
Ask HN: Anyone else uncomfortable talking to cloud voice agents? - awinter-py
20% of american households have an alexa now and I get generalized anxiety from being in the same room with one. I don&#x27;t like driving in a car with G talk &#x2F; siri. I stay away from samsung TVs.<p>Should I seek psychiatric help or are these devices truly creepy?<p>In particular: have you caught yourself watching what you say around always-listening devices.
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PaulHoule
I get tired when I talk to machines, it seems to take more mental and physical
effort than talking to people. (I have to make whatever adjustments are
required so the machine will understand me, multiplied by the number of times
I have to repeat it.)

As for the fear of your fellow man, I think the total amount of danger you are
exposed to through microphones through

* high-school hackers

* intelligence services of countries other than your own

* identity thieves, bank robbers, etc.

* disgruntled contractors of Amazon.com, National Security Agency, etc.

* people who want to make a sex tape of you, or frame you for some crime, etc.

* your spouse, parents, children, etc.

is vastly greater than the treat of the intelligence agencies of your own
country poses to you in most places.

Echo normalizes "always on" behavior; something that looks a bit like a hockey
puck can be stuffed under the bed, in either a tidy or messy A/V center and be
ignored. For that matter, people are used to seeing strange phones, laptops
and other things plugged in around the home and office.

The threat you are up against looks like:

[https://vanderpot.com/Clinton_Cook_Paper.pdf](https://vanderpot.com/Clinton_Cook_Paper.pdf)

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tdkl
More people should watch the movie "Das Leben der Anderen"[1], how Stasi
thoroughly bugged the living places of people dangerous to "state security".

Now they're buying them for being too lazy.

[1]
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/)

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eternalban
> Should I seek psychiatric help

No, you should write your representative(s), support privacy groups (such as
EFF), and in general lend a hand to establish the legal limits to surveillance
and ownership of meta/data produced in course of using a commerical product.

