English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Hindi, Japanese, and Portuguese.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Crosseye_Jack 5y ago> Why do people buy and use these things? For me it’s basically laziness. I like being able to control my heating / lighting without having to reach for my phone while I’m still in bed. Before having my thermostat on the LAN I would have to guess before going to bed what temperature I would like the house to be at and at what time. Now I switch it on/off from the comfort of my blanket and have the house nice and warm before getting out of bed when I wake. I also like having the ability to switch lights on and off while having my hands full, request music, news, information, create timers, amend my shopping list, without having to reach for my phone (which for me is even more convenient when my hands are in no state to be touching my phone/switches/whatever, cooking or doing the washing up for example). Now for me personally my Echos are mainly just fancy voice remotes for my Home Assistant setup with most of the devices it controls local only devices (I have a couple of plugs I’ve yet to crack open to flash tasmota onto them), because their isn’t anything really competes with them for what they do in the open source hardware “market”. So for the moment I use Echos with the privacy settings all maxed out. While not directly smart speaker related I always hated outdoor PIRs because of their false positive triggers. So using Home Assistant, the camera covering the front of my house, Doods and a bit of JavaScript I now track when a person is moving outside my home at night to turn the outdoor lighting on without it being triggered by the neighbourhood wildlife. For my elderly parents, they use them because their mobility isn’t as great as it used to be. My step dad has to use walking sticks to great around, having the ability to control the lights with just his voice removes the need to stop using this sticks to toggle the lights has he enters/exits a room. My mother has more mobility and has no issues with wall mounted switches when entering / exiting a room she can find the small switches on lamps more of a chore. She also like using lamps over the main ceiling light as it feels more “cozy”. So it saves her having to walk around the room turning on/off multiple lamps (although that could be done with wiring the sockets to a wall switch, but doing that without the need to repair decorations is a pain, much easier to use pass thru relay sockets for things like lamps). They also like the lack of buttons and screens on them. When she wants to listen to the radio/music she can just ask for the station instead of “faffing” with the controls on the radio to find the station/music she wants to listen too. While I understand there are privacy concerns with smart speakers of any brand (and I will not dismiss those concerns of those who have them), I feel with good data protection laws to help deal with those issues smart speakers have a place for those who find it easier to interact with their world via their voice over their hands.
- barbazoo 5y agoKids just pick it up from seeing their parents do it. Why people have them I don't know. Sure they're practical, whatever, but at what cost‽ When will people stop trading convenience for safety, privacy, sustainability, etc? I feel like very few people actually think before they buy something.