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> People don't really care about privacy, They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up? > they worry about privacy, and

> People don't really care about privacy, They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up? > they worry about privacy, and complain about violations of privacy Yea, so, looks like they do care. > they never would have purchased this product in the first place They were lied to, baited in, and the terms switched. Your assertion is ridiculous and one sided. > Social Media, I'm sharing things with my friends not with corporations. > All of those are terrifically difficult to fully avoid or mitigate Two browser plugins mitigate it entirely. > They just don't care about privacy, and companies know this. They're not sophisticated enough to understand the landscape around them and assume the laws are actually being enforced. What a corrupt position you have taken here.

shadowgovt 2y ago
> They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up? Continued human behavior online. The actual behavior of users does not suggest they consider, on average, that their privacy is being violated every time they put more data into Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. If you want to use this as a case study, come back to this topic in a year and see if Alexa sales and / or usage has gone down or up. It's at about 600 million installed units and 77 million users right now (and that's after someone's Alexa dataset was used as evidence in their murder trial two years ago... If people cared, wouldn't the line go down, not up?).
- smcin 2y ago
  Per my longer post above, people do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where they tend not to. Stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region. Americans do one thing, Europeans another. And as I pointed out there are not 600 million active installed Alexas, noone (outside Amazon and LE) knows the number of active current Alexas or current households with 1+ active Alexa. A better way to estimate usage is look at usercounts for the top-100 most popular apps, by geo. UPDATE: I found the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat from [0] citing [1] [0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/ [1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/ https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/
smcin 2y ago
Right. People do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where users tend not to. It's better for everyone in this thread to simply stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region or privacy regime. (Whether the laws are flouted is entirey another topic.) As to smart-assistant usage, what we would really want to see is comparative numbers of current and new Alexa users, broken out by privacy region (US, EU, other Europe, Australia, Asia, ME, CALA, Africa). (PS noone other than Amazon knows how many "active Alexa users" there are in a geo, since no third-party can audit Amazon's numbers, and "installed units" might simply mean "user bought an Alexa device at any pointsince 2014, it might be unused/disconnected/broken/sitting in a pile of junk/given away years ago. This is just like the games Linux vendors, Java and MSFT notoriously played with "licenses installed" even if that machine was wiped to install another OS, without ever activating the shipped OS). "Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices" absolutely does not mean "there were at any point 500 million active Alexa users", and anyway most Alexa users have multiple devices in one house, so the theoretical peak devicecount was only ever 500m/n at most. I suspect the real peak was closer to 77m than 500m. But noone outside Amazon knows; there are only estimates. There is no Nielsen Research or Quantcast of Alexa devices, AFAIK. There are only the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat for number of users [0][1]. Not devicecount. And as to whether privacy laws, warrant requests are being disregarded, blanket geofenced warrants, Ring syndication, yRoombas snooping on you, data fusion of that data with Kindle devices/phones and smart TV etc., it's a semantic debate whether that's "widespread privacy violations which US Congress is lobbied to turn a blind eye to" rather than "users aren't sophisticated enough to detect when laws are being violated". Imagine if we applied that thought process to bank robberies and whether they were adequately protecting your money: the onus being on the customer to constantly monitor your bank. (We don't need to because there are consumer and criminal laws governing banking). Anyone with more time might care to look for estimates of number of households with active Alexas by geo/privacy region, and compare to privacy watchdog reports. [0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/ [1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/ https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/

shadowgovt 2y ago

> They really do. Do you have anything other than a blind assertion to back this up? Continued human behavior online. The actual behavior of users does not suggest they consider, on average, that their privacy is being violated every time they put more data into Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. If you want to use this as a case study, come back to this topic in a year and see if Alexa sales and / or usage has gone down or up. It's at about 600 million installed units and 77 million users right now (and that's after someone's Alexa dataset was used as evidence in their murder trial two years ago... If people cared, wouldn't the line go down, not up?).

smcin 2y ago
Per my longer post above, people do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where they tend not to. Stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region. Americans do one thing, Europeans another. And as I pointed out there are not 600 million active installed Alexas, noone (outside Amazon and LE) knows the number of active current Alexas or current households with 1+ active Alexa. A better way to estimate usage is look at usercounts for the top-100 most popular apps, by geo. UPDATE: I found the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat from [0] citing [1] [0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/ [1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/ https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/

smcin 2y ago

Right. People do care about privacy, in the EU and other jurisdictions; it's the US where users tend not to. It's better for everyone in this thread to simply stop generalizing about what "humans" and "people" or "laws" do; start talking by country or region or privacy regime. (Whether the laws are flouted is entirey another topic.) As to smart-assistant usage, what we would really want to see is comparative numbers of current and new Alexa users, broken out by privacy region (US, EU, other Europe, Australia, Asia, ME, CALA, Africa). (PS noone other than Amazon knows how many "active Alexa users" there are in a geo, since no third-party can audit Amazon's numbers, and "installed units" might simply mean "user bought an Alexa device at any pointsince 2014, it might be unused/disconnected/broken/sitting in a pile of junk/given away years ago. This is just like the games Linux vendors, Java and MSFT notoriously played with "licenses installed" even if that machine was wiped to install another OS, without ever activating the shipped OS). "Amazon has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices" absolutely does not mean "there were at any point 500 million active Alexa users", and anyway most Alexa users have multiple devices in one house, so the theoretical peak devicecount was only ever 500m/n at most. I suspect the real peak was closer to 77m than 500m. But noone outside Amazon knows; there are only estimates. There is no Nielsen Research or Quantcast of Alexa devices, AFAIK. There are only the "77.2 million (Alexa) users globally" stat for number of users [0][1]. Not devicecount. And as to whether privacy laws, warrant requests are being disregarded, blanket geofenced warrants, Ring syndication, yRoombas snooping on you, data fusion of that data with Kindle devices/phones and smart TV etc., it's a semantic debate whether that's "widespread privacy violations which US Congress is lobbied to turn a blind eye to" rather than "users aren't sophisticated enough to detect when laws are being violated". Imagine if we applied that thought process to bank robberies and whether they were adequately protecting your money: the onus being on the customer to constantly monitor your bank. (We don't need to because there are consumer and criminal laws governing banking). Anyone with more time might care to look for estimates of number of households with active Alexas by geo/privacy region, and compare to privacy watchdog reports. [0]: https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/ https://www.demandsage.com/voice-search-statistics/ [1]: https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/ https://keywordseverywhere.com/blog/voice-search-stats/