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The real Alexa product is the wealth of data that the device can provide with 24 hr surveillance. The shaky voice recognition/command model is merely just the

The real Alexa product is the wealth of data that the device can provide with 24 hr surveillance. The shaky voice recognition/command model is merely just the Trojan horse. Amazon now knows who is watching the Super Bowl and will treat you as a consumer they can advertise to. Alexa skill developers were sold a promise of platform promotion, quality, and customer interaction. The whole consumer experience for adding custom Skills is fairly arbitrary and broken. You’ll be lucky to make $20/month from ISPs (in-skill purchases) and the other dead-end up sells your customers/users will ignore.

paxys 4y ago
This keeps getting repeated all over the internet but is simply not true. There may be a day when Amazon turns Alexa into advertising spyware, but that definitely wasn't its original intention and nothing of the sort is happening today.
- bboygravity 4y ago
  Why sell advertising of you can lease out a backdoor to the NSA and other (international) agencies?
  - iamacyborg 4y ago
    Because Amazon operate a very effective advertising model already and this could be a hugely valuable source of data.
  - fortyseven 4y ago
    I read this in Dale Gribble's voice.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  How would you know when they do this? Buried inside a "We've made some updates to our Terms of Service" email?
  - brian_cloutier 4y ago
    There are a lot of people who run proxies like pi-hole while using these devices. It only takes one of those people to notice a sudden increase in traffic and post that finding somewhere. If you discover that Alexa is uploading information that it shouldn't be and blog about it you can be almost guaranteed to hit the front page of HN, these kinds of posts appear from time to time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447080
    - upon_drumhead 4y ago
      Pihole is a dns solution. It wouldn’t notice any uptick in actual data transferred.
      - fernandotakai 4y ago
        i mean, it's quite easy to monitor a device's network usage. you would be able to see alexa uploading tons of data when not in use.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - gruez 4y ago
      >It only takes one of those people to notice a sudden increase in traffic and post that finding somewhere. Not if they perform speech speech to text on-device and send the parsed results (only a few kb). If you really want to keep things hidden you can perform all the recognition/inference on-device and only send the topic (eg. [1]), which is only a few bits of information. [1] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v1.md https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...
      - bastawhiz 4y ago
        While plausible on paper, it's not practical unless they jam an order of magnitude or two more compute into the devices. To get reasonable accuracy (i.e., enough to be able to use for profit) from any casual speech, the current models run far from realtime on a modern MacBook. You're not going to squeeze reasonable accuracy from the tiny processor on the devices in the world today, even if you record and process async as a way to hide from people inspecting traffic. Edit: it's worth noting that this dramatically increases the cost of the device. They'd need to be able to see a way to recoup those costs if they eat the additional hardware cost. But that's silly for a company that's literally in the business of cloud computing and where the goal of the hardware is to hide what you're doing. When will people start asking why there's a full GPU in their Echo?
- 31337Logic 4y ago
  Found the Amazon shill.
  - dang 4y ago
    Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the site rules when posting here? You've unfortunately been breaking them repeatedly.
googlryas 4y ago
Far more people have smart phones using one of 2 OSes, and unlike smart home devices, people generally take these with them wherever they go - to the store, to the bathroom, to sleep, to the doctors office, etc. Do you think cell phones are trojan horses too?
- htag 4y ago
  You don't? * How many apps ask for location data and background location data, when the use case for such permissions are questionable. * Look at how much FB's revenue decreased when it's consumer tracking efforts were given the smallest roadblock on iOS. * Law enforcement has access to a variety of tools that track individuals based on their cellphones. [0] * Google Maps requires an incredible amount of connectivity in order to do simple navigation. [1] * We still don't have end-to-end encryption for basic communication protocols such as SMS. * The entire Tik-tok controversy highlights the risks associated with tracking user behavior. * How much personal data was compromised by cloud based backups? How many nudes leaked, or criminal activity proven? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_law_enforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167865
  - gruez 4y ago
    >* Look at how much FB's revenue decreased when it's consumer tracking efforts were given the smallest roadblock on iOS. How much did it drop? By "smallest roadblock on iOS", I'm assuming you mean app tracking transparency, which was implemented in ios 14.5 (released April 26, 2021). According to this graph[1], facebook revenue for Q2 2021 was up from last quarter. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277963/facebooks-quarterly-global-revenue-by-segment/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/277963/facebooks-quarter...
  - googlryas 4y ago
    I certainly think phones have more spying potential than Alexa/smart devices. But my point is very few people bring up "but what about spying?" whenever smartphones are discussed, with the implication that these devices should be avoided because of that.
htag 4y ago
> You’ll be lucky to make $20/month from ISPs (in-skill purchases) and the other dead-end up sells your customers/users will ignore. I agree with this point. It's basically impossible to monetize as a third party on Alexa. The closest thing happening is Spotify, Audible, and other audio content, but it would be hard to pinpoint how much of their sales/ads are attributable to Alexa and how much would have happened on another platform if Alexa was unavailable. It's rare to have someone trigger even a $3 transaction via Alexa.

paxys 4y ago

This keeps getting repeated all over the internet but is simply not true. There may be a day when Amazon turns Alexa into advertising spyware, but that definitely wasn't its original intention and nothing of the sort is happening today.

bboygravity 4y ago
Why sell advertising of you can lease out a backdoor to the NSA and other (international) agencies?
- iamacyborg 4y ago
  Because Amazon operate a very effective advertising model already and this could be a hugely valuable source of data.
- fortyseven 4y ago
  I read this in Dale Gribble's voice.
candiddevmike 4y ago
How would you know when they do this? Buried inside a "We've made some updates to our Terms of Service" email?
- brian_cloutier 4y ago
  There are a lot of people who run proxies like pi-hole while using these devices. It only takes one of those people to notice a sudden increase in traffic and post that finding somewhere. If you discover that Alexa is uploading information that it shouldn't be and blog about it you can be almost guaranteed to hit the front page of HN, these kinds of posts appear from time to time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9447080
  - upon_drumhead 4y ago
    Pihole is a dns solution. It wouldn’t notice any uptick in actual data transferred.
    - fernandotakai 4y ago
      i mean, it's quite easy to monitor a device's network usage. you would be able to see alexa uploading tons of data when not in use.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gruez 4y ago
    >It only takes one of those people to notice a sudden increase in traffic and post that finding somewhere. Not if they perform speech speech to text on-device and send the parsed results (only a few kb). If you really want to keep things hidden you can perform all the recognition/inference on-device and only send the topic (eg. [1]), which is only a few bits of information. [1] https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/taxonomy_v1.md https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/topics/blob/main/...
    - bastawhiz 4y ago
      While plausible on paper, it's not practical unless they jam an order of magnitude or two more compute into the devices. To get reasonable accuracy (i.e., enough to be able to use for profit) from any casual speech, the current models run far from realtime on a modern MacBook. You're not going to squeeze reasonable accuracy from the tiny processor on the devices in the world today, even if you record and process async as a way to hide from people inspecting traffic. Edit: it's worth noting that this dramatically increases the cost of the device. They'd need to be able to see a way to recoup those costs if they eat the additional hardware cost. But that's silly for a company that's literally in the business of cloud computing and where the goal of the hardware is to hide what you're doing. When will people start asking why there's a full GPU in their Echo?
31337Logic 4y ago
Found the Amazon shill.
- dang 4y ago
  Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the site rules when posting here? You've unfortunately been breaking them repeatedly.

googlryas 4y ago

Far more people have smart phones using one of 2 OSes, and unlike smart home devices, people generally take these with them wherever they go - to the store, to the bathroom, to sleep, to the doctors office, etc. Do you think cell phones are trojan horses too?

htag 4y ago
You don't? * How many apps ask for location data and background location data, when the use case for such permissions are questionable. * Look at how much FB's revenue decreased when it's consumer tracking efforts were given the smallest roadblock on iOS. * Law enforcement has access to a variety of tools that track individuals based on their cellphones. [0] * Google Maps requires an incredible amount of connectivity in order to do simple navigation. [1] * We still don't have end-to-end encryption for basic communication protocols such as SMS. * The entire Tik-tok controversy highlights the risks associated with tracking user behavior. * How much personal data was compromised by cloud based backups? How many nudes leaked, or criminal activity proven? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_law_enforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30167865
- gruez 4y ago
  >* Look at how much FB's revenue decreased when it's consumer tracking efforts were given the smallest roadblock on iOS. How much did it drop? By "smallest roadblock on iOS", I'm assuming you mean app tracking transparency, which was implemented in ios 14.5 (released April 26, 2021). According to this graph[1], facebook revenue for Q2 2021 was up from last quarter. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/277963/facebooks-quarterly-global-revenue-by-segment/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/277963/facebooks-quarter...
- googlryas 4y ago
  I certainly think phones have more spying potential than Alexa/smart devices. But my point is very few people bring up "but what about spying?" whenever smartphones are discussed, with the implication that these devices should be avoided because of that.

htag 4y ago

> You’ll be lucky to make $20/month from ISPs (in-skill purchases) and the other dead-end up sells your customers/users will ignore. I agree with this point. It's basically impossible to monetize as a third party on Alexa. The closest thing happening is Spotify, Audible, and other audio content, but it would be hard to pinpoint how much of their sales/ads are attributable to Alexa and how much would have happened on another platform if Alexa was unavailable. It's rare to have someone trigger even a $3 transaction via Alexa.