5 ms·
I have two Amazon Echos that I never use, but they apparently burn GBs a day
- tombert 1y agoI used to have the Rumble app installed [1], and I uninstalled it when I saw it was using gigs and gigs of data on my phone, even when I wasn't using the app. I'm sure I opted into some permission at some point, but I really didn't like the idea of them constantly sending data to their site at the expense of my data plan and battery, so I removed it. Now I think this stuff is the norm though; I guess bandwidth is so abundant and cheap for the average American that they don't realize how much is actually being used? [1] I'm not conservative but there was a creator I liked that was banned from YouTube and was uploading to Rumble.
- sh4rks 1y agoDoes anybody have suggestions for a device similar to the echo, but with no microphone? I want whole house speakers on a budget, and the Echo's music group feature seems to do what I want, but I have no need for the microphone.
- conception 1y agoSonos/Ikea?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bazmattaz 1y agoSonos One SL has no microphone.
- de6u99er 1y agoThis is click ait, right?
- LorenPechtel 1y agoEcho show--of course it uses a decent amount of data. If it's awake it will typically be showing an ad on at least part of it's screen. Some of those have images.
- stevage 1y agoWow, people have devices that show ads all day? Vomit.
- johnisgood 1y agoReminds me of the movie Idiocracy. Why would anyone do this deliberately to themselves is beyond me.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoI have mine configured so the majority of the screen is useful information. There's a third of it that shows ads, so what? I just ignore them.
- ThePowerOfFuet 1y agohttps://xcancel.com/davepl1968/status/1963803025572770212 https://xcancel.com/davepl1968/status/1963803025572770212
- huem0n 1y agoThank you
- procaryote 1y agoWell this easily happens and is just the result of a simple mistake: you bought an amazon echo This is easily fixed by disconnecting and shredding any such devices you own! I hope this helps!
- mikelward 1y agoI set up a Google Home to show family photos for my grandma. Got a call soon after that it'd used her monthly home internet allowance. I guess it didn't cache the wallpaper images.
- theoreticalmal 1y agoI was able to effectively stop this behavior by shooting my Echo with a rifle. I hope to hang its rent carcass above my fireplace soon
- kogasa240p 1y agoI'm sorry but what was expected here? They're designed to be corporate wiretap devices.
- motbus3 1y agoI ditched having any smart stuff I can avoid. One of my best friends on the other hand has everything he can, or he had. I don't know. The amount of cameras and the lack of security upgrades on those devices gives me chills. I have been worried about it since I found my ISP router back in the day spent 10G/week by itself when nothing is connected. Wtf
- mrlinx 1y agoIn 2025, can't believe there's still no open-source alternative to these devices.
- victorbjorklund 1y agoNot exactly the same but there is Home assistant voice.
- zahlman 1y agoIt's still honestly amazing to me that people buy, or want, devices like this, even before considering the downsides. I mean, I don't even like leaving voicemail messages. So the idea of talking to nobody in particular, within my own home, to cause something to happen, totally freaks me out. I really don't need more excuses for physical laziness, either.
- verytrivial 1y agoThey're hardware projections into your living space of a massive system run by Amazon. It's the massive system that open-source will have trouble replicating.
- mrlinx 1y agoSpotify multi-speaker playing + a LLM answering questions would cover what 80% of people need.
- herculity275 1y agoMost people use Echos as voice controlled music players with occasional smart assistant functionality, this shouldn't be too hard to replicate in OSS. You could argue that the extend to which they're not making you buy into the Amazon ecosystem is a major failure of the product line.
- rickdeckard 1y agoIt might be used as a hub for other devices via Amazon sidewalk [0]... [0] https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk
- jeroenhd 1y agoI imagine it may contribute to data usage for some people, but from his Youtube videos I don't exactly get the impression this guy gets a lot of foot traffic near his house.
- diggan 1y agoSeems that'd be easy to confirm, and also seems unlikely to be the reason because of the supposed limits in place. > Customers can turn Sidewalk on or off at any time from Control Center in the Ring app or Account Settings in the Alexa app > The maximum bandwidth of a Sidewalk Bridge to the Sidewalk server is 80Kbps, which is about 1/40th of the bandwidth used to stream a typical high definition video. Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.
- tinix 1y ago> Today, when you share your Bridge’s connection with Sidewalk, total monthly data used by Sidewalk, per account, is capped at 500MB, which is equivalent to streaming about 10 minutes of high definition video.
- luma 1y agoSidewalk is LoRA so I think we can be pretty sure it wasn't the source of GBs of data . Anyone freaked out about sidewalk's use of their internet connection hasn't looked at the numbers.
- CharlesW 1y agoLoRa is Sidewalk's long-haul backup layer, but it uses a mix of BLE, FSK, and LoRa depending on the distance and data requirements. https://docs.sidewalk.amazon/introduction/ https://docs.sidewalk.amazon/introduction/
- maxclark 1y agoHe also has a 25 Gbps Internet connection - not really a huge problem here
- diggan 1y agoThat's really besides the point, unused devices shouldn't upload/download GB of data per month, it's really simple :)
- egorfine 1y agoYou never use them. Unlike Amazon.
- GJim 1y ago"Smart speakers" should be called by their real name: Smart microphones. Echo --> Amazons microphone.
- Phrenzy 1y agodoubleplusgood
- brador 1y agoListening devices
- yupyupyups 1y agoBugs
- bravetraveler 1y agoTaps as a service
- ozgung 1y agoAll smartphones are also smartmicrophones.
- juliangmp 1y agoYeah? I mean that's their purpose, why is this surprising to anyone?
- lupusreal 1y agoUsually when this sort of scenario is brought up as a concern, the corporate sycophants crawl out of their holes to gaslight everybody.
- juliangmp 1y agoIdk what drugs you're on to think I'm some kind of amazon shill. My point stands, acting surprised about any of this is just nonsense. You bought the Amazon Smart Spying Speakers, what the fuck do you expect them to do
- noisy_boy 1y agoProvocative: Then why haven't you turned them off?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stevage 1y agoThey probably have now? Nothing weird about posting a "whoa look what I just discovered".
- nickthegreek 1y agoi dont understand how people can setup this level of monitoring but not also a pihole.
- chrisandchris 1y agoNot OP, but if you've got a Ubiquiti device, this is out-of-box (and they're easier to setup than printer WiFi).
- nizbit 1y agoAnd all defaults set? Yeah you’re gonna have a bad time. Disable voice recording storage Disable "Help Improve Alexa" Manage skill permissions Turn off Amazon Sidewalk But in the end you have a 3rd party passive listening device. Depends if you trust that 3rd party I guess. And after that post on x, I’m sure that person disconnected all the Alexa’s in their home right?
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- HPsquared 1y agoMost people already have a phone, laptop, maybe a watch, maybe the TV remote.. And lots of apps on each one. Any one of which could be listening in. It's a crazy situation.
- m463 1y agoI remember years ago, when viruses were common, watching kids use computers... OK Install Accept [X] Upgrade and they never want to clear their cookies and lose their logins.
- ptx 1y agoAndroid has a button in the quick settings bar to enable/disable the microphone, which helps with this (as long as you trust the OS itself). I keep it disabled most of the time.
- oarla 1y agoI wish my phone was just listening. It’s actually much worse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799802
- IIsi50MHz 1y agoThat thread's too old for me to reply, but for me this "eerie ad for what we just talked about" went away when I disabled "Ok Google" detection.
- gucci-on-fleek 1y agoI also monitor the bandwidth of each device on my network, and my numbers are much lower than his. The totals that I observed over the last 90 days: Device Download Upload =========== ========== ========= Echo Show A 5.487 GiB 1.451 GiB Echo Show B 4.343 GiB 1.293 GiB Echo A 0.778 GiB 0.739 GiB Echo Dot 0.626 GiB 0.580 GiB Echo B 0.132 GiB 0.291 GiB ----------- ---------- --------- Total 11.366 GiB 4.354 GiB Also note that both devices in the OP are called "echoshow", which means that they have a full LCD display that you could theoretically stream videos on (if you like watching videos on a 5" display with a terrible interface).
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoFwiw i've had long running devices that just constantly ARP broadcast. Affects the local network only but if that's how you measure bandwidth you'll notice it. Ie. Non stop "Who has IP/MAC address XYZ? tell ABC" ARP requests, then a second device see's the request for XYZ (which may not even exist on the network anymore!) and realizes it too doesn't know who XYZ is, so it too sends it's own broadcast. And on the cycle goes as devices constantly see others requesting knowledge of XYZ and triggering the request in a cycle. Embedded devices are especially susceptible to doing this. You might not even notice, apart from a mild "my network feels slow" unless you inspect at network traffic closely. The worst part is these ARP storms basically require you to power down everything and power back up again. In the most classic engineer move the most effective way is to reboot the house. Ie. flip the switch at the fuse breaker and turn the house back on again. That turns all devices off and on again and causes what ever IP/MAC address confusion that triggered the storm to resolve. Worth investigating for OP. Especially for home networks with a lot of devices. Home routers won't stop a broadcast storm and once it's going they don't stop. Happens more often than is discussed in my experience (i think people just don't notice that poorly programmed devices can do these cyclic and endless ARP requests)
- chatmasta 1y agoI wouldn't trust flipping the fuse to the house because of thundering herd issues. When I restart my router I first disconnect all WiFi clients and unplug the Ethernet connections. Then I let it do its thing, download its mysterious updates, etc. Only when it's solidly online do I reconnect the clients one by one...
- neuroelectron 1y agoSeems like something is seriously wrong. This is not normal. It's not caused by "improving Alexa" or Sidewalk.
- cubefox 1y agoBy the way, "that person" is Dave Plummer, an ex Microsoft employee. He made things like the Windows Task Manager and the infamous file copy window. His YouTube channel has interesting behind the scenes information on historical Windows decisions.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dang 1y ago(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45136997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45136997.)
- IlikeKitties 1y agoOh it's that guy? yeah, there's another thing he did: Write scammy Scareware [0] which he got sued [1] for and settled [2] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GeF9AjlqP8 [1] https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/ne https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/ne [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1593468/internetshield-vendor-pays-to-settle-deceptive-ad-suit.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1593468/internetshield...
- techjamie 1y agoIt makes me sad that video doesn't have 100k views at least. He tried so hard to bury it and it kinda worked, but it's a well put together documentary on the stuff he pulled in the 00s. It'd be one thing if he owned up to it and admitted what he did was wrong but he's grown past it. His attempts to obscure it away just tell me he hasn't changed. Which is funny, because his videos gave me a grifter vibe I couldn't quite place until I learned about his history.
- blibble 1y ago> Which is funny, because his videos gave me a grifter vibe I couldn't quite place until I learned about his history. for me it was him boasting about his amazing game changing contributions to Windows when he mostly did thing like lay out the widgets on the format dialog he's no Dave Cutler
- marwanzzxxcc 1y ago[flagged]
- marwanzzxxcc 1y ago[flagged]
- marcroberts 1y agoI had a similar issue 2 years ago[0], tracked it down to a device metrics hostname and then blacklisted the DNS for it. That stopped the huge data use and seemed to have zero affect on the device functioning. It's still working just fine today with that host blocked. [0] https://www.marcroberts.info/2023/echo-show-uploading-data-constantly/ https://www.marcroberts.info/2023/echo-show-uploading-data-c...
- 1oooqooq 1y agoperson buys the literal telescreen from 1984, and is surprised it's the telescreen he paid for. color me shocked.
- advael 1y agoWe have an impossibly pervasive network of sensor blisters littered throughout our lives, to the point where I don't feel comfortable discussing certain sensitive topics in most other people's homes, but every step of the way most normal people have given the same refrain: "oh, the tech companies probably already have all my data anyway" Now that those tech companies are working closely with an American regime that seems increasingly willing to disregard the rule of law and public perception to round up people they deem undesirable in large numbers and put them in concentration camps, and we have natural language processing tech that can pretty effectively filter through large amounts of text for some semantic analysis, I hear some of the more attentive people coming to the barest hint of a realization that this situation is unacceptably dire It really seems to me like we are cooked
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pointlessone 1y ago> doing nothing at all Doing nothing at all for you.
- xnx 1y agoI can only imagine that much data usage if it was trying to compress a 24 hour recording of white noise.
- rickdeckard 1y agoCould possibly be solved by blocking connections to device-metrics-us.amazon.com (via the router or a pihole), the devices tend to be quite chatty towards that domain but don't seem to be affected in function if they can't reach it...
- burnt-resistor 1y agoBecause they continually download and serve commercial ads, upload telemetry, and upload everything they hear regardless of wake word with no way of deleting (per a past privacy-invasive EULA change). At a minimum, disable the microphone via the switch... which makes them basically worthless and so they've outlived their usefulness.