
Amazon confirms it keeps your Alexa recordings basically forever - gilad
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/amazon-confirms-it-keeps-your-alexa-recordings-basically-forever/
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dayvid
We’re moving from getting services for free that are taking all of our data to
paying for services that are taking all of our data.

It’s honestly ridiculous and only government intervention will prevent this
from getting out of hand.

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dawhizkid
Alexa feels like like one of those devices that everyone (tech & non-tech
people alike) understand to be an always-on recording device, and a proof
point that many people do, in fact, choose convenience over privacy.

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neilv
Perhaps multiple categories:

1\. Non-tech people, who don't understand the immediate technical aspects of
what's happening, and haven't had much occasion to think about the
implications.

2\. Tech people, many of us who do understand a lot of what's happening in
technical levels, but are conditioned by all the practices around us (and our
paychecks/startups depending on it) to not think of this as bad for society.

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vitalysh
I already have phone in my pocket with Google assistant (yes, you can switch
it off, but is it truly off?) Thats why I decided that Alexa is not a big
deal.

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harshreality
Phones have a security/privacy advantage, because being battery powered and
(potentially) using metered data, the cost of recording everything and
shipping interesting parts of the audio to the corporate mothership would be
immediate, in customer complaints about battery life and data usage.

Wifi/ethernet and AC-connected devices change the risk/benefit calculation
significantly.

Alexa or Google Assistant on a phone is therefore not really the same thing as
Alexa or Google on a standalone plug-in device.

For example, a google phone (depending on model/setup) and Google mini might
both listening all the time for "Hey google". Both respond by listening and
recording the next collection of sounds. However, the bar for deciding when to
ship that audio off to Google, or when it's confident enough it can handle
processing on-device, could easily change depending on whether the device is
battery-powered or whether it's on wifi/eth instead of mobile. A wall-powered
device might opt to keep a running history in ram of the last N seconds of
audio, so it has more context with which to answer questions if Google
Assistant is addressed. If it's battery powered, there are obvious reasons not
to do that unless the phone has a dedicated extremely low powered continuous
recording loop circuit.

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peteyPete
I get that there should be logs.. for debugging and feature tracking etc... I
don't think its reasonable for the "voice" to be stored and available to 3rd
parties. The system beyond speech to text doesn't respond to voice, it
responds to text. So couldn't they just have the logs of the commands put into
the system in text? And once the voice is converted + is processed to make the
system better, automatically deleted? The voice should only be accessible by
the amazon core service responsible for speech to text, the voice shouldn't
leave that system, and again, once in text, the text, or commands, can be
logged / shared with relevant "skills" providers, since they'd have logs of
your interactions with their systems anyways.

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lukeschlather
This is obviously bad, but I think the deeper problem is with Android that
it's impossible to turn off the long-home-button press behavior. The
wiretapping statutes really need to be updated to cover "negligent
wiretapping" and require manufacturers to provide an opt-out toggle that
prevents it.

Alexa speakers, of course, are surveillance devices and if you have it on it
seems fair to say you have opted in.

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Marsymars
> This is obviously bad, but I think the deeper problem is with Android that
> it's impossible to turn off the long-home-button press behavior.

I set mine to search in Firefox: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-
replace-google-assi...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-replace-
google-assistant-firefox-search)

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skybrian
In other words, they don't have a way for consumers to set a retention policy,
like businesses typically do for email. You have to delete things manually.

It seems pretty clear that there are lots of people who want this and I'd be
surprised if more companies don't start doing it. Snapchat made its name with
auto-deleting videos.

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resoluteteeth
They have tons of people working full time to classify the recordings to use
as training data. Of course they aren't going to delete them automatically and
waste millions of dollars of work.

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greenyoda
Discussion from yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342917)

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remote_phone
What about Google and Nest videos? Are those kept forever as well?

