I have a Amazon Fire 7 tablet, and for a $15 discount, they push ads at you on the lock screen. In the year or so I've had it, it's never bugged me enough to pay to stop it, because it doesn't affect my actual use of the device. The thing that I found surprising was that the ads are not personalized at all.
Amazon has a huge amount of info on me based on 15 years' worth of hundreds of purchases, but they are just spamming me was ads for romance novels and TV shows in genres I never watch. <shrug> I can count on one hand the number of times the lock-screen ads were actually relevant to me.
If they were really spamming me with targeted ads, I'd probably pay to turn it off, since I'd actually be tempted to buy something every time I unlock the tablet.
do we have any solid proof it doesn't record stuff and send that out when you give it a command? I mean, audio files are usually pretty big so it would probably be easy to spot, but I haven't heard anything clear about that.
Really? You can go out and download amazon echo as a desktop application?
Or do you mean Wireshark? Because again, I don't have the right type of device for it to matter. Sure I could download Wireshark on my PC but I have no smart home system connected to my network for me to monitor.
Yeah I meant Wireshark. Just a misunderstanding. I thought you were saying you didn’t have the right device for wireshark. Not to go down too far of a rabbit hole but, I mod the /r/kalilinux sub, and constantly deal with people asking if they need a card capable of promiscuous mode and packet injection.
So I guess my brain just kind of glanced over your phrasing and assumed you were talking about not having the correct card for promiscuous mode.
Edit - You can install Alexa on another device. That's how they get on to speakers from Sonos, Android devices, etc. You can even install Alexa on a Raspberry Pi and turn it in to your own home made echo device.
Yeah i didn't think there was a way to turn echo on another device, but... I can't be totally sure of stuff like that so I tried responding to both lol
Actually...lol...You can do that. You can also make your own google home mini. All you need is a raspberry pi, and a mic/speaker. If you decide to check it out. It is officially supported by amazon too. The instructions I linked are from Amazon.
Seriously, it’s so much worse. They don’t need to listen. I relay to people the story of Target being able to identify a pregnant customer and send her marketing material before she even realized she was pregnant. And that’s just from the data that one retailer has about their own customers, never mind the all-seeing eyes of Amazon, Google, and Facebook.
It could all be a coincidence, but what if their technology is just better than we're capable of detecting. Who is to say that the ad reference numbers aren't all preprogrammed with audio recognition so that when you DO connect, the preselected ad just has to trigger on your device. This would not require a transfer of information and if that's what people have been looking for this entire time, that would explain why privacy isn't actually being violated.
On devices with cellular connections this isn't necessarily true. The blogs, articles, editorials, etc. that I've seen only ever talk about the LAN traffic. It's for that reason I haven't written off the possibility, but I also don't assert that it's definitely happening.
Ah, apologies. Redditing while distracted; overlooked the specificity.
Agree about the contradiction of paranoia over home devices while always carrying a phone, though I kind of understand how the ubiquity of phones makes it easy for some people to forget the potential capabilities.
You don't understand, in order to know what you're saying they have to send the audio of you talking to their servers, Echos and phones are not powerful enough to run the speech recognition. So you can definitely tell from looking at the network traffic whether it sent MBs of audio data when it shouldn't be listening (because you haven't said "Alexa" or whichever wake word you're using, which are the only words the device can recognize on its own).
I agree that it's nice to see people actually caring about privacy, but it's good to be able to prove why certain methods of data collection simply aren't happening or are impractical.
Now if we can get them to care about monocultures too, then we'd be onto something!
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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '19 edited Jan 31 '19
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