Well you installed an always on microphone in your house, attached to a processing unit connected to internet all the time.
People said again and again it's going to be abused, and you had the technical knowledge to evaluate the risk.
Yet you went with it.
If it was not your scenario, it would have been another one. There will be other ones. Hell, with things like PRISM, that's inviting 3 letters agencies in your bedrooms.
Since the pandora box is opened and people are going to do it anyway, we should at least militate for having hardware switches on any sensors for any device.
The Alexas were for my elderly mother in law. If she fell or was having some sort of problem, she could call us with just her voice.
Also she and my partner both like the convenience, so who am I to say that they shouldn’t have such a device? The device does have hardware switches for the camera (it was off) and the microphone but you can’t switch off the microphone without effectively disabling the device.
When I she bought these devices they didn’t have this feature. None of us knew that the feature was deployed and enabled by default. To your point, it is a huge issue that we have no control over these devices anymore since the software can be changed at any time and can lie to you (lies of omission usually).
The Alexa goes above and beyond imo because when this person gained access to my mother in law’s other accounts, it took about 30 minutes to permanently lock him out, despite him bypassing text based tfa by having compromised her phone. Alexa wouldn’t even tell me this problem existed, and I can’t document what happened unlike with literally every other service.
People said again and again it's going to be abused, and you had the technical knowledge to evaluate the risk.
Yet you went with it.
If it was not your scenario, it would have been another one. There will be other ones. Hell, with things like PRISM, that's inviting 3 letters agencies in your bedrooms.
Since the pandora box is opened and people are going to do it anyway, we should at least militate for having hardware switches on any sensors for any device.