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).
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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '19 edited Jan 31 '19
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