
Ask HN: Is it safe to use Alexa Echo? - github-cat
After setting up Alexa Echo, it starts to listen to what we are talking so that it can wake up and answer our question. However, this raises a concern about security. Since it&#x27;s listening to us, it means it would listen to everything we talked. What if we have told some secrets such as password, bank account details etc without noticing that Alexa is listening? Will this be a huge loophole that our privacy would be collected by Alexa? How could this issue be resolved?
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dreamcompiler
In a word, no. For two reasons:

1\. You cannot audit or enforce that Amazon is not listening all the time and
misusing your data. Taking their word for it is simply not good enough. (This
is even more true for Google since their business model is based on selling
your personal information to advertisers.)

2\. In-home devices now have more-than-adequate computational power to
recognize speech without shipping the signal off to the cloud for processing.
But this wouldn't let them sell your data to advertisers, so you don't see
many devices that work this way, and the big companies continue to tell us the
devices have to be cloud connected. They are simply lying.

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sfeather
Locally, it listens for the wake word. Only after it recognizes the wake word,
and while the blue light is spinning, is it listening.

