this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Source: I work at Amazon, and have worked on Alexa
They don't spy on you without your permission. Comments like these devalue actual instances where companies genuinely steal and manipulate data. Take the tin foil hat off...
If you're high enough level at Amazon to know for sure, you're also high enough level at Amazon to almost definitely lie to people about it and other things as part of your job.
So no, we will not be taking your word for it.
They'd also be violating their NDA.
NDAs are null and void for illegal activity
Illegal activity was never being discussed.
Depends on if you think essentially wiretapping someone's house is illegal
The discussion was about Amazon not doing that
I know? I wasn't disagreeing with you
That doesn't make any sense. If I were "higher up", do you think I would be actually doing any IC work? I'd be in management, and probably won't even know where to look at any of the fucking source code.
Feel free not to take my word for it, but also feel free to ask anyone that has any experience with Alexa, or anyone that has monitored traffic leaving the device.
Is Lemmy just full of conspiracy nuts or something?
If you weren't, why would you have access to enough data to know for sure whatv every part of it does and doesn't do?
So basically biased people and people who might lose their jobs if they say anything Amazon doesn't want people to know? Sure, sounds credible!
There's conspiracy theories and then there's expecting that a company that has been proven to spy on people without their knowledge will spy on people without their knowledge.
That's not how it works, at all, at ANY tech company. I know, because Amazon has a shared GitFarm, with detailed documentation on how things work, and most importantly the better part of a decade where no one inside or outside of the company has found the device "listening".
I said it elsewhere, but will repeat since you clearly have no idea about the tech industry. Amazon treats it's corp employees like shit. If ANYONE was going to leak shit about their employer doing something shitty, it would be an Amazon employee, especially since their URA process is so widely known.
IF Amazon get caught spying, they get everything that they deserve. I've never worked in the Ring org, so whatever they do is on them, and if they get caught being shitty with customer data they should be punished severely. What I can say, which (again) is backed by a decade of people not calling out the really-fucking-easily-verified fact that Alexa isn't phoning home outside of the utterances you say to it. Wakewords don't leave the device, they're an offline trigger to get the "actual" content.
I'll repeat it again, this is an insane take that I haven't experienced after a decade of posting on Reddit and Twitter. Why is the fediverse full of conspiracy theorists that don't do basic research before making statements?
lol they are such stereotypical conspiracy theorists too, “of course you’d say it’s not true, that’s exactly what someone who was hiding the truth would say!”
You might want to take your own advice, buddy.
Your general demeanor is atrocious.
Genuinely.
If you think they're not spying then you're just still way too low on the totem pole.
You "work at Amazon" so I imagine you're either deluded or intentionally misleading on purpose.
It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
Any level of technical knowledge in this is enough to know that they aren't listening through your echo
Tell me you're not a software developer without telling me you're not a software developer.
If you're working on the code the only thing that might change is not having access to the release/staging environments (production databases, cloud server, etc.) but you would need access to the code itself (and development database/services), so it wouldn't be too difficult to check if the code is keeping voice recordings
(italicized is edited in for clarity)
Additionally, the higher up you are, the less code you usually write. With software development being higher up usually means more meetings, team management, planning, and higher level infrastructure talk.
(Obligatory disclaimer that I'm pretty new in software development, this is the experience in the company I work at and seems to be pretty standard among other companies as well)
So your theory as to why you haven’t seen evidence is that there’s a conspiracy of people withholding the evidence. I gotta ask, do you have evidence of that conspiracy?
Consent could be argued that it was given upon purchase of the Alexa unit...
You should probably edit your comment to clarify that they don't listen to you.
"Spying" doesn't really have a clear definition in this context. Amazon employees have been caught spying on customers through their cameras, and giving away clips to authorities without "owners'" consent, consult or notification.
True, that is more accurate. IMO, in those instances, Amazon get all the shit that they deserve...although for many instances these are in their terms of service. There has been no shortage of scandals where Amazon have used utterance data for training ML models, or where they've retained voice data for the same reasons, when these have been in the TOS from the beginning.
Source: Trust me bro
If you had any remote idea about the tech industry, you'd know what kind of reputation Amazon has. If Amazon were stealing data, you can bet your ass that one of its employees (probably one of the ~6% that gets fired every year) would happily rat them out.
Comments like these amaze me. Even cesspools like Reddit and Twitter wouldn't be so out of touch and stupid.
It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
They're not completely wrong, though. If the devices are phoning home when the mic is disabled, then someone would have discovered it by now. There are people who do that shit for fun, and Amazon is a big target.
As someone who has Google Home and used to have Alexa:
I have network tools tracking what these devices are doing just to see if they are constantly listening or doing anything weird.
In 4 years I've yet to see anything suspicious, which sucks, cuz it'd be worth so much fucking money to the media